Anthony Trucks
Anthony Trucks talks about overcoming foster care and then coping with having to transition after having a short professional NFL football career. “I came out of the NFL and I toured shorter. So it ended before I wanted it to, which is even worse, because I didn’t go out of my own doing. And then I tried to find myself again and unfortunately in doing so, I found that I lost a lot. Because for me it’s like I knew what I had to put in. I earned my keep in football, right? Then all of a sudden I’m in this realm where it’s like...the real world.” 
 
On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Anthony Trucks, Retired NFL Player for the Buccaneers, Redskins, and Steelers, President & CEO of Anthony Trucks Industries, Author, Speaker, Coach, and Current American Ninja Warrior on NBC. Anthony Trucks started his own businesses and become a motivational speaker for others to benefit from. “I think a lot of people think it has to be sports or military. It could be a mom. All of a sudden your kids go to college. Who are you without driving people around all day? Maybe if you are a dad and all of a sudden you retire. Or you are a dad and your kid doesn’t need you to coach anymore. We always have these shifts and people attribute them to just the sports world. But its humanity.” 
 
What You Will Learn:
 
Anthony Trucks shares the physical, mental, and emotional hardships of his early life in foster care. “It was just a level of not feeling secure, not feeling stable, not feeling loved. I bounced around from house to house for three years, six different homes I was in. A lot of them were just bad people. Be starved, torchered me, like weird stuff as a kid. At six years old I got put in my family, which is my family to this day. I was not adopted until I was 14 though. So everyday you have no idea. ‘Am I going to go back to foster care, in a different house?’”
 
Why did it take eight years for Anthony Trucks to get fully adopted by his current foster family? “For eight years I was in that house but my real mom had what’s called parental rights. Which means that she can control what I can and can’t do. Couldn’t play sports. Couldn’t take trips. Couldn’t get adopted. And so at 14, I finally let the family love me. Because for a lot of years I always wanted to go back to my real mom and I think we don’t realise that sometimes the thing you want so bad is not the greatest for you.”
 
Anthony Trucks talks about getting arrested as a kid after hanging out with the wrong crowd and breaking into cars, which he still regrets to this day. He shares how his mindstate at that time shifted between the feeling that being a foster kid set up his life for failure and having doubt that he deserved the chance to have a good life. “‘You’re a foster kid Ant and what do foster kids do?’ You look at any prison in American, 75% of the inmates are former foster kids. Like 50% of the homeless population...foster kids. Less than 1% of us ever graduate college. So I’m not numerically set up to do anything well.”
 
How does Anthony define real love? “I think real love has to be tough because everybody can give you false love which makes you feel good all the time. But love is like, ‘I want you to be better,’ and usually it means breaking you from the direction you feel comfortable going because that is not taking you where you want to go.”