Wake Up Ready: How Marine Veteran and CEO Kate Monroe Builds Grit and Bounces Back Faster

The next time you try to do something that you're not comfortable with, that is outside the bounds of your day to day, move toward it. Take a step, start walking to it, flip the covers open. You want to write a book? Write the second you think about it. Get up and go grab a pen and a piece of paper. Do an activity because motivation follows the action. You can only get into traction with action. And if you think you're not in traction, you are negative or positive.

You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory. No fluff. No shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. What's up, guys? We've got Kate on row. What's up, Kate? I'm happy to be here. Let's get it done. Let's get it done. Hey, you know, something tells me you get it done a lot. Serial entrepreneur, multiple companies, Marine Corps. What else, Kate? I mean, I think you've done it all. I mean, I'm an author, speaker. I'm a mom. That's something I'm most probably just one of those crazy people that thinks that nothing should escape me. I recently at 47 walked in Miami Swim Week. If you tagged me in to do something insane, I'd probably go for it.

For instance, if you sit down to write a book, I've written seven of them. People say, wow, you're going to sit down and write a book. That's a lot of work. Well, not really compared to being in the assaulted and crushing my face and my elbow and my ankle and all of my feelings. I had my company stolen from me a couple of years ago. I had a battle to get it back. I've had stage four cancer, fought back to life, almost lost my son when he was two. It's really about shortening the distance between defeat and victory. Don't have to sit and wind yourself up in it. And oh, woe is me. I'm going to draw a line, step over it, and I'm going to march on.

It's very hard. As hard as you can imagine. It's hard for anyone. I can't help but think there's a little added layer there. It wasn't necessarily boot camp. Boot camp was actually fun. That's the most fun part. Marine boot camp's fun. It's like a big exercise of just like if they can out crazy you, basically if you can just outlast. And it's kind of funny. But after getting assaulted and getting my nose crushed in a softball accident, I actually lacerated my face seven inches, almost lost my eye. I'm missing part of my skull. They made my nose. But I learned one very important thing in the Marine Corps. I got assaulted and they said, Kate, we don't really know how to tell your parents. Your dad would probably come here and kill all of us.

So we're gonna let you go work with the chaplain for a couple of days and I did. And this is the biggest lesson I ever learned in my life at 19 years old. He said, you know, I've been clocking you for a couple of days and you seem to be a Christian person. I said, I am. You said, you seem to have had a trauma-free, easy 80s childhood. I said, yes, absolutely. Best parents on earth. Well, then you have a decision that you get to make. You can see this as an event, this assault as an event, or you can let it touch and hurt and injure every moment from here until you go in the ground. So tonight when you go to bed, Pray on it.

If it's for you to give to God, do it. If you want to carry it like a sack of turds for the rest of your life, then do that. In 19, I realized you have quite a lot of power over how you decide to respond to things and how far you want to carry things. And I did. I gave it to God and I marched on. I've been better for it since. So now I happen to my life. I don't let it happen to me. That's a big secret people can learn. Arrive violently on your field of battle. You got all the sayings there, Kate. I'm saying it's first myself. Mentally writing these down. We talked about a word that I'm going to bring up pre-episode.

I held all of it up here and I was fine. And we tackled it and we went to war and everybody knew Kate's gonna get the company back. But if I had been defeated way down here, we would have folded like a prom dress and we would have lost everything. Do hard things. Stop being such a whiny, crying, woe is me, miserable human being. It's miserable sucking at stuff because you're on mine. It sucks. I feel for you.

I had a less cool name. My marketing team at the time, I had not run for Congress yet. I had never been on TV, never made a movie. Vetcom was teeny tiny. And they said, you remind me of like a modern day Marilyn, like who Marilyn Monroe would be if she got to exist in this time and space. What if we start marketing you as Kate Monroe? For about a year, I was playing this character, Kate Monroe, but then taking her off and putting it back on my old self, Katie. I was picking her back up. But I had to change my name to get on the ballot. I literally made it within an hour. The second somehow that I held my new driver's license, boom, I snapped in on that Kate Monroe show shit hard.

I mean, I went all in, balls to the wall. And all of a sudden, people didn't like that. All the people that were comfortable where we are, all the people that didn't want to have to work as hard and be taller, better, faster, stronger, started to try to hold me down. And I told them, I'm about to collapse timelines. We're getting in the portal and I'm about to shut the door and you are standing on the outside of it. And if you don't get in... and have a funeral for Katie and welcome your new friend, Kate, into existence. You won't be in my life. And I lost a lot of people. I lost a 17-year relationship because they would not acknowledge where I was going.

A lot of generations got peddled like, you don't need a man and men aren't going to do anything for you and have your own money and don't have kids. You just got to be and do and strive. That isn't really what we're built for. I'm crazy. Don't try to go be Kate Monroe. You might find yourself to be very miserable because the amount of stuff that I do in a day to have this cool life that you wish you had, you would drown in. By noon, you would go, okay, I can't keep up with this. Maybe don't do it. Be your own version of that. Because I think that we're built to be feminine. We're built to provide a household. We're built to provide love and empathy and all of those things.

And I think that we just got peddled a bunch of horseshit, quite frankly, that every woman needs to be their own thing. And then sadly, we set men aside to the point where they don't even want to come back to the table because we basically said, you're not a value and I don't need you and whatever. And it's sad what's going on right now. I'm hoping that we close the distance back between men and women and we get them back seated in their right roles. But being this alpha female, this crazy person that I am takes a lot of sacrifice. I don't wish it on most men or most women. Not everyone's built for this kind of crazy. Yeah, but if you are, you need to read Wake Up Ready.

I'm the only female led one. What's it like serving your country and serving your country? I went in the Marine Corps. In 2023, I ran for Congress. When I was running for Congress here in San Diego, we were beating the drum of an open border in 2023. Like the border was wide open and I could just go down to the border, witness people coming around it. People would say, well, okay, the border's open. What are you going to do about it? Like you specifically, we want us to vote you in. What are you going to do? And I sat at home one day and thought, that's a really bad thing. That's a really good question. So I formed the border vets. I got a bunch of vets to go down with me to the border with razor wire because we're crazy.

And we shored up these three huge holes. And it made it very difficult for the cartel to bring people to the border and get them across the border. And pulling veterans back in and going to tackle problems and having that calm, helping 40,000 people, going to do homeless walks, being on the news 2,000 times, talking about everything, commentating. I really just feel like God gives you your work to do and he expects you to do it. And the better you do at it, you may get more work, but more gifts to do it. And I feel like God gifts me and gifts me and gifts me because it's a flywheel of success. Whatever he gives me, I turn it back around for more. I 10x whatever he gives me for that purpose.

When really, if you step to the left and look out the window, there's a whole world out there of people who need your help. When I go to do homeless walks, I had a person train me how to be calm enough really to get somebody's story when they are sitting in their own feces and drug needles are everywhere and they might have a machete on their hip. And it was said to me that very rarely, if ever, does a homeless person get a kind touch interaction even once a year. So I hope this Navy veteran, she's now not homeless, that calm has helped her get to 100 percent. And now she's like in nursing school, huge turnaround. But I found her out by a swamp.

And she hadn't been touched in three years. When I said, do you mind if I touch you? She started crying the second my hand hit her shoulder. And I said, do you mind if I give you a hug? And she was filthy. She didn't want me to hug her. And I said, no, this is mine to do. I pulled her in, but it touched me first. I was the first person. I probably got more out of that interaction than she did. You need to hug people more. Look them in the eye. Give compliments to people. Most of the things people need are free. They don't cost you much, but they give you everything. This episode is brought to you by HighLevel. Make sure to check out the link in the show notes to sign up for your 14-day free trial.

And I'm not saying they haven't been traumatized by other people, of course. But at a certain point, it becomes about not being drowning in your own self. We do it all the time. It is the human condition in a way. But I think anything that gets you out of that, that's what I love about the tenets, like in your book, Wake Up Ready. Like, yeah, you're focused on a goal that is about yourself, but it becomes bigger than you. And that's what I feel like when I look at Kate Monroe, it just feels bigger than Kate Monroe. just many lives and make waves, make room for other people to thrive. You know, in my book, I talk about how a lot of people think that they're out in deep water at night with no lighthouse in the cold and waves are crashing over their head and they're just barely making it.

When in reality, they themselves went and filled up a kiddie pool in their backyard and they're sitting in it and they're only like waist deep. You know, most of our problems are by our own design, branding ourselves. Like a lot of people say like, well, I have depression. I have anxiety. I have ADHD. And then they hold on to it. Like it's like the most precious thing about them. No, you don't have depression. You're fucking miserable because you don't go to the gym. You don't walk and you don't sow into other people and you don't read. You don't go to church and whatever. You don't have to do that. You can just decide to radically change your life and draw a line, step over it, march on.

And if you got to do it every damn hour, then you got to do it. You don't think I have a bad day. You don't think the devil knocks me. On Kate's door, hey, you got a minute and I got to look at my calendar. Oh, no, all stocked up. Sorry, no time for your crap. You know, get busier. Go to the gym. Listen to good music. Like, stop all your... You only got one life. You just want to be miserable forever when you go in the ground, throw the dirt on yourself at the very end, choke to death on it. That's the kind of life you want to live. Happen to your life. Get excited. Everybody thinks they're going to get another shot. I say that a lot when people, I go on other shows.

You're creating reality that doesn't exist because that's a brand and a name. You will become what you think something is. And then you'll use it as an excuse for your failure. Exactly. I bring that up because I think you nailed it. And I think that will brand use the word brand. Brand is a big word. We didn't just call it a name or something or a brand. People will become that because they tell themselves that's what they are. Everything will shift and lean into it. Every single thing. I'll be like, see, I'm not lucky. See, I'm this. See, I'm not good. See, people don't like me. See, it's very sad. I tell my son every time he brings me one of these things, I go, where'd you pick that up?

I don't let a year go by. One minute we're walking and I'll hear him say something like really negative about himself. I go, buddy, where'd you pick that up from? Who said that to you? Where did you hear that? He's like, what do you mean? You heard it somewhere and now you believe it. And now you're telling yourself lies. I want to understand what nasty child put that in your head. What show you're watching that's sowing hate and divisiveness into your heart against yourself. And so we talk through it and I go, are you ready to lay it down? We're ready to light it on fire. And we have like a little imaginary bonfire. We're done with that. I said, you don't talk about yourself like that.

So the other day I said to my son, I said, buddy, sorry, mommy's so busy. Sometimes I could be when a mommy's like, like, you know, like there's tension. He goes, don't talk about yourself. Mommy, you're an angel. Like we don't talk about ourselves like that. And I went, ah, I got him early. Too many times people make it out into their life and they have perfectionism and traumas and things that their parents didn't. like sewed into them through paradigms and all these little like poverty mind tricks people play on themselves. Two things have to happen. Your parents got to go apologize to you or remind you that it isn't your fault you got there. Or you got to say, hey, I can't say where I didn't get to decide whose body I came out of, but I can decide how I want to choose to live.

If I don't like that I came from poverty, then I don't need to be impoverished. I can become a homeowner. I can free myself of these things. And wake up ready. There's a chapter in it where I talk about stop writing another chapter in an old book, write a new book. Not all the characters get to go to the next book. Sometimes you got to scrap that whole series and start a whole new one. And then when I became Kate Monroe, man, I've been writing books, plural. I left behind almost all the crap that was holding me back. No one is born a loser. You choose. You can be born to a loser, though. Yes, you can be. You can be born from losers. Yeah.

Just keep going. Nothing's going to be easy when you start it. It's about how you finish it. There's a rule for change. And this is something that Mel Robbins teaches, the five second rule. This is one of the number one things you can do to change your life. Your mind will lie to you and try to keep you comfortable. So if you try to do something outside the bounds of your normal day to day, your body's going to go, we shouldn't do that. Because what if it doesn't go well? I tested it one day. I said, OK, I want to start getting up earlier. I'm going to set my alarm for an unreasonably early time. I'm going to see if five seconds, if that rule is true.

So the alarm went off. I said, oh, my God, like my eyes are closed. I shut it. I laid there and it went. Boom. By the third second, I started the crazy started to say, Kate, nobody knows you committed to get up early. The whisper of the end of life. Only you know that. Let's just give it a shot again tomorrow. It's going to be cold when you get out of bed. You're going to be tired all day. I was like, nope. I threw the wipe out. hit the floor. And I realized that's so true. And I apply it to every single thing. The five second rule. The next time you try to do something that you're not comfortable with, that is outside the bounds of your day to day, move toward it.

No, because I apply different pressure to different things. But the schedule and repetition and the positivity, the things that you want to make and you know positive gains and things, whether that's in the gym, in business or whatever, you've got to set a schedule repeatable. I write a book in about 10 days because I put an hour a day on my calendar. I put workout on the calendar. I put my vitamins. Every single thing that I have to do, I want to happen to my day. I want to go, oh, shit, I take my vitamins. I take my peptides so I can be an empire. You need to happen to your day. It happened to your life. Stop letting life happen to you. It's miserable.

In 30 days, they could radically change their life because you'd be forced to write down all the things you don't want to take on your journey. All the things you do need to work on, commitments you do have to make to get up earlier and work a little harder and put in the one more rep, whatever it is, the one more phone call to try to be taller, better, faster, stronger. And eventually you catch and staying in traction, positive traction becomes easier. I'm not going to ask you what the end game is because there is no end game for Kate Monroe. But what does make Kate happy? The happiest I probably am is when I'm watching my son succeed at something that we worked on together.

The thing that makes me most happy is I had to go through a transition of where everything was me. You know, I was a high level sales performer, high level leader. Everything was I'm doing this. I'm great. I'm always trying to get the trophy from me. But then I realized me could only take me so far. So I had to pivot to we. We can be taller, better, faster, stronger and bigger together. And then VETCOM grew and grew. And now I'm in the transition of they. Now I hired people and they got to go run the operation and they got to go do this. So I'm happy now sitting, watching. I still, you know, hand on the wheel a little bit, but I'm most excited that I'm about to massively scale my life again.

You make enough little changes. You can make them small and stack them tall. It's the same as making one huge change. It's easier to stick these 30 little things in one massive change that is probably without the 30 things, not even possible. Go do the little things right so you can be trusted with the big things. That's what I would. Kate, let's start with telling people where to find the book, where to get in touch with Kate's people, you, all those things, social media, website. Let's do it. All of my social channels are easy. It's at Kate Monroe, CEO. If you're a veteran watching and you need disability compensation or help, I'm vetcom.us, V-E-T-C-O-M-M.us. And the book is wakeupreadybook.com. And right there for very inexpensive, you can get the book, get the workbook and go radically change your life.

And of course, the highlight clips, the full episode. You know where to find us, RyanIsRight.com. We appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time right about now. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram at Ryan Alford. And watch or listen to every episode at RyanIsRight.com. This is Right About Now. Now quit waiting. Go win.