Believe The Hope

Paul Nottoli: 00:29

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Believe the Hope podcast. I am here with Doctor. James Taylor. He is a Minnesota native turned Texan with a journey that's taken him through Wisconsin, Kansas, and Missouri. Once an aspiring semi professional rugby player, he's now a driven entrepreneur, philanthropist, and founder of Aspire Chiropractic, one of the top rated clinics in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

Paul Nottoli: 00:53

He's also the team chiropractor for the Dallas Jackals, a Major League Rugby team, and he also is the host of the Fueled by Spite podcast that reflects his entrepreneurial philosophy, achieving victory against odds, proving naysayers wrong, and celebrating resilience. Outside his professional life. James is devoted husband to Tamika Taylor, a powerhouse in her own right as a leader of the Evolution Collective. Thank you so much for your time today, James, and thanks for being on the Believe the Hope podcast.

James Taylor: 01:24

No problem, man. Thanks for that beautifully worded intro.

Paul Nottoli: 01:27

I do my best for my I try to hype you guys up as much as Yes. I've known James, I don't know how A couple years now, two or three years now. That's why I've been coaching with BDC and yeah, I've always, you and Tamika's both your success and entrepreneurship and learn a lot from just observing from a distance and hearing you share in the entrepreneurial space and in the coaching and everything. Thank you for that. If you know No problem.

Paul Nottoli: 01:55

My first question I always ask everyone because everyone has different perspectives in their life is what does hope mean to them personally?

James Taylor: 02:06

Personally, like, I feel like hope is hope doesn't provide you with a definite end goal. Like, it's certainly a wonderful place to start. I hope this stuff works out. I wish this stuff works out, but, man, I think hope is a great first step. I don't think it's something that will carry you through.

James Taylor: 02:26

Think you need to be able to transition from the I hope it works out to it's going to work out. So what does hope mean to me? Hope is a great starting point. It really is. But there's gonna be a transition in there that you're gonna have to make internally to make that hope into actually something that's going to be fruitful.

Paul Nottoli: 02:48

Yeah, I remember, well, our friend, Chris Helms, I was interviewing him, he always has a saying, Hope is not a strategy because in of itself, hope is the seed. As I was interviewing Sean, he was like, Hope is the seed, it's the stem cell, it's everything that gives you something to look forward to or press towards, or that hope Yes, because it people to transition to take action and do something that's going to make their life better. Where do you think that Cedar

James Taylor: 03:21

does I've caught a few of your episodes. Haven't caught Sean's or Chris's, but I'm not gonna lie. Like, I thought I came with that all on my own. But if that's their same line of thinking, hell, yeah, dude.

Paul Nottoli: 03:32

I'm stoked. That's fantastic to hear. I think it's I think it's a everyone every interview I've done, there's always a common it's common thing that hope gives you that starting point. Hope allows you to give you permission to step into something, which is my version of hope. Hope gives you the light to start.

Paul Nottoli: 03:52

I think it's always there's some form of that in some way, shape or form. Where do you think that spark for some people happens and where do you think it lacks in other people? The spark for hope? Yeah.

James Taylor: 04:09

Dude, I'm guessing, obviously can only speak from my own personal experience. I think the spark for hope just comes from the point of when you realize that, man, for all intents and purposes, it's all up to you. No, I don't want to say it like that. It's not all up to you, but you are truly in control. I think that's a better way to put it.

James Taylor: 04:30

When you realize that you are the one in control, you make the decisions on how your life is going to be laid out before you, that's where hope comes in. Because there's so much of, you know, just, I mean, heck, if you're going through, I mean, not to kind of beat a dead horse, but you know, if you're going through like the school system, school system teach you to be a great employee. They teach you to be a great follower of the rules. And one of those days, if you decide that you are fed up by those rules and you actually realize like, Hey, you can say no, or you can decide to go a different direction. And then you're like, Holy shit, this kind of worked.

James Taylor: 05:07

That's where hope comes from. But in so doing, like, you're really just realizing, like, I can actually dictate how I want this whole thing to work out for myself.

Paul Nottoli: 05:17

I like it. I like taking a stand for what you believe in, what you want in your life and realizing that you're the person that's going to dictate. For the most part, obviously there are situations in our life that we can't control, but on a day to day basis, we always have control over how we react to what happens to us in the world and how we are going to come back from that setback or come back or whatever want to, is kind of going our life. Like to have people give examples for their own personal life of where hope played a significant role, where they may have looked at things that weren't going well, or they were in a down position or struggling in a time in their life.

James Taylor: 06:04

Actually, shortly before you and I met, so I've been a chiropractor here in DFW for over a decade, but shortly before you and I met, my office flooded by no fault of my own. So I share an office building with a dentist and it was Christmas of twenty twenty three, I believe, if memory serves. Okay. No, between the flood and COVID and the damn time change two weeks ago, it all blends together. But let's just say recently, it was Christmas of like '22 or '23.

James Taylor: 06:34

And I literally, I got done with breakfast and I was sitting on the couch, digesting, if you will, and here in DFW, it was cold, like things could certainly freeze. And I told my wife, I'm like, Hey, I'm gonna run to the office and just check on things. And I get up, I go to the bedroom, I come back, grab a pair of socks, and I sit down, and my cell phone is sitting on the coffee table, and it blinked. I had a missed call. And it was my neighbor, Doctor.

James Taylor: 06:56

Thorne, the dentist. And I'm like, I I hope he's calling to wish me happy Not hope, he's calling to wish me a Merry Christmas. Like that was the first thought in my head. Like how nice of him. So I pick it up, I call him back and he doesn't even say hello.

James Taylor: 07:08

It just, first thing he says is we've got water. I'm like, shit. And I've like literally got socks in my hand. That's what I was gonna go do anyway. Cause there's a thought.

James Taylor: 07:16

I come down and he had about six, he had a pipe burst in one of his operatories. He had about six inches of water covering his whole space. And I came across, and there's just a dividing wall between his space and mine. I come and look at mine and it's not six inches. It's maybe about an inch, enough to cover the soles of your shoes, but it is in every square inch of the space.

James Taylor: 07:35

And I learned that day that Sheetrock is very, very absorptive, and it sucked everything up. So literally on Christmas, we had to close down. We weren't open on Christmas. We had to close down the entire week between Christmas and new year's, had every bit of carpet ripped up, every cabinet that was on the floor, the bottom two feet of every wall around this office had to be taken out. Like we had to remodel the entire place.

James Taylor: 08:01

So like there was hope. Like, man, I hope I'm able to recover from this. And we're actually, so that happened on Christmas. We were vaccine patients on January 4. Because that's, dude, that's one of the awesome things about chiropractic is all I need is these things.

James Taylor: 08:22

My business travels with me. We didn't have any carpet. All the glue on the floor had redried. Like I said, the bottom two and a half feet of every wall in this office was taken out. And somebody comes in at one point and they're like, know, aren't you concerned about HIPAA and privacy issues?

James Taylor: 08:41

So like, no, it's like, literally this place has the same privacy as a gas station bathroom, get down on the table. And we were right back at it. So we went through the entire remodel. It took every bit of six months from getting carpet laid back down and getting the sheet rock put back up, getting the whole place repainted, having to go through insurance and everything like that. But yeah, at the beginning, hope played a huge role.

James Taylor: 09:05

I hope this works out. I've never flooded up my own business before.

Paul Nottoli: 09:09

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just there's enough day to day stuff as an entrepreneur or a business owner or anybody that's listening that owns a business or any type of thing, they realize that, but when you have something catastrophic like a flood or something like that, that just destroys everything, it is that initial, like, What am I going to do? But at the end of the day, you were like, Okay, first step is to get the water out, get it done, and then see where we need to go from there and try to get operating as fast as possible. Yeah, I probably would've had a heart attack if that was me, but- Yeah, like it.

James Taylor: 09:49

Came, I drove back home and I got a shop vac and I came back here and I plugged it in and I turned it and I held it in my hand. I'm like, This is pointless. What am I going to do with a shop vac in 2,500 square feet of carpeted space?

Paul Nottoli: 10:08

Yeah. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it's that, I'm going to figure it out. And so the shot back was just you trying to figure it out and then realizing, Oh, reality kind of sits in, and then you're like, Okay, now I need to go through the right things and actually do the work. But yeah, that's huge, huge thing to overcome.

Paul Nottoli: 10:29

How do you think people maintain hope? And so maybe they come into you that maybe they're in pain or, so as a provider, we often see that where people have lost hope because their health is not great and they're coming to us to help fix that. How do you think people maintain hope and cultivate hope when there is some type of pain or loss or uncertainty?

James Taylor: 10:53

There's two things that come to mind. One is a guy I was talking to, I see a lot of MMA fighters. And I asked him a question just in passing, kind of along those same lines one time, like, you know, what do you do to come back from a loss premise, if you will, or what drives you to come back? And he goes, Evidence. Like, what do mean evidence?

James Taylor: 11:17

He goes, Well, I've won before. Like, just because I lost now doesn't mean I can't do it. It's just simple. It's evidence. He goes, Talk about all the times he's put in the gym, in sparring and things like that.

James Taylor: 11:29

Just he's a father too. The other stuff he's overcome. It just such a simple response. Hey Evan, what keeps you going back? He goes, Just evidence.

James Taylor: 11:40

So from a patient standpoint or somebody who's looking to hang on to hope or even find hope, like you said, you know, when I'm standing there with a shop vac, like that was a first step. It was a stupid step, but it was a first step. Like literally, if you could take a first step in the face of anything, I think that's where a lot of hope will arise. Even if it's a misstep. A shot back was a misstep.

James Taylor: 12:05

But if I stopped there and I'm like, well, I made an effort, it's not gonna work. Well, then the whole place would've been gone. Okay, well, what's the next best option I have? What's the next best option I have? And I mean, I say that with the understanding that obviously there are people that face far greater things than they flooded office.

James Taylor: 12:22

So taking the next step is probably really difficult and taking the step after that, but for all intents and purposes, dude, that's literally, you've got two options. You can do nothing nor you can do something, But there's a lot of times where people will choose to do nothing, to wallow in a sense, instead of trying that next step and seeing where that hope lies.

Paul Nottoli: 13:35

Yeah, I do like that there's evidence, you know, as well as in that case, as the Fighter. There's evidence, like you said, there's evidence that I have won fights. There's evidence that I've beaten these people that said I wasn't going to beat. There's evidence that I show up every day and train for hours without, never missing a day. There's evidence that I show up for my kids all the time as a father.

Paul Nottoli: 13:57

And there's evidence for, I mean, just in your case, there's evidence that people has had flooded offices and businesses before, and there's people that take care of it. There are many people that, you know, that they, Yeah, so there's evidence around all the time, whether it's a small amount or a glim amount that can help move you forward when things don't seem Maybe it's a bigger picture, but there's evidence, like if you often look back to where you were a month ago, a week ago, a year ago from where you were set off on something that you're trying to accomplish, sometimes you feel like you're not making any progress, and then you go back, you're like, Oh, yeah. When you actually use those evidence and you actually look back at the evidence, you're like, Oh man, I made a lot of progress in that space, in what I'm trying to achieve. Yeah, so I think there's things like evidence journals and stuff like that to write down little things that happen throughout the day, that kind of gratitude and evidence as well to help kind of move through that. How do you think someone can, or people that are listening cultivate more hope in their own lives as well as in their community and their surrounding areas?

James Taylor: 15:06

I'm gonna kind of piggyback off that last question. It is evidence. You brought up something, an evidence journal. I do something similar in at the end of the day, like I write down I start the day and I write down something I'm thankful for. Just the first thing that pops into my head, something I'm thankful for.

James Taylor: 15:22

I mean, I do the same thing at the end of the day, but then I also do a couple other things in there. What is one thing I learned today and what is one thing I did well? And again, I mean, I can only speak from my personal experience, but for someone, I don't mean this to sound as self serving as it does, but for someone who has done as well as I have, I constantly need to remind myself that I have actually done well. Because I am my own worst critic. I am the first person who will point out my faults and flaws, probably not publicly, like you or anything, but certainly up here.

James Taylor: 15:57

So literally to be in the daily habit of reminding myself of just something I did well. And it could be, I've written down things as mundane as I felt that I was a, you know, I felt I gave a patient ample time today. I felt that I really listened to somebody. Like I did something great. Like, hey, I brought my kids to Disney World or Hey, I just randomly, I stopped and I sent my wife a text to let her know I was thinking about her.

James Taylor: 16:24

And again, to me that might seem kind of small or something like that, but to her it might be something awesome. But even that small thing is something that I did well, because it is super easy to focus on all the stuff that we don't do well. I don't know why the human brain is programmed that way to find our faults so incredibly easy and our triumphs so incredibly difficult to see comes back to that evidence thing. And it's weird that sometimes like we literally have to find evidence in ourselves and remind ourselves, oh shit, I actually did really good today on just my regular day to day stuff. Sometimes that in and of itself is an absolute triumph.

James Taylor: 17:05

I woke up and worked out today. Hell yeah, there we go.

Paul Nottoli: 17:08

Yeah. I think it's their, what is that quote? Be careful how you talk to yourself because you're listening, and I think that kind of goes in that, or the biggest enemy is the one between your two ears, so I think that's often the case. I mean, I'm guilty of that too, where I get frustrated more with myself than anybody else, and I feel like I'm letting people down, and I'm not being the provider that I should be, etcetera. And in reality, it's probably not that reality, but in my brain it automatically goes to that.

Paul Nottoli: 17:42

And I don't know, maybe like you said-

James Taylor: 17:43

Well, again, I think like we all are. We can all say that to one degree or another, Oh, get done on myself too. That doesn't make you special or unique.

Paul Nottoli: 17:50

All do it.

James Taylor: 17:51

We all do do it, but some of us take the time to actually get ourselves out of that, not get ourselves out of that and just, Hey, I'm just going to plow through this thing and it's going to keep going, but actually going to remind ourselves and prove to ourselves that actually, I have done X, Y, and Z incredibly well, maybe better than most. And, you know, that's something I should actually hold onto as opposed to focusing on all this stuff. Because it's one thing to actually like feel bad about yourself and you don't feel you're living up to your potential. So what I'm going to do? Well, I'm just going to work harder.

James Taylor: 18:24

Well, that's not actually fixing that underlying issue, why that thought keeps coming up in your head, why you keep shitting on yourself. It's actually the other thing, let's find evidence. Let's remind ourselves of the great things we actually have done, are doing.

Paul Nottoli: 18:37

Yeah, and it allows us to change and just show up better to people in our lives, our communities, whoever we're serving as a profession. Yeah, I think it just helps versus just being like, I'm down on myself, I'm going to get through it versus taking that and building inventory and gratitude and that reflection of evidence and things I've done well, because that makes you show up better for the people in your lives that matter and the things in your life that matter for you and your community. I think so.

James Taylor: 19:08

Well, not only show up better for the people in your lives and your community, but like literally show up better for yourself. Like, it's like, man, you cannot pour from an empty cup. You could try, but you can't do it for long. Like, I think that's kind of one thing that for all intents purposes, I think I'm really good at at least now is focusing on me. Like don't get me wrong.

James Taylor: 19:27

Like I have the utmost love and respect for my wife and my kids and the people I serve, but man, I'm selfish, dude. And that took time. That took a bunch of time to learn to be selfish. Like I gotta worry about me first. I gotta promote me first before I can do anything for you.

James Taylor: 19:46

Because if I'm pouring into you and I'm not pouring into myself, man, I'm not giving you the best.

Paul Nottoli: 19:53

I mean, that goes back to the put your mask on before you help anybody else on the airline too. That's kind of

James Taylor: 20:00

the thing.

Paul Nottoli: 20:00

Exactly, man. Within reason.

James Taylor: 20:02

Screw that baby.

Paul Nottoli: 20:04

Is there anything else that you'd like to discuss that we haven't covered regarding hope, inspiration, positivity? A message you wanna put

James Taylor: 20:12

it

Paul Nottoli: 20:12

Yeah, not

James Taylor: 20:12

too. I love what you're doing. Think it's fantastic. It truly is a voice and a message that is not out there near enough. One thing I like about it is that you do dive into those things that like, you know, what if it's not all, you know, happy, you know, rainbows and roses and things like that?

James Taylor: 20:28

Because I think that's one thing that people glom onto a little bit too much is the, man, this is a stupid buzzword, but like toxic positivity. Dumb as it sounds like it's really a thing like, hey, there's some bad stuff that we're gonna have to come across too and go through this kind of thing. And no, the fact that you hit on that with these episodes too, I think does a real service to the people listening. So no, you're doing a great job, dude.

Paul Nottoli: 20:52

Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Because yeah, I didn't want it to be just the warm, fuzzy inspiration quotes per se, because while I think that can be helpful and necessary, reality is things get ugly in our lives, or things get messed up in our lives, and hope is something that can help us get us through, and we can drown and put more light into the world by having these conversations and realizing that we're not alone. We have a community, we have this podcast, we have people that have gone through similar things that can share to give evidence, like you were saying before, that yes, you can make it through when maybe those things aren't evident in their life and they're looking for something as well.

Paul Nottoli: 21:36

So I appreciate it because that's the reason why this podcast started. So thank you.

James Taylor: 21:41

That's why we're here.

Paul Nottoli: 21:43

That's why we're here. How do people connect with you more, learn more about you and

James Taylor: 21:49

Yeah. If you're in DFW and need a chiropractor, like I said, I'm literally the best one here. It's Aspire Chiropractic, Aspire Chiro DFW across all the social channels. Working on that whole eighty twenty thing. I'd like to think 80% of it's entertaining, but you know, I've got my own sense of We put out a real cool sausage video recently, so check that out.

James Taylor: 22:08

Okay. Or if you're going on the podcast, Bent, spitefulsuccess podcast is fueled by spite. Same thing, right across all the socials. If you are in DFW too, or looking to build a community of people here who can share stories, kind of like what Paul's doing, it'd be great to have you on.

Paul Nottoli: 22:23

Perfect, yeah. So if you're looking for a podcast to be on, I know you posted something that you're looking for people to interview that's Fueled by Spite. Is that the name of the podcast?

James Taylor: 22:34

That's the name, the handle, if you will, is Spiteful Success.

Paul Nottoli: 22:38

Excuse me, can't even talk today. Spiteful success. It is. Yes, I'll make sure I have all the links and everything posted correctly in the notes and everything. So thank you so much for your time today.

Paul Nottoli: 22:50

I appreciate it, and thank you for sharing the message of hope and helping it spread. Do have anything else to add? No problem, man.

James Taylor: 22:58

I appreciate having me. This was fun.

Paul Nottoli: 23:00

Awesome, thank you. All right, and until next time, we'll bring you another episode of the Believe the Whole podcast.