194 - Clint Hatton : From Struggling to Soaring - How to Live Courageously

Breaking a generational cycle starts when a man asks why the switch flips in him, then traces it back to his father. My guest Clint Hatton was 11 when his dad took him on a car ride and told him about an affair. His dad moved out, and his mom spiraled into heavy drinking and crisis. Clint carried all of it at home alone. By 12 and 13, he was using drugs and alcohol to drown out the pain. Football held him together until a second knee injury ended it at 19. He went into the car business, made a good living, and spent years using meth on weekends. At 30, he woke up disgusted with himself and quit cold turkey. The harder work came after that. In relationships, any talk of cheating turned him angry and abusive. It took him until his thirties to see where that came from.

The way out came through the people he chose to stand next to. Clint grew up in a house where the answer to pain was to rub dirt on it. Two mentors in a health and wellness business started telling him he could be more than he’d shown so far. Nobody had spoken those things into him before. In this conversation with Mike Forrester, Clint lays out three things he believes about every man: courage, creative genius, and compassion. He describes a NASA study where creative genius dropped from 98 percent of young kids to about 2 percent of adults. He gives two simple ways to wake it back up, mind mapping and journaling. Then he hands over the exercises he uses in coaching. Write out the man you want to be. Write your own eulogy. Ask three to five people you trust what gifts they see in you. The thing you think is ordinary may look extraordinary to them, and that can change how you see your work.

Then Clint walks through the hardest day a father can face. In 2019, his son Gabriel, a licensed pilot at 17, died in a small plane crash in bad weather. The next morning, Clint sat his two younger boys on the couch and gave them a choice. They could live with a life mentality or a death mentality. The family chose to honor how Gabriel lived. Big, bold, and brave became their mantra. Clint also refused to grieve behind closed doors to look strong for his sons. He cried in front of them and told them every feeling was okay to process and move through. He shares the day he drifted away from a family party to feel his grief, then chose joy and rejoined everyone. This one is for the dad with kids still at home who was taught to stuff it down. He wants his kids to see a man who can feel deeply and still lead them through anything.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode:

Recognize how anger that flips on one specific topic can trace straight back to what your father did.
Understand why quitting hard drugs was only the first step, and why the patterns underneath still needed work.
Learn how the right mentors at work can change how you see your gifts, your career, and your future.
Use three coaching exercises: write who you want to be, write your own eulogy, and ask trusted people what gifts they see in you.
Try mind mapping and journaling to wake up the creative thinking that hard years and your upbringing buried.
Walk through how to grieve openly in front of your kids, then help them move into the next emotion with you.

The key moments in this episode are:

00:05:28 - How a father’s affair changes the way a young boy copes

00:12:36 - The morning he decided to quit meth cold turkey at 30

00:14:28 - Carrying resentment toward a dad who cheated

00:18:24 - Why anger flips on when one topic comes up

00:21:27 - Growing up with “rub dirt on it” and finding mentors who believed in him

00:26:49 - What to tell a 30 year old man who thinks he can’t change

00:31:44 - What buries creativity and how mind mapping and journaling bring it back

00:37:20 - How to write out the man you want to be and your own eulogy

00:41:48 - Losing a son and choosing a life mentality as a family

00:54:37 - How a dad leads his family through grief without hiding his emotions

01:00:47 - How to feel your grief and then choose joy