The BraveHeart Story of Forbes Riley on How to Dream Big PART 1

Dawn Damon: Hey, all you beautiful, bravehearted women today. I am absolutely spoiling you. You are not going to believe it. Well, yes, you are going to believe you will say as expected. I'm bringing you the greatest opportunity. You get to hear some from amazing women today.

My guest today is composed of so many facets. She's an actress and an award-winning television personality. She's an inventor, top saleswoman, and person for the Home Shopping Network, someplace I love to go. She’s a Broadway dancer and a fitness guru. She created the Spin Gym Sensation, you know about that, and it doesn't end there. She's an author, an entrepreneur, a sought-after keynote speaker, and to top it all off, she's a martial arts expert. Listen, will you welcome to The BraveHearted Woman Podcast today, my guest, Forbes Riley.

Hi, Forbes.

Forbes Riley: Hi! Well, that just popped up to be one of my all-time favorite introductions. Very nicely done.

Dawn Damon: Wonderful. I'm so glad. Well, you're worthy of a great introduction. You have an incredible history and career. You've done so many amazing things. And what we like to do about the bravehearted woman is really kind of look underneath the hood and talk about the qualities that it takes to do these brave things in life. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Specifically, you encourage your clients. You say that if you can dream it and believe it, you can achieve it. Tell us a little bit about all that.

Forbes Riley: Well, I know that firsthand because nobody ever gave me anything. I didn't, I had a very rocky start in life. Like many of us, although I did have two loving parents. As I've looked at my life and many, many others as I do as a professional coach, I think having love in your life is the coolest thing ever. And both parents or two parents or as many parents as you can have. I didn't have any aunts, uncles, or grandparents.

So, I grew up kind of ugly. I had a broken nose as a kid for like eight years. I had braces for literally eight years of my life. I had a tongue thruster Dawn for two years of my life. I couldn't talk to anybody and that's how I sounded. So no one wanted to be my friend. I had giant frizzy hair, I was overweight, and very isolated youth. But the crazy thing about it, and I do live by this motto that's a magnet on our refrigerators called, Life happens for you, not to you. And I could have been very shy, introverted, which I was, but I spent a lot of time dreaming. I watched a lot of television and a lot of movies, and I saw that other people lived their lives differently than we were.

I had this dream that maybe one day and then I architected it. It's ironic, now that is what I teach in life, how it doesn't matter where you start. I really don't care at all about what happened to you in your past from being molested, raped, hurt, screwed over. It doesn't matter. It happened. If it's not happening today you're in trouble. Then it didn't happen. It's old and there are ways and mechanisms and brain techniques that I've spent a lot of my life devoted to To understand how to put things in the correct closet in your house. Trauma over there doesn't affect me today because Dawn you and I are talking but if I brought in all the horror of my past life and I didn't know how to speak to you. Well, that's not true And you cannot write a beautiful future if you're holding an 80-pound balloon or a piece of luggage with you everywhere you go. I did this on my own. I certainly took some self-development classes over the years, but I decided it was my choice to embody a fantastic life. I also thought that if somebody else has this, why don't I? Why can't I? Then, as I just even said the word can't, one of the ways that you do it is simply to change the language and the way that you talk to yourself. Do you wake up in the morning going, Oh my God, it's another Monday? Or do you go, Oh, I'm on this side of the dirt? Let's go. And just that attitude and energy that you put out comes back to you in droves.

It's who you attract. It's what you end up doing. I love what you said in your intro to my world. We don't allow you to say, because people get all these amazing offers. They'll get books. They'll get marriage proposals. They'll get whatever they want and what a great place to live, but they'll call me and they'll go, Oh my God, Forbes, you can't believe it. And I'm like, of course, I can believe it. It's what I help you do. So we say, as expected, as expected. I have a nomination for my new award show as expected. I'm going off to shoot a movie starting on Saturday as expected. I'm living the life that I designed rather than living the life of leftovers.

Dawn Damon: Yes, I love what you're saying, and you've just unpacked so much stuff for us right there. I want to go back a little bit, and I want to continue this conversation, but you grew up in an atmosphere of love. Don't you think that was the juice, power, and love that allowed you to overcome these obstacles? Because where would you be today if you didn't have that love as a foundation? You would have had a bigger hole to dig yourself out of. You talk about we are the sum of the obstacles that we overcome. Where did you come up with that?

Forbes Riley: Because we had a lot of love in our house, but we had a whole lot of fear. My mom was the daughter of immigrants from the Ukraine. She slept on a couch most of her life. She had a very controlling, butchered dad and a very spunky mom. I only met them until I was four years old. You say butchered dad.

Dawn Damon: You don't mean like he was a physical.

Forbes Riley: No, no, no. My grandfather was a physical meat and poultry butcher. No, he was a very lovely man from what I can understand, although I don't know him, you know, he died before I was three years old. But my mom was a wonderful woman who didn't have a whole lot in life. She dreamed a lot and she wanted a lot. But she didn't have a mechanism to get it, and she came from this sense of lack. I think my grandparents were a bit of hoarders, that's what she ended up doing a lot of. She lived her life a little overweight because she'd been physically, mentally screwed over. But then she met my dad, and my dad was a handsome guy. And he really was, he was a beautiful man. He had a very nice upbringing, he had money growing up. Although his dad died when he was 25. So he had other issues about survival and they met and I guess I can romanticize it, but it's the story that I grew up with, that the pretty girl from the wrong side of the tracks met the really beautiful guy from the right side of the tracks.

When they got together, his mother was such a witch. She was so controlling that they ended up having to elope because she wanted to control everything and they started their own little life, their own little family. I'm their firstborn in Long Island. They bought their first house and they loved each other their entire lives. They died shortly. I don't think I've ever put it that way. I'm so sorry. I'm so glad. They died within a year of each other. They were each other's best friends, but they had their own issues. My dad was a machinist, an inventor, and a magician. He was a crazy guy, who had all of these thoughts, and he imparted all of them to me. I was his little protege. I was doing magic by the time I was 8. I was on stage making doves appear when I was 15, I had a very comical, crazy life.

I learned to fly an airplane by the time I was 15 years old because that was one of his dreams He loved flying and so I did how many girls do you know? How many people do you have a pilot's license by the time they're 16 years old? I used to buzz my college when I was 18 years old. So I had a life that didn't Makes, I just kept thinking, I'm just insanely special and not special that I'm better or worse, but I'm really special. That's why I grew up believing that I was special. I could make card tricks happen. I could fly airplanes. I could do things other people couldn't do. I was also wickedly smart. I graduated college with two degrees in three years.

My ADHD allowed me to do a lot of things faster than most people will ever do. I've constantly had like 10 different careers. I was the host who started the X games. I had my own national radio show interviewing rock stars. I've had talk shows, game shows, and stand-up comedy at the top club in the world called the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles. I've been in movies and television on TV series. It's like, wow, this really is a special life when you look at it. But if I really think about it, I set out to say that my life that I'm special, I don't think I said it to anybody outside of me in the universe, but I created that and I remember when I was 20 years old, I just graduated college, and I did not want to be a lawyer like my parents thought I was going to be, I wanted to be an actress. Because one guy believed in me. He gave me the lead in a play in college. And I'd never had even the third chorus person from the left before in any of the high school plays I ever auditioned for. I never got any of the parts. When I got this lead role, I sat him down and said, explain to me, why are you choosing me. This is a big responsibility. He said, he said, have you met you between your communication skills, your unpredictability vocal skills? I'm like, Uh-huh. Then I looked at Professor David Richmond. He looked back at me, but he couldn't see me. Do you know why? He was 100 percent legally blind. Oh my goodness. You got a blind guy telling you how wonderful you are. It must be true because he couldn't see all the little things that people didn't like. The size of my thighs, the color of my hair. He saw who I really was. And based on that and the fact that the play was a raging success. I got glowing reviews. I called my folks and said, I love you guys. And I'm sorry that you invested so much to be a lawyer, but. I want to be an actress. And they were like, um, okay, we love you. We can't help you. And I went off to New York and I'll tell you what, I auditioned for my very first movie, which is called Splatter University every Halloween.

I started a freaking feature film in my early twenties, the first audition I ever had. Somehow I was convinced the universe was whispering that in fact, you're right. You are special. You're going to do this and you're going to live this fantastic life. I told my mom this. Everything in my life was a fantasy. I had no girlfriends. I look at you, you're awfully adorably cute, and I would have loved to have been like friends with you. I had no friends. Now, I know that sounds, as I say it, so sad or so weird, but the girls who had friends and hung out in cliques and talked about boys and did their nails, they're all living a certain kind of life. I'm not living that life. I am still this lone ranger adventure kid. Who thinks that she can create magic out of nothing? I keep doing that. I mean, I took three years ago during COVID after my fiance at the time had a horrible motorcycle accident, and spent six months in a wheelchair, my daughter and I built a multimillion-dollar company in minutes, literally the first day we were in business was 25,000.

The first month was a hundred thousand. Six months was 1. 2 million and all because we said so. We didn't have all the skills we needed. Nobody didn't need permission from anybody. I just said to her, look, I've reinvented myself. I am. When you look up Phoenix in the encyclopedia or Wikipedia, there's my picture. I am, but that's how I have lived my life all along. My mom got held up at gunpoint at my house shortly after my dad had an accident that left him in the hospital for three years. What does that do to a high school kid? It takes you out of any sense of reality that you've ever known. You come home at 15 years old and you see cop cars everywhere, and you don't know if somebody inside is alive or dead, and my mom emotionally was dead for many years after that because two gunmen came in and ransacked our house, stole everything.

By the way, that makes you special too. Special isn't always a good thing, so just be careful, you know, what you wish for. But I said to her when I was 20 years old, just to finish this, I said, I'm going to go to Europe. I found this book called Europe on 20 a-day by Arthur Fromer. I'm going to see everything in this book, tear out the pages, and come home when I have the cover. She's like, okay. I said, Mom, I envisioned this life where I tell stories. I'm 83 years old and I tell the story of great adventures. I have nothing to talk about. So I'm going to go write the story of my life. Who does that?

Dawn Damon: Who does that? Well, the people who do those kinds of things are the people who have a very strong sense of Their destiny, people who believe in themselves. I have to tell you, part of my story is that while I was raised in a home where we had all kinds of everything that you could want, materially speaking, there was not a lot of attunement from my parents. To me, they were busy doing their thing. They were running their lives. And that sense of, am I invisible to you?

On the other hand, you guys didn't have a lot, but you knew you weren't invisible. They gave you a gift, a tremendous gift that you matter. You make a difference. Your presence speaks to us. And that foundation, my bravehearted sister, gave you the inertia and just a launch pad to do incredible things. How did you foster that belief in yourself? When you hit obstacles, where did you get the grit to keep on going you said some things like adventure and you said courage. You said I believed I was special. Like you pulled that up from the depth of your being you had that grit to keep on going, part of your personality temperament, or you just looked at the evidence of life and said no if they can do it I can do it.

Forbes Riley: Yep. You know what? I watched James Bond. I watched Lara Croft. I watched Indiana Jones. Now here's what's interesting about every hero in every movie. It's not a smooth sale. They always hit insurmountable obstacles, all of my action heroes, and they overcome them time and time again. So it was imprinted in my brain that you're going to hit insurmountable obstacles, like every action hero, and you're going to weasel your way out of it.

So as I tell my friends who become, who own companies. You become a CEO. CEO is not a glamorous job, by the way, you know what you do all day, every day. As a CEO, you solve problems, but nobody knows that. Entrepreneurs come to me like, Oh my God, I've got this issue. I got that. Good. Solve it. Solve that problem. Solve this problem. You are the quality of the problems you solve. That's my newest quote. I just made it up here. You're the quality of the problems you solve because everything is an obstacle all day. How do I market? How do I get this? How do I pay the bills? I don't tax. It's always an obstacle. So if you start to believe that that is your job, Oh, my gosh. You know, it's nice to go walk the red carpet when you're an actress, but that isn't your job. Your job is like I'm heading off to Tucson where it's 90 degrees in the middle of the day and wear an outfit, you know, that's 400 pounds and have to sweat up. That's your job and it's not glamorous and sitting in trailers is not glamorous and waiting hours for someone to light something making movies is not glamorous. It's a whole lot of fun, but it's not glamorous. You guys only see the icing on the cake. So as entrepreneurs. Because of social media, you see the icing on the cake. You see people on stage. I spoke on 10 X in front of 10, 000 people. If you had any idea how much time, energy, grit substance it took to get there.

If I hadn't already overcome 1 million obstacles. Yes, and every day there's a reason that you could give up or stop doing it. And so my question is, you either understand this, and I guess now as I'm saying this to you, which is so beautiful, go watch an action movie, picture yourself there, what do you do when you're hanging off the cliff going, I'm going to die, and you don't? Well, that was a big, pretty big obstacle. I've become a phenomenal problem solver. I do this for everybody. Because as I've grown up here, I have a 30,000-foot view of things.

Now people view things differently. I'm I have a top view and I have a minutiae view. I don't always have the implementation, how to get it done or the systems and processes, my middle view is not very good. So I hire people who are really good at those things because I can look at this and go, Oh, well, if you move that chess piece here and that chess piece, we're going to win. I'll do that for other people. So if you're the middle person, if you're the person who loves systems and you understand numbers, or you understand marketing, do what you do and hire somebody who can see your coffee cup, which, you know, you don't know what it's in the inside, you don't know what it says on the outside, if you're in it. Then maybe hire a minutia person, a VA, and an assistant who does all the little details because if you have a little detail that you miss, your entire ship can fall down.

Dawn Damon: Yes. And so all of those things are what we need to be teaching entrepreneurs. Yes. I love the word vision. It's one of the things that I love teaching people too.

You talked about your mom having a lot of fear and that kind of paralyzed her and that kept her probably living small and I'm thankful she didn't impart that to you. But your mom had a vision of scary things in her future. You captured the purpose of vision and you saw brilliance in your future. You saw empowerment in your future. Is that something that you're able to teach us? Do you teach people how to get a vision for a beautiful future?

Forbes Riley: Yeah, you know, there's this saying in the brain world that you go towards pleasure or away from fear at every moment You have the decision to make and you are the sum of your decisions. Okay, you're the sum of everything apparently your obstacles your questions, and now your decisions. But in fact, that's true decisions that you made five years ago or why you're sitting on that stage why you have a book Behind you why you have a podcast decisions I made five years ago, or why I'm in love with the man that I'm where I'm sitting here So you need to understand the decisions you make today or what's gonna happen five years from now.

the first time. And I looked [: 00:17:00

Again, I can't fault her. But I made a very clear decision at that moment that I was going to have a beautifully decorated. I looked at Architectural Digest, I'm going to live like a celebrity. Everything I said has come true. This is another crazy thing. I said I wanted an in-ground pool. Now that's a wicked weird decision. We live in a neighborhood. There was only one family. There was a mafioso family and they had a giant marble in-ground pool. We had one of those that was above ground and we had a little plastic thing. I thought rich people had in-ground pools. In-ground. You know that ever since I bought my first house, I don't even really use my pool that much. It has a freaking pool, not and it's not negotiable because that's what rich people do. So that's in the back of my head. I had to drive myself to how much money you need to have a house that's got an in-ground pool and the guy to take care of the pool. I looked at my mom's weight and God, I loved her. I wish I could have changed her, but because of her, I made a decision that I'm going to have a body that rocks for my entire life.

If for example, you look at Jane Fonda, who at 85, Weighs 119 pounds, is 5 foot 9, and looks like a model at 85. It's beautiful. So it's not true what all the rest of you guys are saying that, well, it's 60 with menopause, you get a belly, baloney. So I set out, and I did this in my early days, if you have a certain kind of eating routine and a workout routine and a mental routine, I mean, I'm 63 years old. I wear a size smaller than I did in high school. I don't make myself nuts. It's been a journey because I also realized somewhere in my 20s that I suffered from being an overeater.

I had other issues and there are things that you need to unpack in yourself. We all have them. You just talked. I would have loved your life. I would have loved whether it was parents had so much money, but then I wouldn't be me. That you wouldn't be you. So what I went through is what helps me. So I love looking, I love taking people by the shirt collar and going, look, yes, these horrible things did happen in your past, but unless they're happening now, it is fuel for who you get to be if you use it, right? It's either going to burn you down or fire you up.

Dawn Damon: You're exactly right. There is nothing false in what you're saying. Our life moves towards our most prominent thought. We get to go in the direction of our words and we're going to go in the direction of our thoughts. And you made a decision, conscious or unconscious. There was something that was programmed in your mind to say, if it's out there, I can have it. I can achieve it. God willing. I know the sovereignty of God in my life. We believe that. Congratulations to you. I want to ask you a few more questions because there's so much to your life. And so does your dad know the results of your invention of the creations you have made?

Forbes Riley: No, he never met my kids. He never saw my fitness product. He didn't see a lot of the things, but he did get to see me live my dream. He passed away when I was 40 years old, and I know he was very proud of me. He got to sit in a Broadway theater and watch his daughter roller skate on Broadway with Christopher Reeve.

I mean, I'd already done some pretty fantastical things. I would love them to witness, and I think they are watching, but I do too. Well, but then I couldn't say all the things I say, because I think some of them would embarrass them. They've been gone almost 25 years.