063 Are You Fully Alive with Ken Davis

Jason Parker interviews Ken Davis.

Ken Davis is one of the country’s most sought after motivational and inspirational speakers. His mixture of side-splitting humor and his powerful insights on living fully alive have inspired audiences around the world. He is an award winning author of 12 books. The film “Fully Alive” based on his latest book by the same name was shown in theaters across the U.S. and is now enjoying a popular run on Netflix. He is also President of Ken Davis Productions and Lighten Up Ministries which produce inspirational, and motivational live shows, DVDs, books, seminars and conferences designed to make a positive difference in the quality of people’s lives. Ken was born in North Minessota and now lives in Franklin, TNwith his wife Diane.

If you would like to learn more please visit www.kendavis.com .

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Below is the full transcript of the show:

Speaker 1: Welcome back America to Sound Retirement Radio, where we bring you concepts, ideas, and strategies designed to help you achieve clarity, confidence, and freedom as you prepare for and transition through retirement. Now here is your host Jason Parker.

Jason: Welcome back, America, to another round of Sound Retirement Radio. I sure appreciate you listening to this program. I was looking at iTunes the other day and I noticed under the category of retirement, Sound Retirement Radio continues to move up the ranks. I think we are in the top 10 now for the category of retirement on iTunes so thank you listeners. For those of you driving down the street in Seattle, if you’re not going to be able to catch the entire episode here, you’re listening to episode 062. The title is “Are You Fully Alive,” and I’m really excited to bring our guest on to the program today because I think he’s really going to be able to add significant, meaningful value to our listeners’ lives.

Before we get started, as you all know, I like to start the morning with something kind of fun, so I’ve got a joke here for you all. What do you call an alligator in a vest? An investigator. In-vest-igator. Yeah, I know, it’s pretty bad. The next thing I want to do, as you know, we want to renew our minds, we want to get this thing started the right way, so I’ve got a verse here. This is Ephesians 5:2 says, “Live a life filled with love following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.” Awesome.

All right, so with that, let me bring on the guest. The title again, this is episode 062 “Are You Fully Alive.” Today, it is my good fortune to have Ken Davis on the program with us. Ken Davis is one of the country’s most sought after motivational and inspirational speakers. His mixture of side-splitting humor and his powerful insights on living fully alive have inspired audiences around the world.

Folks, if you’re driving down the road, I just want you to know, the reason this interview came about, I’ve been actually trying to pursue Ken Davis for an interview for some time now. I had the opportunity to read his book “Fully Alive,” and I just thought it was awesome. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I encourage you to do so. Ken Davis, welcome to Sound Retirement Radio. Are you there?

Ken: It’s good to be with you, man. Yeah, I’m here.

Jason: All right.

Ken: It’s great to be with you.

Jason: Well, I appreciate you being a guest. I thought we could start out … You know, my office, my Chief Operations Officer here at my office, when I told her I was trying to bring you on as a guest, she said she saw a video that you recorded recently talking about a time your car was stolen and, if you don’t mind, maybe we could start out with that story and then I’ll ask you some questions about your book.

Ken: I’d rather start out with the alligator vest story. Can I do that one?

Jason: Hey, the jokes on this program are bad and getting worse all the time, so …

Ken: At my age, which is fairly advanced, I have problems with memory, and I travel a lot, so that means I have stuff scattered all over the world. I’ve developed a little pattern where I kind of make sure when I leave I have everything I need and that when I come back home I’m bringing back home everything I brought when I left. I was at a meeting in church one day and, by the way, some of your listeners may recognize this story. It is all over the Internet. I often get people come and go, “I know where you got that. You got that from the Internet.”

This is a true story, and the Internet got it from me. It became viral after our book “Fully Alive” was made a movie. [inaudible 00:04:07] I was at church. I couldn’t find my keys, hunted all over church for my keys, and then realized that I had probably left them in the [inaudible 00:04:20] which would really make my wife upset, because she’s told me for years, “Don’t leave the keys in the ignition of the car.” But at my advanced age, the ignition of the car is the best place to find the keys. I don’t know if you struggle with this, but I lose keys all the time. They fall in that little crack in the sofa. I just leave them laying on the desk somewhere. If you leave them in the ignition, there’s no problem. You find the car, there’s the key.

So I went outside to retrieve my keys, knowing I would be in trouble if Diane found out about this, and the parking lot to the church was absolutely empty. My car was gone. I realized that what she had warned me about had happened, the car had been stolen. So I called the police, told them what had happened, gave them a description of the car, and then with fear and trembling, I called Diane. When she answered, I said with some great element of authority, “Sweet baby, I have disobeyed you.” I told her I had left the keys in the ignition of the car, and the car had been stolen.

It was absolutely silent. She didn’t respond, there was no encouragement, there was no … nothing. So I thought the call had been dropped, and I said, “Are you there?” And my wife Diane said, “Ken,” and this was with great authority, “I dropped you off at church.” So I said, “Well, come and get me.” And she said, “I will, as soon as I convince this policeman I have not stolen your car.” So that’s the story of the lost keys and the price I had to pay. I paid for more than just one day for that little thing. But I had forgotten that she dropped me off. I thought I had driven, and that’s why my car wasn’t in the parking lot.

Jason: Man, that is funny. Well, thank you for sharing that story. So let’s talk about your book, “Fully Alive.” I really enjoyed that book, and you start out, in the first couple of chapters there, you tell this really powerful story about you and your granddaughter being up camping. You want to take our listeners kind of through how this book came about and maybe share some of that story?

Ken: Yeah. Well, the book is really about a restoration of life. When I hear the title of your program, Sound Retirement, is that it?

Jason: Sound Retirement Planning, yeah.

Ken: Sound Retirement. Unfortunately, I took retirement as a, how would you say this, as an excuse to stop living, to begin coasting in life. I had been very fortunate, very successful, and as a result I was leaning on my bank account and my possessions and my career and really had stopped living, stopped risking, just kind of coasting along with the wonderful things that had come my way. And in the middle of that, God made me very, very aware that that is not his intention for our life.

Part of that experience was when I took my grandchildren camping in the mountains, there were six of them. My youngest granddaughter, Jaden, at the time, was almost four, and I went to get some fire wood, to make a long story short, and my little granddaughter Jaden decided that she wanted to be with her grandpa, so she walked into the wilderness at 10,500 feet and my wife thought she was with me, and I thought she was with [inaudible 00:08:22] so we didn’t realize for an hour that she was gone and then storms began to kind of gather in the mountains, so we experienced four of the most terrifying hours I have ever experienced as we searched everywhere for this child.

I ran until I couldn’t run any more. Called her name until I couldn’t call it any more. Search team had come, they lined up a mile above our camp, because children don’t go uphill, especially in that kind of wild country, they go downhill. They take the easiest route, downhill. Finally, I fell in a swamp. I was looking through this swamp, and I fell on my hands and knees and I could not get up. I couldn’t move. I had used every last bit of my strength, had used all my voice, and there in that puddle, I remember saying to God you can everything, take my possessions, my career, and my final part of that prayer, take my life. If you need to, take my life, but please bring this baby back.

Unbeknownst to us, at about this time, a teacher and her husband were walking through the … They were up in the mountains to go hiking, and they had gone above the tree line and spotted some color in the bushes and went over to investigate, and my little granddaughter was there. And this marvelous angel of a woman asked her if she was okay, and my granddaughter said to her, “I cannot speak with you.” She’s been well trained. So this beautiful teacher said, “I know, you think I’m a stranger, but I’m a teacher, and my name is Molly. Are you okay?” And with that, my granddaughter exploded into her arms and began to sob, “My grandpa is lost.”

Jason: Grandpa’s lost.

Ken: They found this little … Yeah, it was a great reunion. Many, many lessons that are in the book that came out of that reunion and other events that God used to bring me from about 247 pounds, I think it was, back to a reasonable and more healthy state of life. I can now throw my grandchildren in the air and catch them about 50% of the time. But anyway, she had wandered, they found her, two and a half miles straight up the mountain from our camp.

Jason: Wow.

Ken: And we weren’t in a camp ground, we had established a little camp of our own. The rescue team had lined up a mile and a half short and would have never found her, because they were going to search downhill. So that’s just part of the story. “My grandpa’s lost,” and I think I say in that chapter at the end of that chapter she was right, but he was on his way to be found. He was on a journey to be found, and that’s what this book is about.

Jason: It was great. It was really, really good. I enjoyed so many parts of it, I’ve recommended it to a lot of people already. You have the opportunity to really impact people’s lives. I was just looking here on your website. It looks like you have almost 40,000 followers just on Facebook, but what is it, when you get a chance to speak with people and you’re talking about this message of living fully alive, what does it mean to live fully alive?

Ken: I would say it means to strive every day to live to the fullest extent for which [inaudible 00:12:06] created, and if I can say this, and you’re welcome to argue this point if you want, because that’s part of what makes a podcast or radio show successful, but it means you don’t live with the end goal in mind to retire in the traditional sense of the word, meaning you stop working. I don’t know if you know this, if you’ve done some research, so many people retire and die. I like to look at retirement more as a retreadment. You get a whole new set of tires, re-tire, and then instead of having to make a living, you live doing the things that change lives, inspire people, and make a difference in their lives.

The armchair, the television, distractions that we once thought we would like to spend the rest of our life doing, often are a death knell to us when we lose our meaning and fulfillment in life. I ran into a 71-year-old couple, 71 year-old couple, headed for short-term missions in Asia. They’re retired, but they’re the kind of retirement I want to be. And of course the importance of what you’re talking about to is to prepare our life now in such a way, physically, mentally, socially, financially, whatever it might be, so that we will be in the position while we don’t work to make a living but we get a chance to live, to really live.

Jason: I have to tell you, something that we’re preaching all the time from the radio show here is that we want people to have a greater sense of purpose when they retire. We don’t want them to just retire running away from something. We want them to be retiring into something. What’s that next journey? It’s all about having a greater sense of clarity, confidence, and ultimately we hope people experience a greater sense of freedom. And so I couldn’t agree more with you. We don’t want people to retire, play golf five days a week, and then die within five years of retirement. That just doesn’t sound …

Ken: That’s right.

Jason: Yeah. So you now …

Ken: Especially the way I play golf. I’m just saying.

Jason: But I guess I didn’t realize that about your story is that you were heading … so had you retired, or were you getting ready to retire when … ?

Ken: No. I was still working. I was still working a lot, but I had forgotten who brought me to the dance. I had forgotten what gave me purpose and meaning. So you’re just going through the motions of doing the events and doing the … And that’s a confession. I mean, your listeners, they’d say, “Well, why would I ever invite Ken?” Because I’m a real person, I have real blood in my veins, I make mistakes, and hopefully I learn from them. But I was going through the motions. And really instead of leaning on God, taking risks, you know the excitement of taking risks, especially when God calls you to do something, you think, “Well, that’s a little out of the ordinary. I don’t think I’m going to do that.”

If he calls you to do something, you better hop on it right away, because you are about to miss one of the greatest joys and fulfillment that life can offer you. So I just backed away from that. And I let myself go physically. If you’ve read the book, you know there is a tremendous, connection between physical, spiritual, social, all of those aspects that we were created with. I’ll be 70 next year, and I still compete in triathlons. I just climbed a 14,000 foot mountain two weeks ago.

Jason: Wow. You know, actually … I’m sorry, go ahead, finish that story. 14,000 foot mountain.

Ken: Yeah, I just climbed a 14,000 foot mountain, and I’ve got another one that I’ve got my eye on. I’ve been camping in the wilderness for two weeks hunting elk with a bow and arrow, which is the safest time in the entire year for elk, by the way. But those are things, I don’t back off on the physical part. And when I began to get healthy physically, it immediately began to impact the other areas of my life, and then created within me a tremendous desire to renew my life spiritually as well as mentally and socially.

Jason: Ken, so with that, you know the way that I found your book, actually, I was listening to a podcast by Cliff Ravenscraft, and he was talking this relationship between you guys, and I guess you had told him that the workout plan was you were going to work out every single day for the rest of your life, and he’s like, “Okay, I got it. It’s not three days a week, it’s every day for the rest of my life.” I think that’s what he said. I may be misquoting him. So you got back into it, was that a hard transition, for you to start getting physically healthy? You say you were, what was it, 247 pounds when you made this transition, and you start doing triathlons and running marathons …

Ken: Yeah, I started training for it, and it was hard at first because any training, any discipline is kind of difficult, but the results are amazing. I had a lady come up to me once, and she was pushing 300 pounds, she was in her 30s, she was riding in one of those little electric carts, and she asked if I could help her, and I asked her to give me her story and she said, well, I thought she was in an accident. It was no accident, and as I talked more and more, I said, “Well, why are you in this cart?” She said, “Because when I walk it makes me breath hard.” I said to this very sweet person, and I didn’t realize it would have the impact it had on her, “I can’t help you.” She actually started to cry, and I felt bad. I said, “But let me say something. You can help yourself. This cart is your electric chair. It’s killing you.” She said, “Well, I don’t know what to do. How can I get past when I have to breath hard?” And my response was, “You’ve got to breath hard.”

So I forced myself each day … here’s the other thing. With my travel schedule, if I told you that I never missed a day, it would be the biggest lie on the face of the Earth, but I don’t give up. When I have a travel schedule, like yesterday, landed in Atlanta at 3am because of a huge storm and stoppage. I’m driving down the road right now to get to the next event. There’s no way I can catch up on that today. I will get there, change clothes, go to the event, but I don’t give up on myself. I’m right back at it again. The problem is we give up.

I had a NASA scientist tell me the most amazing story. He said, “You know, when we shoot a rocket to the moon, it doesn’t go straight to the moon.” I said, “What are you talking about, does it go to Venus first and then have lunch and [inaudible 00:19:23] what?” He said, “No, almost immediately when it leaves the launching pad, it begins to err. It moves off course. And then the computer is saying, it’s a message saying, ‘You’re off course’ and [inaudible 00:19:38] coordinates to correct, and the rocket corrects, and then it isn’t long before it’s off course again.” So the path is not a direct path, it’s one of error and correction, error and correction.

So often in our culture it’s so easy when we slip and we start to gain weight, then we maybe fall down spiritually, then we make some errors in our life. So easy to just throw up our hands and give up and say, “What’s the use?” Instead of listening carefully for God’s correction, making the correction, and beginning to live. When I saw the picture that someone took of me from the back at a beach, it was like a walking manatee. That’s what God used, and I just said, “Well, I’ve got to do something,” and so I started to train for the triathlon …

Jason: How old were you?

Ken: … lost the first ten pounds.

Jason: How old were you at that point?

Ken: I was 65 I think at that time. 65.

Jason: 65. Hey, Ken, I noticed just a minute ago, our connection seems like it’s starting to get a little bit fuzzy. I don’t know if you changed anything on your end here, but it just got a little bit …

Ken: Yeah, we’re just roaming along the highway. We might be in a bad area here.

Jason: Okay, all right. You know, it sounds like you also had a bit of a spiritual awakening with that when all of this was coming to a head. You want to talk a minute about what that was like and what happened there?

Ken: I think what happened is here’s the interesting thing. The interesting thing is that we often determine spiritual illness or spiritual, what would I say? A lack of spiritual health, we connect that directly with one of the obscene that we can think of. In this case, it was an obscene sin, but it was so subtle, a lot of times we don’t realize it. It was the obscene sin of mediocrity, of becoming unaware of God’s presence in my life every single day, of not leaning on seeking his guidance for every day.

After all, I’m gifted, I travel the world, I’m well known. Lord, I’ve got almost 40,000 followers on Facebook. I’m amazing. No, I’m not. God is amazing, and he wants us to lean on him every single day. And realizing my physical weakness turned me to him, realizing the fragile nature of our existence made me turn to him, and realizing that emotionally I was a complete wreck because I had lost that focus made me turn to him.

Jason: Wow. Ken, we only …

Ken: It just changed things.

Jason: We only have one minute, but in one minute, if you could share the most important that you want our listeners to take away from our time together, what’s the most important thing here?

Ken: The glory of God, as Saint Irenaeus said, is man fully alive. Look where you are coasting, look where you have started to slack off, and ask God for the strength to live every day fully alive. People will see that, and it will make a difference in their lives.

Jason: That’s awesome. For our listeners, if you’d like to learn more, I want to encourage you to go to Ken’s website. You can find him at Ken Davis.com. I was looking at, Ken, you’ve got a speaking schedule all over the country. It looks like you’re going to be traveling and speaking. I didn’t see any spots for Washington state. If you ever make your way out here, I’d love to take you out fishing and get a chance to listen to you speak at one of your events.

Ken: We tour that state regularly, and I’m going to hold you to that one.

Jason: All right. And then also, for our listeners, “Fully Alive” is the book. I really encourage you, especially if you’re getting ready to retire, like Ken said, it’s not retirement, it’s re-treading. I really like that little catchphrase there, Ken. Ken Davis, thank you so much for being a guest on Sound Retirement Radio.

Ken: You are very, very welcome. It was my pleasure.

Jason: Take care.

Ken: Bye, bye.

Speaker 1: Information and opinions expressed here are believed to be accurate and complete, for general information only, and should not be construed as specific tax, legal or financial advice for any individual, and does not constitute a solicitation for any securities or insurance products. Please consult with your financial professional before taking action on anything discussed in this program. Parker Financial, its representatives, or it’s affiliates have no liability for investment decisions or other actions taken or made by you based on the information provided in this program. All insurance related discussions are subject to the claims-paying ability of the company. Investing involves risk.

Jason Parker is the president of Parker Financial, an independent fee-based wealth management firm located at 9057 Washington Avenue Northwest, Silverdale, Washington. For additional information, call 1-800-514-5046, or visit us online at SoundRetirementPlanning.com.

s was coming to a head. You want to talk a minute about what that was like and what happened there?