Everybody can in denial. Hello.
And I am so excited to have Michael Taylor on as for those
you guys who don't know, he is an MMA champion, three time Bellator
lightweight champion, one of the most, baddest
ass guys in the world, the toughest guys of the world, for sure.
He's on his way to win the UFC title.
I'm going to predict that right now.
Michael, welcome. Thank you guys so much for having me.
I appreciate the intro.
And man, it's awesome to be here.
Yeah, obviously this is a real estate channel
and primarily we talk about that, but we talk a lot about mindset.
We talk a lot about habits of success.
But also you're investing in real estate and you're a personal finance major
and you minored in real estate.
And so,
you know, you're kind of tracking these maybe not entirely right now, right?
But once you talk a little bit about, you know, how you started, where you are
and where you're headed. Yeah.
So I mean, you know, we were talking a little bit before.
I mean, I consider myself getting my feet kind of wet in the in life
when it comes to the ups and the downs and the toils and the peaks and valleys
through the sport of wrestling, you know, I started I was a five foot nothing.
98 pound freshman in high school.
So being the starting quarterback in the starting
point guard on the basketball team wasn't exactly going to be in my future.
So I gravitated toward the sport of wrestling and I just fell in love with it.
I didn't quite know it at the time, but I was falling in love
with the self-sufficiency that when it's just you
on the mat against your opponent and there's your coaches and teammates
are over there, but they can't do anything to help you.
And if you win, you win. If you lose, you lose.
I'm able to handle the pressures of it and quite frankly, the ups and the downs,
the exhilaration of getting your hand raised in front of millions of people
and then getting knocked out and playing in front of millions of people.
I mean, like I've I've been on both ends of that, that spectrum.
Isn't it true that that you just find people along the way
and you
and they give you a little bit more and they give you
just a little bit of hope to punch to that next barrier?
Yeah.
And that's and that's
when, you know, now is a 35 year old and so much has happened since then.
I look back to the 18 year old me, 19 year old me with,
you know this, as you said, a ceiling that was placed around me,
not just the limiting beliefs that I would tell people
that I wanted to be a national champion when I really didn't truly believe it.
But I worked hard. I worked harder than everyone else.
I lived the right lifestyle I wanted to be.
I wanted to be a champion in the work that I was doing,
but I didn't quite believe it between my two ears, you know?
So what I wanted to talk about was habits of success,
because I think a lot of people are walk ons.
You know, I think everybody in life is kind of a walk on.
You had to punch through some big barriers.
What are some of the things that you did, some habits
that got you, the success that you had so far?
Yeah, it's been a long journey.
And I do, you know, you alluded to walk on.
I was I was a walk on at the University of Missouri.
So essentially that meant I was the lowest guy on the totem pole.
I was the guy that the coach is expected to now make it past year one.
You know, they would give out four shirts
and four pairs of shorts to all the guys on the team.
And I got to I wasn't getting all the gear.
I wasn't getting all the nice stuff.
Most instrumental decision I ever made in my entire
life was walking on to the University of Missouri.
It was the single.
It was the single most important decision in the catalyst to the man that you see
today, a really shelf like what other people thought of you
because I think a lot of times
people get in their head of what other people are thinking of them.
I did.
And looking back now, I have no idea why
I made that decision, why I was able to and what if you did ride the bench?
What if you don't make it? What if you just quit?
And I think that's that's
kind of the overarching Archie mentality of the people that I was most surrounded
by was, well, don't try too hard, too fast to try to do too big of things.
Because if you fall flat on your face and you fail,
then that's pretty much the worst thing that can happen.
And now that I look back on it,
there are moments where you have to really take stock in exactly who you are
and where you're going and what you're trying to do that
even if you fail, at least you fail while there. Great.
Is there something inside of you that just wants to, you know, punch out, right?
Like, and then you start to see that it works
and then it just never you realize that it's really been you all along.
There's so much pride that you can take in knowing that you were
one of the only people that that thought you were making the right decision.
It's the epitome of accomplishment.
Inside the sport of mixed martial arts is try to become the UFC champion.
And while I've gone through this journey over the last year, I don't do it to
to prove people wrong as much as I do it to prove those believers, right?
It's always been after a loss.
Oh my goodness, Jeff against.
Chandler, with the edge on
officially in round three.
Oh, oh, my.
I pick myself back up and I dust myself off and I say, OK,
this is right where I want to be now, my back up against the wall.
And there's a little bit of it's a little bit of fight, a little bit of fire
that got rekindled inside of you from having these setbacks.
So when you were trying to transition from wrestling to M.A,
what kind of habits or routines
did you instill to make that move
needed to do exactly what I had been doing for the last twelve years prior to that?
And then when I got into the sport, starting to realize the lack of dedication
or the lack of discipline around me as professional mixed martial artist.
And I saw it as an opportunity to capitalize
because even though this guy was fighting for a world title,
I see the way that he lived his life and how he trains.
It's only a matter of time before
I start to catch up to him because I'm doing more than he is pushing myself
harder than a lot of people are willing to.
Now did this discipline?
Did you always have this discipline or is this something like when did it hit you
that you needed to have discipline just in your life in general?
I was very fortunate to grow up with two amazing parents, you know,
even though, as we said, Ken, like my father was a union carpenter.
My mother worked in a couple of different,
had a couple of different jobs as a waitress,
or she worked at my grandpa's scrap yard as a as a secretary.
And although they
they didn't make tons of money and they didn't have this great amount
of financial success.
They knew what it took to be successful and even if even if in their mind,
it was just to survive.
They taught me the very foundation of working extremely hard.
So for me, it was knowing that if I was going to do something,
I was going to do it just as my mom and dad did extremely, extremely disciplined.
I ran into this book that I read ten years ago, called Turning Pro.
I just wanted to read one thing this jumped right.
I opened it right to this, and it said each individual
is so caught up in his own bullshit that he doesn't have two seconds
to worry about yours or mine, or to reject or diminish us because of it.
When we truly understand that a tribe does not even give a damn.
We're free. There is no tribe. There never was.
Our lives are simply up to us.
Well, it's so good because we do.
We spend so much time thinking
and second guessing and planning, planning our steps based upon
how it's going to affect other people or how it's going to
how other people are going to see or view us
or it or what we're trying to do when really like you said.
Do people really care? No, don't.
And I am not a master at this.
Trust me when you read that on my book, he's speaking right to you, Michael.
You know, but but that's but it's part of it.
And I've gotten better at it over the years.
And I just think a lot of it does come with age.
A lot of it does come with wisdom
and just time under tension.
Well, Michael, if there's anything I can ever do
also, we're going to put all your stuff up so people can follow you.
You're very active on Instagram at Mike Chandler mm.
That's where I do a lot of my platform, and I do have a 14 day mindset booklet
that I sat down during COVID
and wrote out it's on unsung grinders dot com and three downloadable PDF
that have got a lot of great response from the body out here.
Yeah, we'll stick that on the clip.
Parents and unsung grinders dot com in the show notes on some grounders.
Nice, I love the love the title quick kind of what it means.
Everybody always looks at me like I'm this awesome fitness guru
and I you know, I'm I'm so disciplined and I look a certain way.
And I gosh, I just want to be that people can get so much inspiration
at what I do, but really, I tell them I do this to feed my family.
I shouldn't even really get credit for looking this way or working as hard
kind of that wrestler mentality.
It's the people out there who are waking up at 5:00 a.m.,
getting after it in the gym still go into their job all day long.
Those are the unsung reminders out there,
the people who don't get credit for the hard work that they put in gyms.
Oh my god, we've taken enough of your time.
Thank you so much.
I love chatting with you.
You got an incredible family and you got your values are all just right, right
where they need to be.
And obviously the things that you're doing are working,
and I'm very, very excited to see you're on your way to the UFC title, man.
Thank you. I appreciate you guys.
Thank you guys so much for having me and I.
We love Arizona, so we will be out there again
very soon, probably after this fight.
OK, 100%, Michael. Good chat with you, buddy.
Thank you, guys.