Reset Your Mind to Change the Trajectory of Your Life with ‘The Mindset Answer Man’ Cliff Ravenscraft

We welcome you to this podcast. I'm Dr. Brad Miller. Glad to be with you, and we

are certainly glad to be with the Mindset Answer Man today.

His name is Cliff Ravenscraft. Cliff, welcome to our conversation today.

Brad, I am delighted to have this opportunity to connect with you at a deeper level

and also to be exposed to your audience. Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Well, it's great, and we've known each other for a few years, and I've certainly been

aware about your work, the podcast Answer Man, and many other levels. And I've

been involved with some personal workshops that you've led, but I also know the

last several years, you have been focused on mindset. The Mindset Answer Man,

and particularly how that is a part of the training, coaching, and influence of people

going through transitions. And that leads me to think that you've gone through

some transitions yourself and that you've had some pivotal moments. Can we talk

about that for just a minute? Some of the pivotal changes you made, particularly as

they relate to profound transformation.

Well, a number of them come to mind, and I'll try to cover them briefly,

and if you want me to go in-depth on any of these, feel free to lead me in that

working for my family's business, which was an independent insurance agency.

computer network to become digital in their agency. So I had a lot of skills

with computers and stuff like that.

And I said, listen. I will gladly work for the family business as long as you agree to

two things. Number one, you'll never force me to get my life insurance license, my

health insurance license, or auto and home and business insurance license cause I

have no desire to stay in this business. I'm coming here to do what you've asked me

to do, set up your computer systems, and I will work here for as long as you want

until I'm offered an opportunity to become a full-time pastor.

Going all the way back to when I was 18 years old, I felt a calling in my life. I want to

minister to others. I want to be of service to others. I want to encourage others. I'd

already been leading bible study groups from the time I was 18 years old, leading

small groups of young adults at that time, all the way up through all these years.

would be a ministry to others. Service to others. Well, being from Northern

Kentucky in my background, the limited exposure I had to career opportunities,

the one person I chose to speak about this feeling was my pastor at the time.

And he says, Cliff, you are obviously called to be a full-time pastor. And he's like,

why don't we go before the church board? Let them ask you some questions.

You can tell them your story, your heart.

And sure enough, I did that. They confirmed, Cliff, you're definitely supposed to be

an elder in the church. You're meant to be a pastor. This is God's calling on your life.

And that is the direction I was heading, even though I worked at my family's

insurance agency. My mission, my passion, everything I thought was that I was

going to be a full-time pastor.

I ended up being an associate pastor for 10 years while still working in the

insurance office. But over time, there was a pivot where I no longer wanted to be a

full-time pastor if I was given the opportunity. It's about a 99.999% certainty I would

never accept such an offer. Instead, I believe that my greatest ministry is happening

right here in this little insurance agency in Northern Kentucky, where I am of the

greatest service, council, encouragement and support to about 15 to 16,000

clients in my geographic region.

And so the transformation, Brad, was realizing that I've spent a decade over here as

an associate pastor. Preaching, leading Bible studies, and having a handful of

meaningful conversations here and there. There were some pretty incredible

things I had the opportunity to be of support to others. But the opportunity

seemed very few and far between. The membership of our church was about

200 people, so the opportunities were somewhat limited. Whereas, as I said,

15 to 16,000 people in the insurance agency, I'm often the first person somebody

calls when their child is just killed in a car accident or their house is burned to

the ground or there's a tornado that just came through.

You talk about an opportunity to be of support, care, empathy, and love to an

individual that was happening to me. That kind of experience, at least on a

quarterly basis and sometimes a monthly basis depending on what was going on.

Being in insurance, you were dealing with real-life drama, upfront and center.

Yeah. And as associate pastor, I was dealing with real-life drama. With a pool of 200

people, the opportunities to use the kind of support I can give were somewhat

limited. And even if I were to become a pastor of a megachurch in my area, a

megachurch would be 5,000 people. And here have actively 15,000 clients who are

going to call me when something terrible goes wrong in their life on all fronts

because, by this point, I had become licensed for auto, home, business, life, and

health insurance. So if anything happens with your home, anything happens in an

auto, anything that happens with your health, or if somebody dies in your family,

I'm usually going to be the person your call.

So that was your calling at that moment, was in the insured's agency.

At that moment.

So something happened, something transitioned out of that then.

I want to just say that the first transition, just in case anybody didn't pick it up,

the first massive transition transformation was this belief that I used to believe

that my calling had to be done within this thing called official ministry.

In the institution. And now, I see that my greatest calling, which is being of service

to others, is just having a life devoted to being of service to others. I now made the

transition to insurance work. This, I see as my calling.

I see this as my mission. Insurance wasn't my mission. Insurance wasn't my calling,

but being of service always has been. It just went from, I'm going to fulfil that

calling through the pastor role. And now, I'm fulfilling it as an insurance agent role,

which led to the next transformation. Tell me if you're ready for me to go.

Let's go. Let's kind of give kind of a flyover, if you will, of these major points that

we're going to go a little deeper into when something strikes me here.

So what happened was I started podcasting as a hobby with my wife about a

television show of all things. The TV show was lost, and I had already been a tech

geek. I am an earlier doctor of new technology, and podcasting was relatively new,

and one thing led to another. I launched this podcast with my wife. We ended up

having 27,000 subscribers around the world by our third podcast episode.

Holy cow. And this is the early days of podcasting when it wasn't

prevalent like it is now.

Yep. And within a year, we launched other podcasts about other television shows.

People started asking us questions about the themes and some of the things we

were sharing about our personal lives in these podcast episodes. So we created a

podcast related to business, family, and faith. We had lots of shows and grew our

audience to over a hundred thousand, ultimately growing to hundreds of thousand.

So Brad, what is my calling? What is my mission, my purpose? To be of service to

others. And just like there was once a day when I realized that the role of head

pastor would be too much of a limit for what I feel called to be in this world. An

insurance agent in Northern Kentucky with 15,000 seems to be a greater

opportunity to live out my calling.

So you found you found a bit of your big why, but now you're finding your house

here. And they go to different channels here. Okay. I'm with you. Thank you.

And now all of a sudden, I'm faced with this thing where I'm now able to reach

hundreds of thousands of people around the world every single week. But

yet I am devoting a majority of my working time to 40 to 50 hours a week.

To serve only 15,000 people and quite frankly, what I was saying before,

those opportunities to have those meaningful conversations, they were

once a quarter, occasionally, once a month.

Most of my day as an insurance agent is filling out paperwork,

doing quotes on different coverage options and faxing proof of insurance

cards to people who refuse to take their copies to the courthouse with them.

And I'm like, why am I doing this?

And so I began to have another dream, and that dream was, wow. I wonder what

life would be like if I could go over here and do this mission, this calling of being of

service to others, entertaining, educating, encouraging, and inspiring others to

break free from anything holding them back from living the life they feel God calling

them to live. If I could do that for hundreds of thousands of people, I wonder if

there's a way to make a living doing that. And that was the next major transition.

And yet those leaps of faith in overcoming fear as well. And that's the theme I'd like

to touch with you here is how faith and fear come into play as you talk about these

transitions. But please keep going.

The next transition that led me into this thing here, and if you're listening by audio,

I'm pointing to a little logo on my microphone, and it says Podcast Answer Man. At

the time, I had a limiting belief that people wouldn't pay me for encouraging

conversations, but they'd pay me to teach them something tangible. Some like,

I don't have a podcast, and I can teach you how to have a podcast. So I created

the podcast Answer Man, became a podcast consultant and coach, and ultimately

ended up training more than 40,000 people how to launch a podcast, generating

million dollars in revenue from doing so. And after about a decade, I realized

again that I'd painted myself into a corner.

I still have this massive opportunity to talk about things that are important in life,

but here I am, answering people's technical questions. Hey, what microphone

should I use? How do I get rid of this buzzing noise from my podcast audio?

And I'm like, is this the best use of my time answering all these questions?

I know I get paid incredibly well for it, but I want to have these meaningful life

transformative conversations.

And I'm getting more opportunities as the podcast answer man as I was as the

insurance guy. I wanted to make a change, but I still had some significant issues

and one of the big things that happened to me, sitting behind a microphone all the

time, not being physically active, I'd gotten to the place where I was weighing

almost 300 pounds, and I was very unhealthy, very physically un inactive, did not

eat well at all, had lots of stress throughout all this time, trying to manage the

marketing ups and downs of clients coming in, and am I going to be able to make

enough money to pay the bills this month?

There was a lot of that in the early days, and it wrecked my health. And so one of

the things that I knew that I wanted to make a transformation is to go from an

incredibly unhealthy, unfit individual into living more in alignment with

to begin living. So I know that sounds crazy. I love that. I love that. Begin living.

And so, I'm just trying to think of this one quote. It's like everybody's

going to die, but not everyone will live.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. That's great. I've heard it before, but I can't put

my finger on who the quote is from.

The quote is a little bit more eloquent than that, but that's the heart of it. And what

I realize is I have not been fully living, living fully alive, utilizing what really motivates

me in and everything I've been settling for the things that, you know, bring in the

money, okay. The things that bring in financial certainty, but I. I, I've let so many

health and fitness, and then I would use whatever I learned there to implement in

all of my other areas of life. And sure enough, it wasn't strategy, it wasn't technique

about how I can lose. There's a million books out there, they will all tell you how to

do it. Sure. What I had to do is I had to change my mindset. I had made a decision I

was gonna work out six days a week, every week for the rest of my life, and I was, I

was just gonna be done with this wrestling, with all of this stuff.

The particular, the physical part, it really doesn't change for anybody. Your physical

makeup, for your physiology. It's what you do with it. You know?

You just have to focus and get it.

Yeah. And so I, I began to learn a lot about mindset. Just just how to change, how I

feel and how I think about certain things like working out and about, you know,

eating and all these other things.

Sure. And as soon as I learned the mindset, Stuff. All of a sudden, my

I weighed almost 300 pounds. Today I've lost over a hundred pounds and

put on over 20 pounds of muscle as a result of that. And here, I think

we're going on seven, eight years.

lifestyle. For this long, it's like, and it's all mindset. It's not that I haven't had

any hiccups along the way, but and so what all of a sudden I'm like, wow.

And, I'm like, I wonder if I can apply this to being a dad. I wonder if I can

apply these mindset things to being a business owner.

I wonder if I can mi apply this to my relationship with my wife and other

people in my community. And, all of a sudden I started, began to see my entire

life, every area of mine. I radically transformed because of the way that I was

thinking and feeling about each of those aspects of my life. I, I used to, I used to

joke and, and wear as a badge of honour, just how far I'd gotten in life.

know, people talk about reading these books. Books are. Today, I'm currently in.

This sounds crazy. I could show you on my Kindle, which is over there. Yeah. I'm in

the middle right now of reading 129 different books.

So you're into them, you're reading consecutive consecutively.

You mean over the course of a year goal or you're into them right now?

They're like I'm in the middle. I mean, I'm somewhere between the beginning.

I've already started and I haven't yet finished 129 books.

Wow. Now, some people, some people read, of course, just take a

pull of excerpt out and just let's where they've read. Is that what

you do or do you try to read the whole book eventually?

Uh, I don't ever feel obligated to read an entire book. Okay. From beginning to end.

As long as I open a book and I found something of value, I might

actually get into it. And read like five paragraphs. I don't even finish

the chapter, but man, if that five paragraphs just spoke to me, I'm gonna

go pull out my journal, and I'm gonna journal about it.

That's, that's my process really. With all these books you see behind me, I try to

pull out what I need or apply. Sometimes it's just the title occasionally

yeah. And so, and, and, but then, the thing that I'm getting at here is I have

completed now, just within the last five years, probably about 300 books.

And I'm in the midst of reading 129 currently right now, and I probably have about

over a hundred that I haven't started yet, but they're all sitting there on my Kindle

or on my bookshelf here. And the reason why I bring this up, is not to brag, but just

to say that the way I used to think and feel about reading caused me to never

read books, but I changed how I think and feel about.

and now I have an insatiable desire to read for hours every day.

So there's, that's what I'm trying to get at here. If, if you wanna know

what is the transformation and how did I get beyond the fear? Cuz I know

that's where you want to go. Sure. It's about how I think.