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CFF-TV Ep. 5 | Hot Topics: Negativity In The Trucking Industry

Welcome to CFF-TV and This Week’s Hot Topic!

I’m your host, Matt Manero with another hot topic. This hot topic is very personal to me.

Why Are So Many People Negative In The Trucking Industry?

Why are so many people negative within the trucking industry? I know there are a lot of very positive people in the trucking industry. I know there are way more positive thinkers in the trucking industry than there are negatives, but for some reason, negative thought processes, opinions, mindsets are extremely prevalent in the trucking industry. And I’d like to explore it just for a minute on today’s hot topic, because I have seen it firsthand in the industry. I have seen people when something positive goes out, their immediate reaction is something negative.

Whether it’s on social media or it’s on a radio program or an interview, oftentimes the comments are very, very negative. And I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish that more people within the trucking industry looked at it in a better light people outside the trucking industry, looked at the trucking industry in a better light too, but that we as industry veterans began to show more appreciation and positivity just to ourselves. Right?

Reasons Why The Industry Is Negative

So let’s just go through a couple reasons why maybe the industry is so negative. The first is it’s a tough job. There was no doubt about it. There is a lack of respect to professional truckers when they deserve more doggone respect. That lack of respect comes from other drivers on the highway. You know, people who are driving cars don’t realize the difficulty of pulling 80,000 pounds down the road and the responsibility that comes with that and the requirement for safety and the thought process that is required of a professional driver. And that feels disrespectful to drivers. I get it. There are shippers who make us wait.

They don’t have respect for our time. Pull up. You expect that you got to drop by noon. And next thing you know, it’s four o’clock and nobody’s even giving you an update. There are trucking companies that disrespect their drivers or their owner operators as well. They don’t value time. They don’t value our commitment to them and our time away from our families to get the job done for them.

Reach Your Own Potential

There’s also so much negative talk amongst truckers on radio it’s it’s it’s as if the voices often of negativity seem louder than the voices of, I think on a personal side, sometimes when we know as people that we could be doing better and we don’t, in other words, we’re not taking enough action to tap into our own individual potential. We can develop guilt and negativity around that. And that’s often fixed by doing more, taking more positive action. And I think that that concept weighs heavily on our subconscious mind. The most negative people that I’ve met in my life are the people who do the least, the most positive people I’ve met are the people who are doing the most. They don’t even have to have done the most. They’re just in the process of trying to reach their potential and get better. And they know that it’s a long process, but they’re on the journey to get better.

What Creates Positivity?

They haven’t given up on themselves and said, ah, that’s not going to work for me. So I’m just going to poo poo on anybody who is, let’s go to the opposite. What creates positivity? I think the first is, uh, a positive self-esteem, uh, happiness internally makes us have a more positive attitude. And I love this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt. I wrote it down here. No one can make you feel inferior without you giving them consent. Somebody might throw shade on you, but you don’t have to accept it. You can repel it. You can push it away. You can protect your own self-esteem and your own positivity. You don’t have to be fed into by other people’s negativity. Let’s be straight about money, which I’m going to talk about more in a minute money breeds, positivity to man. A big paycheck makes us feel better about what we’re doing.

Always Be Moving

I think physical movement matters a lot in our industry and why there can be at times so much negativity versus positivity. It’s because there are a lot of people that aren’t physically fit and active enough, right? The ability gets your body moving fires off the endorphins that trigger positivity and they push down negativity. So physical activity or lack thereof really impacts positivity. I think it’s important to address support at home, you know, positive support on the home front leads to a positive mindset. Conversely, negative support at home leads to a negative mindset. And then I think, lastly, how do we stay more positive as we feed our brains with more positive information, which is what brings me to the next point of today’s hot topic, which is a wake-up call. And I’d like to get this message across to everybody who’s listening. There is a change that’s happening in our industry, and it’s a very positive change.

A Land Of Opportunity

Many people do not see the trucking industry as a negative industry. They see it as a hugely positive industry. Allow me to give you an example. Our industry of transportation is incredibly diverse at commercial fleet. We have financed tens of thousands of transportation companies over the last 26 years. We know who’s in trucking and transportation, and we have seen the diversity change. We have seen the influx of more Latino drivers. We have seen more Russian drivers. We have seen more Asian drivers. We have seen more Nigerian drivers. People who are immigrating to the United States are getting into our industry. Somehow the cowboy trucker of the old days, doesn’t like that.

And I think that’s a huge mistake. We have to recognize that America is the land of opportunity. And within the land of opportunity, trucking is a tremendous opportunity for people to change their place in life. Listen, if you can make $20,000 in your home country and you come to America to get a piece of the American dream and trucking allows you to make $75,000 a year there, ain’t nothing negative about trucking going on in your mind. You’re saying to yourself, how did I get so lucky to find this industry that triples my income allows me to take better care of my family, maybe allows me to bring or support more family members to get into this industry.

A Game of Numbers

You know, trucking is really just a game of numbers. When somebody gets into the trucking industry and they can put one truck to work and it makes them $6,000 a month, net income. That’s $72,000 a year. If you had 10 trucks, that’s at least a half a million. Now it’s not 10 times 72 because things change when you hire drivers. And you now have trucks that you don’t operate. You have to hire people to operate. So your margins will go down. But a 10 truck trucking company could throw off a half, a million dollars for the owner, net income, personal income money that they can extract out of the business. Somebody tell me what’s negative about that. The ability for trucking as a business to be done is so positive. And there are a lot of people getting into trucking who are squashing out the negative elements of the old cowboy trucker mindset and looking at it as a great way, change their place in life.

A Game of Numbers

And because of that change the lives of their family. They don’t see trucking as negative. They see trucking as very, very positive. So here’s a couple takeaways on how do we look at ourselves and our industry in a more positive light? How do we feed positivity into it and starve out the negativity? Number one, who are you watching, listening, and reading to? What are you feeding your brain every day? Are you just feeding your brain, the negativity and it begins to take over, or conversely, are you feeding your brain positivity? And it begins to take over number two, are you really reaching your potential? Are you doing all you can to grow and get better and make more money and make more contribution and be a bigger trucking company. Number three, have you actually built out the roadmap of what your business could look like?

Right? Have you taken the time? More people will take time to figure out their one week vacation than they will to figure out the entire lifespan of their business. Imagine if you took that same amount of time and just build out the roadmap of what your business and personal growth was going to look like, imagine what could be accomplished. And finally you get what you give. If you start pushing out more positivity, more positivity is going to come to you.

Don’t Keep Pushing Negativity – Recap

If you keep pushing out negativity, more negativity is going to come to you. It creates the cycle, both negative and positive. It’s been weighing heavy on my mind, this hot topic. How do we get the industry to be more positive? Both internally and externally. Some of my thoughts and some of my tips on today’s hot topic on CFF TV. We’ll see you there.

That’s our hot topic. Should I grow? Should I stay or should I grow now? We’ll see you down the road.


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2022-03-24T14:27:07-05:00
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