Jan. 12, 2025

Accountability Unleashed Transforming Lives with Robert Hunt

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Join us in this insightful episode of the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball, as we delve into the transformative power of accountability with executive coach and author, Robert Hunt. Known as the "Accountability Guy," Robert shares his journey from debt to financial freedom and the principles that helped him and countless others take control of their lives. Discover the steps to true accountability, the benefits it brings, and how you can apply these lessons to achieve personal and professional success. Don't miss out on this empowering conversation that might just change your life!
www.nobodycarespod.com
Want to be a guest on Living the Dream with Curveball? Send Curtis Jackson a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1628631536976x919760049303001600

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome, um, to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. Uh, if you believe you can achieve.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Welcome to the Living a dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I and a few guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today, we're going to be talking about accountability as I am joined by executive coach, author and business owner Robert Hunt. Robert is the co author of the book no one cares until you do. He helps business owners remove the things that keep them from being their best. And he is known as the accountability guy. So we're going to be talking to him about everything that he's up to and about accountability. So, Robert, thank you so much for joining me today.

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> Robert Hunt>Nice. Thank you so much. That's a wonderful introduction.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Robert Hunt>I am married to the most beautiful woman in any room. We've been married 25 years and she is my best friend.

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> Robert Hunt>We have together raised two wonderful adult children, Lawrence, who's 33 and lives in Austin with her husband Dylan, and James, who is 22 and still lives at home with us while he finishes up his last year at UT Dallas, going to college there. We moved to Texas in 2010, grew up in Southern California, and really, uh, wanted to be in Texas to improve the quality of our life. And so we've been here since 2010. And for most of my career, I was a marketing guy doing marketing and business to business environment. When I moved to Texas in 2010 to do that same thing, I came across this idea of peer groups, which is bringing business leaders together every morning, every month to have a private meeting once a month, and we talk about our challenges in reaching our goals, and we create an opportunity for real accountability.

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> Robert Hunt>And through that process, I have really learned about what accountability really looks like and watch people who aren't accountable and watch those who are and see the difference. And in my own life, I found that accountability was something I thought I was good at, but I realized the hard way I was not. And through my own journey with my beautiful wife, Kathy, we decided that we needed to change our lives drastically. And we walked through the journey of accountability, to live it out in our own lives and found the freedom and power that comes with accountability. Accountability is not a bad thing. It's a great thing if you're doing it right. It is freedom and power and hope and joy.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, what does it mean to be accountability accountable in life? And why are, uh, people not accountable.

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> Robert Hunt>In the simplest terms, to define accountability, it's you own it. That's the easiest way to describe, uh, you own it. The reason that we're not accountable is we don't really know what it looks like to be accountable.

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> Robert Hunt>We think we're accountable, but in most cases, we're barely even responsible. And. And so when we. When we become aware of what true accountability looks like, our normal pattern is to blame or make excuses or say we can't do anything about it, or just wait and hope it gets better. And it doesn't. But we've been doing those four things for so long. That's our normal action. That's what we normally do. When you're late for a meeting, you. You blame something. When you didn't get something done, you make an excuse why it doesn't get done. If you're not getting the results you want, you say, well, I can't do this. And sometimes we just wait and hope and think, well, maybe next year I'll get this fixed. Maybe my marriage will be better next year. Maybe I'll get my health in line next year. And all four of those things just keep us as a victim. But we don't see that we're being a victim. Nobody says, I would like to be a victim. But you play the role as a victim in the way that you respond to the accountability as it presents itself to you.

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> Robert Hunt>And I think that's what holds us back, is we're just used to being victims.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, walk us through the steps of, um, being accountable.

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> Robert Hunt>Yeah, in the first part of it is really just recognizing what accountability looks like in your own life, in our own journey, we. We realized in 2019, we owed $90,000 in debt. It didn't surprise us. We knew it was coming up. Every year, it got bigger and bigger. Started out as$5,000, and next year it was 15, and next year was 25. And, you know, bit by bit, over years, we just kept getting more and more into debt.

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> Robert Hunt>But in 2019, we looked at this $90,000 of debt, which did not include the house or the cars. And we just said, this is not the life we want. And we recognized at that moment we weren't being accountable. And the four things that we were doing are the typical things that we outline in the book that people do. We blame. We blamed the economy, we blamed the franchise we worked with. We blamed clients. We, uh, even blamed God. We're mad at God for not doing enough for us, which is ridiculous. And then we made excuses. I made excuses like I wasn't a good salesperson, and that's why the business never grew. And that's why we ended up spending more than we had. But that excuse was a lie. The reality is we shouldn't have spent more than we had. You should spend less than you make. But we weren't doing that. And then we say, well, we can't do anything about it. It's just the way the things are. I mean, everybody has debt, and we're just in a transition phase for the last five years. You know, the lies that we tell ourselves when we're alone in our own private minds and we deceive ourselves. If you had to say that, uh, out loud to somebody, they'd laugh you of the room. But when we say in our own heads, we get away with it because no one else is listening. And so we, we said, well, we can't do anything about it. Well, we, we could do something about it. We could sell our house. We had equity in our home that had built up over the years, and we could sell it for all we owed and start over. We didn't want to, but we could. So we just said, we can't do that.

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> Robert Hunt>And then, um, the last thing was, well, maybe next year it'll get better.

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> Robert Hunt>Maybe next year get better. And that wait and hope stuff doesn't work. Wait and hope that your marriage will get better when you're not doing anything about it. You wait and hope that your health get better, but you don't change anything you do to make it better. It's just foolishness. It's the definition of insanity. Right?

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> Robert Hunt>And we were doing all that. And it wasn't until we got to a place in our own lives where we said, wait, wait, nobody cares. Nobody cares if we're broke, unhealthy, miserable, fighting with each other, frustrated with our lives, disappointed, until we care enough to do something about it. And so at that moment In September of 2019, we decided, we're going to do something about it. We're going to own this. And that's when we put the house on the market, decided to sell it, and, uh, found a place to rent and we closed escrow and moved into this lovely home that we rent now, uh, just down the road from where we used to live in March of 2020. And by April, we paid off everything and we were debt free and we started over.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell the listeners some of the great benefits of being accountable in their lives.

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> Robert Hunt>Yeah, we saw it in our own lives. I see it in the lives of my clients who are, who are business owners and where you are accountable. You take the authority and Power to change things. When you play a victim role or when you live as a victim, you have no power. Everything happens to you. But when you take accountability for everything in your life, you gain the power to change anything in your life.

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> Robert Hunt>So if you don't like the way your life is, do something about it. And the very first thing is to recognize where you're not satisfied and make, uh, an awareness of what that is so you can decide what you want to do.

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> Robert Hunt>In the book we put a satisfaction assessment, but you can go online at my website and do it for free if you don't want to buy the book. We don't ask for your personal information. We just want you to have the benefit of having this assessment. You can go to nobody caresbook.com and you can take this assessment and you be honest with yourself. I mean radically honest. What did you think your marriage was going to be like when you got married compared to where it is now? What did you think your health would be like when you were younger and you could eat and do anything you wanted to and it never bothered you?

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> Robert Hunt>I can't even have a long list of foods. I can't even eat anymore, let alone things I can't do anymore because I'll end up paying for it. My, uh, buddy says he's going to move. I got a boy. Here's$100. Go hire somebody, man. I can't help you.

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> Robert Hunt>We're starting to limit ourselves, but we think back to the vision of the life that you had, that you went at some point that you thought and dreamed it would, and then compare it to where it is today. And when you have that harsh reality, then you go, okay, so what am I going to do about it? Well, if you're accountable, you gain the power to do whatever you want to do about it. And to me that's freedom and power and hope. Because you don't have to live a crappy life. You can make it whatever you want to make it.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, I know you came up with the top five traits of great CEOs, so walk us through those.

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> Robert Hunt>Mhm. Those are things that I've learned by watching the leaders in our CEO groups. And these are the things that I believe. Leaders. And really any, all of us as leaders, whether you're a parent or, or you're, um, own a business, or you're just locally in the community, in your neighborhood, the great leaders are always doing these five things.

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> Robert Hunt>Certainly CEOs need to be doing these things.

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> Robert Hunt>They're always learning, they're always Making decisions, they own those decisions. They pour into others and then they drive the results. And that's different than when you are the person in the company doing all the work. Um, there's, there's the. You've capped the business. You, you've capped the opportunity for growth. I would say the same thing is in your own family. You know, if you're the mom or dad, you, you can't do all the work. You need kids to help you with this stuff, and it helps them to grow and be independent and be ready for life.

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> Robert Hunt>But the world is constantly changing. So if you're not always learning, you're falling behind. I mean, it literally changes every day. And if you're not really aggressively looking and learning what's going on and being ahead of it, you will be behind, trying to catch up. And then you got to make decisions. The CEOs that are in our groups don't always make the right decisions, but they make decisions. They don't have the luxury of not deciding what to do, because not deciding is a decision. And so when you make a decision, you still got to stand by. You got to own it. That's the third thing. They own it. If there was a bad decision, they own it. It's a good decision, great. But either way, they're going to own it because they're accountable. And then they pour into other people. And that's the part that if we're going to build our teams, we're going to build our families and build our world, we've got to make time to pour into others around us. And that, uh, God's blessed you with the life you have. You have knowledge and wisdom and skills and resources. You pouring into others continues the passing along of the knowledge, the wisdom, the resources that you've got in your life. And there are people out there who are really looking for that and needing that. And you can do it. And that's your responsibility. It's. You're certainly, your opportunity is to pour into others. And then you drive results is the last part. You don't do the work, you drive the results.

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> Robert Hunt>You're building a team by pouring into them. You're making it clear as to where we're going to go. And you're helping them by mentoring and coaching and supporting them, but letting them do the work because someday you're going to die or sell the company or whatever. And you have to have a team that's ready to step up and lead with excellence. So your job is to drive the results through the people not do the results, not create the results, but to drive the results through your team.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Speaking of teams, what's the way to, uh, hold your employees accountable while you're driving the results through the team?

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> Robert Hunt>And we say in the book that nobody can hold anyone accountable. And that sounds counterintuitive to what most people say. I'm going to hold you accountable, but you really can't. The reality is, if I ask you, Curtis, um, I want you to get this report done by Friday, every Friday. And if you don't do it on Friday, what, do I fire you? No. Hey, Curtis, get that done. I need it done every Friday. Okay? Okay. And then Friday after Friday, you don't get it done. Now you're not accountable, and I can't be accountable for you, and I can't make you be accountable, But I'm asking you to do it. So eventually, if you don't do it, I fire you. Well, now I'm accountable because I fired you. But you're still not accountable.

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> Robert Hunt>I have not made you accountable. I've just fired you. So you take your lack of accountability. You go to the next company. So you really can't do it for anyone else. However, if I, as a leader or a parent, create a world where I show my accountability by the way I live, then the world around me will want to be as accountable because they see the great results that come with a life of accountability. And I think that's the only opportunity we have is to model it.

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> Robert Hunt>We can teach it. We can certainly show the principles of accountability. We can teach them the ideas, but they have to want it. And that really comes from them looking around and saying, I'm not living the life I want. I'm not having, um, the job, the career, the experience I want. And so I will own it in order to chase that and do it. Because when I own it, I have the opportunity to make the results I'm looking for. So you want to make, um, them envious of your life by the way you model accountability so that they desire to do it, too.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about the book that you co authored. No one cares until you do. Tell us why you guys decide to write it, where to get it, and what listeners can expect when they read it.

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> Robert Hunt>Yeah, we really felt, um, the desire to teach the concepts of accountability and the freedom that comes from that. We, uh, talked about it for a couple years, and then finally we realized we're not going to get it done. I'd go to Salem's office. He's my friend, and A client of mine, and we'd outline all the chapters and make stories about what would be in the book, but neither one of us was going to get it done. We both have our own businesses and families, and we're very committed to those.

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> Robert Hunt>Those efforts. So we decided to hire a company, hired a publisher, got a ghostwriter, and they did the majority of the work because it's about getting it done. It's not about whether I wrote it myself. So we co authored these books at this book, and we wanted to then help people see where they weren't being accountable and what it could be like if they were. So we wrote it in 2022 and we. And we decided to call it Nobody Cares because we thought that was kind of in your face and maybe it would get people's attention. Uh, we're not doing it to be rude. We're just saying we need you to think about it to yourself. When you're about to make an excuse or blame or, or say, I can't, or wait and hope, stop and say to yourself, nobody cares until I do.

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> Robert Hunt>We wanted people to have that thought for themselves.

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> Robert Hunt>And so the goal for the book now is to get people to read it, that they can see that what this is like and where they're playing the role of a victim and what it would be like to have the life they really want and what's the steps to go about doing that. And that's why I'm on these podcasts, just to help get the word out so people can understand the book is there to help them.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Well, tell us about any upcoming projects that you're working on that we need to be aware of.

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> Robert Hunt>Uh, I am looking to do workshops anywhere in the world where they will bring me in to help teach the principles of accountability to their community, to their business, to their organization.

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> Robert Hunt>We did two workshops this year in the beginning of the year, and it was fabulous. We were wanting to prove the model that having people in a room, um, and being vulnerable and really honest about your journey, you can actually get something done. You could actually learn and be aware where you're playing the victim, where you're not being accountable. And it was a real wake up call. We had 65 people in the first event, and we were nervous, like, geez, I hope this works and I hope people will be honest.

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> Robert Hunt>And they were, they were radically transparent because I think they're desperate. I think people really are struggling these days to have the life they really want, and I don't think they have hope. And so our Workshop helps you see there is hope, and you can be aware and you can change it. And by the end of the workshop, they had chose, they had learned how to do it. They'd see how it works, and they chose an area of their life they were going to go change, and they walked away with a tool and a knowledge and the beginning of the journey. And so it's really cool to see how that works. So we want to do it everywhere else. Anyone in the world who wants to bring us out to do the workshop will come do it. Selling, uh, books is nice, but, you know, I don't make any money on that. Uh, we split$2 each whenever a book gets purchased on Amazon. And so, uh, you know, to us, it's really not about making money. We got to sell 50,000 copies just to break even. I don't know if we'll ever do that, but if we could change one person's life like it changed our lives, then, uh, we'd be happy with that. So workshops is our big focus these days.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Throw out your contact information so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.

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> Robert Hunt>Yeah, sorry about that. You did say that you can go to our, our website, nobody cares book.com, and then you can. There's contact forms to contact us, and I answer every single email I get. Um, and I'm on LinkedIn and there's other social media platforms, so I'm easily accessible. And if you get the book and you order from us, you go to that website, you order the book, we'll put a note in there, I'll sign it.

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> Robert Hunt>Um, but I want to have you in our system so we can follow up.

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> Robert Hunt>I want to hear how's your journey going? How are you doing and becoming accountable? What kind of things have you conquered so far, and how do I help you? And to me, that's the benefit of the book. And going to our website is we engage. We have a community. People send me copies of their satisfaction assessment, and they tell me what they're working on, and they tell me about their successes, and they ask questions about their challenges. And I've had many zoom calls to follow up with people who bought the book and talk them through the journey. And so it gives me a lot of joy to help people. So I'm readily available through our website. I've also created a website for your podcast that if anybody goes to nobody carespod.com and puts in the code word curveball, I will mail you a copy of our book for free to the first Two people who fill out that contact form. Give me your address. I'll mail you a copy. If you really want the book and you don't want to pay for it, but you really want it, I'll give you a copy. I, uh, just want you to read it and apply it to your life. So use the code word curveball @nobody cares, p dot com.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on, or any final thoughts you have, listeners.

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> Robert Hunt>You know, I, I've really been walking through this, this concept of, of laziness lately.

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> Robert Hunt>I, I don't think anyone thinks they're lazy. I mean, some of these terms I used are kind of offensive, and maybe they're intended to be that way, but I need to sometimes speak harshly to my own self to get me to do what I want to do. But we, we challenge people to not be victims. And nobody says they're a victim. But you are. You're acting like it. You're living like a victim. You're powerless, and everything happens to you.

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> Robert Hunt>You're a victim, but you don't have to be. You can take accountability and change that. The other side of it is I think we're lazy. I think when you look around at your. Our, uh, world, it's laziness. You know, you should floss your teeth every day, but you don't. That's laziness. You know, you should have a budget in writing that you look at and track and plan for, but you don't. And that's laziness. You know that you should eat so many servings of fruits and vegetables a day, but you don't, and that's laziness. So when you know what you're supposed to do and you don't do it, it's lazy. Now, I'm not saying that to be rude, but I'm saying, look at the easy solution is don't be lazy. You know, I, uh, look at my own business. I've got to make sales calls if I want to meet new people. If I don't make a sales call, that's being lazy. Well, I'm really busy. Well, that's an excuse. Let's go back to accountability. They're all connected. I'm never too busy. I just got to stop letting things that are not aligned, uh, with my focus and my purpose to get in the way. So I don't go through this. I don't look at this. Someone sends me a link, hey, this is a great video. You should watch it. Well, maybe someday I'll put it in this folder and I'll come back if I do. Right now I'm working on this. Be focused. Be intentional. Because when you want the life you want, you have to do something towards that goal. If you're going to build a Ferrari, you don't just run out in the garage and grab a bunch of parts. Whatever's laying around, you got to be very specific with the parts you want and you got to go about it in a certain way. That's your life. If you want a great marriage, there's a way to do it. Don't be lazy. If you're uncomfortable and you don't know how to do it, go get counseling. There is a way to deal with everything you're dealing with and facing. And if you're lazy, it's just going to ruin your life and at some point you'll have regret. So think of the life you want and go. Be intentional and pursue it and don't be lazy.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Great message today. Robert don't be lazy listeners, please don't be lazy and Follow rate, review and share this episode to as many people as possible.

00:20:47.279 --> 00:21:04.740
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>Jump on your favorite podcast app, give us a follow review, share the show. If you have any guest or suggestion topics, send them M in Curtis Jackson 1978 att.net Robert thank you for all that you do as far as accountability and thank you for joining us.

00:21:05.200 --> 00:21:07.059
> Robert Hunt>Thank you for having me on your show.

00:21:07.759 --> 00:21:15.715
> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>For more information on the Living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurveball.com.

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> Curtis Jackson (also known as DJ Curveball)>until next time, stay focused on Living the Dream.

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> Robert Hunt>Dream.