Jon Antonucci
Transcript
Jon Antonucci - 00:00.11
That's a wake-up call when you are 20 years old and 14-year prison sentence. That just seems like your whole life. That seems like just everything. And there were some decisions that needed to be made. And those decisions really revolved around what was I going to do? Was I going to keep being the old Jon or was I going to recognize that that wasn't working and that there were things that needed to be addressed? And I'm very thankful by the grace of God I took the second option and I said, what's going on? where did I get off track and I recognized some serious character issues, some integrity issues and begin to look at my life, not through the lens that look at all the stuff Jon can do and Jon has done and Jon is doing, but rather look what happens when Jon does it his way. Maybe there's a better way. And begin to humble myself and be willing to learn and be willing to grow and adopt a growth mindset and. just began to recognize some things about myself that maybe I hadn't recognized in the past that were really influential to helping me grow.
Theme Music - 01:13.838
The ownership game with Gary Montalvo. What would it take to get into the driver's seat of your life and leave your mark? The ownership game starts now.
Today's episode is about transformation. Real, raw transformation. It's about what happens when life forces you to confront the consequences of your choices and gives you the opportunity to either sink deeper or rise above it. My guest today, Jon Antonucci, knows this crossroads all too well. After early success as an entrepreneur, Jon's unchecked ego and poor decisions led to a tragic crime and that landed him a 14 year prison sentence and the death of his best friend.
But it's what he chose to do with those 14 years that makes his story extraordinary. Through deep introspection and taking radical responsibility for his actions, Jon used his time behind bars to rebuild his character, to develop leadership skills, and ultimately to create a peer-based mentorship program that helped countless other inmates. Today, Jon is a leadership trainer and consultant, working to equip leaders at all levels with the tools they
need to succeed. His story is a powerful reminder that even when life feels irreparably broken, transformation is still possible. But only if you're willing to own your part and do the work and lead with integrity. This episode will challenge you to think differently about leadership, accountability, and what it really means to rebuild from the ground up.
Gary Montalvo - 03:05.938
So Jon, thank you for taking the time to be here with us. I'm really excited to tell your story. You have a really fascinating and beautiful story. I'm just gonna let you do your thing, right? Like, let's take us from the beginning, from your childhood, because even in your childhood, you've got some interesting things that I think we could talk about. So what do you tell the people about you?
Jon Antonucci
Well, thanks, Gary. I appreciate the opportunity. like you said, from early childhood, kind of just an interesting experience and so many points of gratitude, so many points of opportunity and, well, some royal screw ups as well. So yeah, think it's starting it. I'll just start at seven. And I start at seven because that was when I started working. very entrepreneurial from a very young age. I remember going and seeing that a lady down the street, we called her the crabapple lady because this was in Colorado and she had a big crabapple tree in the front yard. And so we called her the crabapple lady and she needed a grass mow. And I asked my dad if I could borrow the mower to go cut her grass. And my dad was really good about trying to teach us money management and business principles and things like that. And so he said, sure, not a problem.
He said, you can mow as many yards as you want. For every yard you mow, you owe me a dollar for using my mower and you get to keep the rest. And that was kind of the beginning of the end, if you will. That turned into leaf raking and snow shoveling. And if there was a way to make money, by the time I was 12, I'd pretty much figured it out. I was selling things from a catalog. had...
partnered up with a little convenience store in town. I would go stock their shelves and make their coffee at four in the morning. There was a little produce vendor that was there in old town and I would go sell produce or go hand out his price sheets to all the restaurants. I was a very industrious child. And then I decided after watching some Bruce Lee movies that I wanted to get involved with martial arts. And so at 12, I picked up martial arts.
Gary Montalvo - 05:15.534
What was driving that?
Jon Antonucci
The martial art part or the...
Gary Montalvo
No, entrepreneurial part, what was having you at seven?
Jon Antonucci
You know, I don't really know other than I'm the first born of five. So I kind of have that first born, gotta go conquer the world tendency. We grew up in a fairly poor family. My dad was the single breadwinner. My mother actually homeschooled all five of us and stayed at home and put up with our shenanigans all day every day while my dad went and worked. My dad is also what they call a bivocational minister, and so that means that he's pastored in several churches, but the churches were never big enough to actually support him with a salary, or least not a full-time salary. And so he's always been in ministry as well as working just a regular job like you or I might have. And so very busy there. But yeah, I I can't like point to one specific thing and it's like, I had to go do this. It was just kind of this innate drive to go and add value and go… probably at that time, a lot of ego too to feel important, to have money, to be able to do what I do. Say again?
Gary Montalvo
What with the money? What were you doing with the money?
Jon Antonucci
A lot of it got saved, but then just, mean, was always interesting, right? Because you have, when you're the oldest of five in a fairly poor family, you don't go out to eat. We shop for clothes at Goodwill and we were very, very frugal. And so when you're 12 and you're like, hey dad, can we go get pizza? And he's like, well, we don't have the money. You're like, well, I'll pay for it.
Like, and you can do that. And so I would, you know, I would buy a bike. A lot of it got saved. My business started buying things for the business. So I would buy the lawn mowers. I never didn't want to pay my dad for his mowers. So I thought for whatever reason, I thought it would be a good idea to go spend $300 on my own mower. And then a second mower because I started hiring my siblings to help me. But yeah, I don't know if there's a why that I can pinpoint other than wanting to do more and want to value.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I thought that was an interesting question to ask because it's not unusual, right, to find a seven, eight, nine, 10 year old that's like trying to build a little empire. So, okay, great. So 12 years old, martial arts.
Jon Antonucci - 07:41.612
Yeah, so I got involved with martial arts at 12 and it was like, I don't know, like four months after I started, there was some natural aptitude. I was a little bit older. know, some kids start when they're five or six or whatever and I didn't, but I was pretty good pretty fast. And I remember a day when the instructor who was actually traveling about an hour from where she lived, she got stuck in traffic and the parents, other parents of the class came up to me and said, we think you should teach. And I was like,
I'm not the oldest, I'm not the highest ranking, like nobody gave me permission to do this. And they were like, well, we're paying for the class and we think you should teach. So why don't you head up there and get busy. And so that was the very first time I officially stepped into leadership as I took command of the classroom. And I was terrified when the Sensei walked in that I had done something wrong, of course. But she affirmed and said, no, that was fine. You were doing a great job.
that kind of carried by the time I was 15, I was officially an assistant instructor. By the time I was 17, I officially had my teaching degree. And by the time I was 19, I had moved from Colorado to Arizona by that time. And by the time I was 19, had muscle, mental 500 students scattered around the Phoenix metropolitan area in different classes that I was teaching. And so just a great amount of success.
that was kind of following me as I went throughout my life. And you kind of take that 12 year span between seven and 19. And it was good. Like there was just, I said kind of success followed me in the sense that by the time I was 19, I was not only teaching, but I had my own house. I was renting, but it was my own place and my own vehicle that I was paying for. you know, doing,
doing the most, if you will, at 19 years old, just trying to make it on my own. And the real problem was not that I didn't have the capacity to do these things, it was that the amount of success that I was experiencing on the one hand was not commensurate with the amount of maturity that I had on the other. I had a lot of… a lot of business success, a lot of good mental ideas, but not a lot of character to match it. And so it started with just being a liar, really. That was really what it boiled down to. And growing up in a pastor's home, I got really good at acting one way on Sunday in a completely different way on Monday morning. Or as I like to say, sometimes it was Sunday morning versus Sunday night.
And so that kind of led its way into manipulation and then eventually just into straight theft. And there was kind of a series of decisions that were being made that from an external perspective didn't really seem all that big or bad. And most people didn't know about them, first of all. then from a, even if you did, it was kind of like, okay, that's the stuff kids do, I think. I think that's kind of the perspective some people would have. But when I look at it, I look at it as more, to whom much is given, much is required. And I'd been given a lot of opportunity and was not demonstrating a lot of character or lot of integrity. And that was manifest in its most dynamic way. And at 19 years old, I made the utterly stupid decision to go with three of my friends. We had the very dumb idea to light a fire in a building and my best friend who lit the match did not make it out.
wow.
And that experience not only took my best friend from me, but obviously lighting a fire is a crime. When somebody dies, that crime gets a lot more serious. And I was charged with arson of an occupied structure and first degree murder. And it wasn't that they thought I tried to kill my best friend. It was that according to the law, when you're committing a crime, if somebody dies in the process, it's considered capital murder. And capital murder is just a fancy way to say first degree.
Jon Antonucci - 1:49.868
And so I'll never forget my attorney, my court appointed public defender sitting on the other side of the glass on a Saturday evening. He came into the jail and he said, Mr. Antonucci, my name is Jeffrey Kirchler. I will be your court appointed attorney. I will be your attorney for the duration of your pretrial proceedings, unless the state chooses to seek the death penalty. At which point I will no longer be your court appointed attorney and you will be assigned another. And as you can tell, it's been
Many, many, many years since that happened and those words are still indelibly imprinted upon my mind.
I got chills when you said that. That had to be like, I mean, I'm trying to like, wow, you were just like literally being a schmuck. Why were you trying to light the fire? You just thought it'd be funny or something?
That's a great question. And I think from one perspective, I don't know the other perspective I do. So from the big cosmic perspective, like why would I participate in that? There is no good reason. I've thought about that for years now. And it's like, Why? I knew better. Even though I didn't really understand the full consequences of my decisions, I still knew that was wrong, right? Now, the reasoning that we were all kind of saying was,
My best friend was significantly older than the rest of us. He was about, I think, eight or nine years older than us. There were four of us that were involved. the chain of events was, I mentioned theft earlier, I had been basically skimming off the top of those classes, and that got brought to the light. And I said, I created some cockamamie story about how I was showing how this could be done, and I had every intention of telling them about it. of this whole line. And then, of course they fired me, which is what happens when you make a decision like that. And that put me in a position where I was like, okay, well, what do I do? And the thing that I was good at, the thing that I knew how to do was teach martial arts. It's what I had been doing. And so I went and started my own school and they sent a cease and desist letter. And I said, well, basically that's not enforceable because… the only signature they'd ever had from me on a contract was signed when I was a minor. Now, I wouldn't say nowadays that that's a good strategy to have or a mentality that you can't hold me accountable because I wasn't an adult, but that was my thought process at the time. My best friend on the other hand, who was the one that had kind of showed me the ropes on how to skim and do some things like that, was still working for them, but knew his time was short. And he knew that his non-compete clause in his contract had been signed while he was an adult.
And so the reasoning that had been given was basically we were there to destroy that contract that was in that building. Doesn't make any sense now. You think about it and you look at it and the whole plan, the whole way it was executed, none of it makes sense. But at that time, that was the rationale that we were using.
Yeah, dumb.
So dumb. So dumb. And so costly. mean, just let down so many people and negatively impacted so many people. Not even just me and my family and whatnot, but hundreds of students. Probably thousands, hundreds of mine. And then not to mention the students of the other three who are also all instructors for that organization. Just a debilitating decision that’s... has no justification in logic and no, other than just stupidity.
Yeah. So tell me, okay, so you hear these words, what happened next?
So I hear those words and those words indelibly imprinted on my mind to this day did not have maybe the impact you might think they would because you would think that that would be enough for me to be like, my goodness, I need to just like do the right thing. And I didn't, I didn't. I was so caught up in my own ego that I just kept lying. I kept insisting I wasn't there. I kept insisting, you know, I don't know what they're talking about.
over time little pieces would come out and eventually I realized, okay, like this is stupid. I can't keep this nonsense up. And so eventually I confessed to my attorney what I had done, but it took some time. It took some time for me to come to terms with the fact that I was even there and took time for me to even recognize that I need to stop lying and I need to actually be truthful, at least with myself, if nothing else, right? Like you can't tell truth to others if you're not willing to be truthful with yourself.
And then it took even longer for me to, I think, truly come to terms with things, because there was a very long period of time, probably I would say at least five years between the time where I originally said, okay, I did it. But here was the challenge with that is even when I said I did it, if you've ever had any experience with anyone who's ever been arrested, you can't admit anything verbally.
Jon Antonucci - 17:00.15
because they will use that against you in court. And so your attorney says, you can't say anything on the phone. You can't write anything in a letter. You can't, don't say anything to anyone. And so the thing that I kept saying, which was technically true, but was not good for my own growth was that I did not do what I was accused of. Well, I was accused of setting a fire, which I did not strike the match. And I was accused of murder, which I did not kill anybody. And so that really got into my psyche. You say it enough times, you begin to believe, drink your own Kool-Aid, if you will.
and it took time for me to recognize that I had done it. And then when I did realize I'd done it, it was like, okay, but all I really did was help break a window, because that was my physical action. My physical action was helping to break the window that we went in through to try to start the fire. And so that was what I clung to. And I really thought, know, what is that, trespassing, criminal damage? What is that, a year or two? And you know, when you've committed a serious offense like the ones I did, and then you make a statement like,
I'm hoping for a year or two. That just doesn't bode well for you. That doesn't represent well. And so eventually, I was sentenced. I was sentenced not to one or two years. I ended up getting a plea bargain and the plea bargain basically was between seven and 21 years. Seven being what they would call the mitigated sentence. 10 and a half being the presumptive, which would mean the of the basic.
this is what you would get if all things were equal. And then 21 being the aggravated sentence. And of course, me and my whole family were hoping for seven at the most. We were actually hoping the judge would say, I'm not accepting this and give me less, which legally that doesn't work the way that we would hope it might at that time. But the judge did not give me seven. He said, basically, I don't know if you're sorry. You've said some really weird things, Mr. HAntonucci.
And so he ended up splitting the difference between the seven that my family asked for and the 21 that the prosecution and the victims were asking for and gave me a 14 year prison sentence in the Arizona Department of Corrections. so that's a wake up call, right? That's a wake up call when you are 19 years old. Or I guess I would have been 20 by the time I was sentenced, but 20 years old and boom.
Jon Antonucci - 19:22.766
14 year prison sentence. That just seems like your whole life. That seems like just everything. And there were some decisions that needed to be made. And those decisions really revolved around what was I going to do? Was I going to keep being the old Jon? Or was I going to recognize that that wasn't working? And that there were things that needed to be addressed. And I'm very thankful that by the grace of God, I took the...
second option and I said, I'm gonna, what's going on? Where did I get off track and I recognized some serious character issues, some integrity issues and begin to look at my life, not through the lens that look at all the stuff Jon can do and Jon has done and Jon is doing, but rather look what happens when Jon does it his way. Maybe there's a better way and begin to humble myself and be willing to learn and be willing to grow and.
adopted a growth mindset and just began to recognize some things about myself that maybe I hadn't recognized in the past that were really influential to helping me grow. And that started to characterize the time of incarceration. I started to take every class I could, participate in every program I could find, took a ton of correspondence Bible studies. By the time I had left,
on a personal level, I had read, I think we counted over 900 nonfiction books that I had read, I was able to earn a couple of associates, a bachelor's and a master's degree. And the legacy that I left was that as I fixed in here, that gave me the opportunity to begin to invest out there. And I was able to build something known as inmate peer programming, which was a peer based rehabilitation program that in
provided tools and resources for people that wanted to leave a life of crime and return to their communities as contributing citizens. there's still, Department of Corrections is still using some of the materials that I created over the time that I was there and had a cool opportunity to impact well over 10,000 lives while I was incarcerated through some of those programs and Bible studies and other things that we did while I was there.
Gary Montalvo - 21:43.584
Wow. this program got built while you were in prison.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly correct. So I worked with a ton of administrators and just depending on which unit I was on, depended on what we were able to get done. But yes, working with the administration with programs, departments, we built basically a peer to peer program. So it was by inmates, foreign mates, two inmates. And we would we were offering everything from money management and parenting and small business and sobriety classes and
seven habits of highly effective people. just, I mean, I think we had at one time 27 different programs that we had built to try to give people different resources for different areas of their lives.
Wow. Okay. So I want to ask you about
How did you go from being this, because in my experience, the type of transformation that you went through is hard to do by yourself because you, I think because you don't have enough of a mirror, you know, or you don't have enough, you often need someone to call you on your stuff, right? And you need something to mirror back to you. And without that, I mean, I guess,
Gary Montalvo - 23:07.374
prison sentence would be a pretty effective way of doing that.
That's what I was gonna say a 14-year sentence creates a powerful mirror. Let me tell you
Well, but here's the thing. would, not that I have a lot of experience in this, but I think a lot of people would go through your experience and still be a victim. Like, it's not fair. I just opened the window. I didn't do this. All I did was break a window, you know, and so on and so forth. Especially when you were very well-practiced at that.
Right? you, when you, I couldn't help when you were sort of describing how you operated in that time. I could, you know, I'm like, we all know people like that. You know, we all know people like that. Maybe not to the extent of, you know, committing a crime in that way, but even in that way, like.
You know, we all know people that, maybe you are somebody who struggles with the idea of taking full responsibility with the idea of, you know, always scapegoating, always looking for the reason, holding onto the, you know, like that lie until you absolutely cannot hold onto it anymore. I think those are pretty difficult patterns to break.
Gary Montalvo - 24:46.38
you know, and I because they're entrenched in in your survival and they become part of your identity and you really hold on to it so that you were able to break the patterns. It's remarkable and and and that you were in a in a situation like prison and did that is also I think pretty remarkable. So, you know, you were going to respond to that.
It sounded like. Yeah, you bring up, I mean, you brought up like 12 really, really good points. And the first one I'll just say is it's so much easier to take the victim perspective. I jokingly say somewhat often, I'll point and I'll say, you know, oh, I'm blaming Gary. It's not Gary's fault, but it's just easier to blame him than take any personal responsibility. And it's a joke because that's what we do as human beings. And it's specifically what I did. It was never.
my fault. It was always somebody else. And if there was no one else to point at, then I was there to convince you that what you thought was my fault wasn't actually a fault. I actually had a master plan or whatever. What I think was probably, there was a couple of catalysts. The biggest catalyst, the 14 year prison sentence was the context, but what really I think shattered those, what I'm gonna refer to as synaptic connections, right? You got all those synapses in the brain that just become
and that's just the way the brain works. When I was on the five o'clock news for four nights in a row, in a, you know, not a positive light, and when various media outlets had some very, very unsavory things to say about me, what it did is it took my perceived sense of self and the bubble that I thought surrounded it and it exploded it.
It shrapneled it. And I was able to very, I guess just very realistically recognize that I no longer had anything to lose. So as an example, when I was in high school, I cheated on pretty much every test all the way through high school. And that was because I couldn't bear the idea of getting less than an A, right? Anything less than an A was just inconceivable. My ego couldn't take that. But when you have that and then all of a sudden you are not,
Jon Antonucci - 27:12.492
the hero, you are the villain. The ego gets shattered in that. And so it resulted in this kind of realization that I got nothing to lose. I might as well actually be real. I might as well actually be authentic because whoever's for me at this point, I mean, can't get any worse. Whatever I tell them at this point, it's not gonna get any worse than the five o'clock news. And then if you take that setting and you...
Combine that with a 14 year prison sentence and then you combine that with little seeds. Little seeds like the seven habits of highly effective people. Stephen Covey talks about being proactive, meaning taking responsibility for your choices and their consequences. How to win friends and influence people and talks about how the ripple effect happens when we're engaged. There's lots of quotes and different things that I read. When you read 900 non-fiction books, those are gonna impact
part ideas into you and you end up with a choice. You end up with a choice to go either right or left, if you will. And thankfully, and it's probably just God's grace that I can really point at, but thankfully I did not choose the victim route and I chose the growth route and I wouldn't be sitting here talking with you today, I don't believe, if I hadn't made that decision. I think that that decision was probably the first truly good decision that I made.
in my life because everything else had all been a facade. Everything else had all been a game, a manipulation, a tactic. That was the first authentically, I'm going to do the right thing even if it costs me decision. And once you make a decision and then you make another and another, it becomes easier and easier over time. And you get to a point where I have a story I tell somewhat frequently where
I was on a unit, I was doing all those good things that I was talking to you about a minute ago, the programming and all that, and there was a specific staff member that did not trust me. And so much to the extent that they decided to file a pretty lengthy report detailing, I don't even know how many allegations about things that they thought I was doing wrong. And so I got put under investigation and the whole nine yards and turned out clean. There was no negative impact except for the
Jon Antonucci - 29:33.454
three to four weeks that I'm under this investigation and my phone calls are turned off and my visits are canceled and all my mail is being read word by word and all the inconveniences that come with that. And my right-hand guy had a team of like eight or so working for me in the prison on these programs. My right-hand guy came to me and he said, Jon, dude, if this can happen to you, like none of us, none of us are safe. You're the squeakiest person here. Like, you don't do anything wrong.
And I sat him down and I said, here's the deal. If you're in leadership, if you're doing these programs, if you're working with this because you were hoping that it would make things easier on you, you're in the wrong profession. You're doing the, you know, it's good stuff you're doing, but you're doing it for the wrong reason. I said, sometimes as a leader and as somebody that's trying to do the right thing, all you've got at the end of the day is the ability to put your head on the pillow.
and know you gave it your best try. And you may not have anybody that recognizes it. In fact, you may have people that come against you directly, but you know in your spirit that your conscience is clean. And I think that that getting from where I was, it would have been probably 10 years before that to getting to where I was in that moment. That was a long journey and it was a day by day journey of little growth here, a little growth there. And...
Thankfully, Jon Antonucci today is not the same Jon Antonucci of the mid 2000s.
When did you start to identify yourself as a leader?
Jon Antonucci - 31:15.758
That's a great question. Because the way you asked it is different than I think I've been asked before. There was an epiphany moment about two and a half or three years ago, and it wasn't an epiphany that says, I'm a leader. It was an epiphany of how long I had been in leadership roles. So I would give you two different answers and whichever one you feel like is most authentic, feel free to run with. The first answer will be,
During my incarceration, there was a period. So in Arizona, you can apply for something known as clemency. And clemency basically just says, look, I'm sorry, I'm doing the best I can. Will you give me some mercy on my sentence? And the first time I applied for clemency, I had asked for my sentence to be reduced to seven years. And the idea behind that was that was the lowest I could get. So I signed a plea bargain and I said I would serve seven. So I'll serve my seven, but you know, look at all the good things I'm doing.
and they didn't even give me a second hearing. They read the packet and said, no, get out of our room. The second time I was getting ready to ask for 10 and a half, or no, was getting ready to ask for.
What was I getting ready to ask? That's right. I was getting ready to ask for seven again. And the reason for that, same reasons, but of the other two, one of them got four and a half and one of them got 10 and then he got clemency and got it reduced to seven. And so I was going back asking for seven for a second time saying, hey, not only have I done all these good things, but you gave my co-defendant seven. So we did this, we were part of the same situation. And it was about, I don't know, maybe a month. before I was going to submit the packet that I had this epiphany. And I realized...
Jon Antonucci - 33:04.926
No, wasn't my idea. No, contrary to what I'd been accused of, I didn't convince anybody to join.
But I've had a natural born leadership presence since I was very young. And just by my being there, I led that group. If I had chosen to not go, they probably would have followed suit. And that epiphany in my mind transformed my entire application. I changed the application and I said, give me 10 and a half, that's the presumptive, it's more than anybody else did, but I recognize I deserve to spend more time here because even though my actions were the same, my responsibility was greater because of my leadership tendencies. So that would be a time where I recognized myself as kind of having inherent leadership qualities and recognizing the responsibility that comes with that. The next time would have been two or three years ago when I began formulating the idea of the company that I now
have found it and that was when I realized, my goodness, I've been in leadership positions for like 20 years, this is crazy, I think I actually have something of value to add to the world and people that want to lead.
You set up my next question so perfectly because what I was going to say is that it's like you have always displayed these leadership qualities, but they were not focused or about something. And so you were using your leadership in reckless ways.
Gary Montalvo - 34:47.63
Like it lacked the vision, it lacked the purpose.
It was myopic. It was myopic. It was all about me. And so yes, I was leading, but it wasn't to help others. It was to get everyone looking at me.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. it's interesting because I'm a leadership coach as well. So a lot of the work that I end up doing with people is just getting them to understand that they already are leaders, right? That we are like, people have this thing where they don't see themselves as leaders because they don't have
the accreditation, enough money in the bank, the title, the permission, the something out there that tells me that I can go out in the world and be a leader, right? And so I think the impact of that is that it creates a blind spot to the impact that you have.
Yeah.
Jon Antonucci - 36:07.278
Right? And to your point, you're a perfect example of that. You're sort of blind to the impact that you have when you are playing with your friends in this way and look at what can happen.
So it just really highlights the importance of, and I mean, there's a whole point of this ownership game podcast, right? The ownership game is all about taking personal responsibility and highlighting the value of personal responsibility. And I think that this is 100 % one of those moments, right?
Yeah, eventually I came to realize, I actually did a session on this. There's a buddy of mine who also did time that runs a podcast called Outlaws to Advocates. And we talked about this, until you can take ownership for your own life choices, you can't advocate for anybody else, because you can't even advocate for yourself because you're not being honest with yourself. And so.
Until you can really take that ownership. I I love that being the theme of this podcast. I really think that is what stands in the way of pretty much every human being's greatness, is that we won't take the ownership for our own choices. And we don't recognize that as long as we are taking that victim's stance, we've given away all of our power. And I probably take this to an extreme. I tend to be that person that I won't say, you know, she makes me mad.
or traffic's pissing me off or whatever. Why? Traffic doesn't have power to. I might be deciding to be upset about traffic, but I need to take ownership of my decision to feel a certain kind of way and not blame traffic, because traffic does not have power over me unless I give it to it. And I think there's an incredible amount of value in that line of reasoning. And unfortunately, you made the statement that it's, we all know people, it's almost celebrated.
Jon Antonucci - 38:10.414
The victim mindset is almost celebrated in the current culture. And I say to people quite often, you can be victimized without being a victim. I'm not saying that nobody has ever done anything to harm you or me, but that doesn't mean I have to be a victim about it. And it doesn't mean that you do either. In fact, you give away a lot when you say, or when we do that.
Say more about the celebrated part.
Yeah, so I think that there's a tendency, whether it's through TikTok or whether it's through anything else, that if you can claim that someone has done you an injustice, it gives you greater power. think that's the narrative. I'm not here to talk bad about shows, but what I've noticed that if you watch any of the, or at least most of the competition shows, America's Got Talent, The Voice, whatever.
The ones that always get to the end are always the ones who have some sob story to tell. And some sort of, well, this person did this to me and I had this bad thing happen in my hand of cards. And there's just like this weird cultural expectation that says whoever can tell the greatest sob story wins. And I don't buy it personally. I think that it's a superficial level of success because
what we've traded is our power, our autonomy, in exchange for whatever approval somebody else is gonna give us because of our story, because of the narrative. And so it's one thing to say, hey, look what I've been through and look at the ownership I've taken. It's another thing to say, woe is me and you need to feel bad for me because of what I've experienced.
Gary Montalvo - 39:57.23
Yeah, you get what people don't sort of own up to is that you get a prize from doing that, right? You get, you get, but I always talk about it. It's a crackerjack prize, you know, it's like this little plastic trinket that's worth absolutely nothing. But in that moment, you get sympathy, you get control, you get, you know, to avoid, you get to, you know,
influence. There's a bunch of stuff that you get in that moment, but long term, yeah, you sell out your power for it, right? The price is much bigger than the Cracker Jack treat you get in that moment.
Yeah. I love that. I might steal the cracker jack prize. like that. I never, I never, I'll give you credit, but no, I like that. That's exactly what it is. It's, it's, it's a superficial prize that breaks, but it looks shiny and good and you rip open the box to find it.
you get the double-inged head of like, I got something.
Yeah, that's that's beautiful Gary. That's absolutely beautiful
Gary Montalvo - 41:02.158
So, okay, so you served your 10 and a half years, is what you served?
I served 12 in the department. So they rejected me even though I asked for 10. They still did not give it to me. I served all 14 years. 12 was behind bars and then another two out on community supervision or parole, whatever you want to call it. yeah, so I served the entire 14 year sentence and that ended, when did that end? That ended May 10th of 2021. So we're coming up on four years.
So this is not even that long ago for you. Okay, great, because this is what I wanted to talk to you about. You essentially spent your adult life behind bars. You're doing all this work and learning skills and doing something with what you're learning. Talk to me about coming out.
and trying to plug yourself back into society. I mean, I guess you had the two years to help a little bit and give you a little bit of a cushion, but I wanna talk a little bit about what that was like for you, what challenges you were coming up against and yeah, and what did you decide to do with your life?
Yeah, you know, you, I'll say this, the two years, it's not what it should be. There's a lot of things I would love to change about the criminal justice system to really give people the best opportunities to succeed. Really what it is is I was behind bars every day for 12 years and then one day I wasn't. And that was really the experience. But here's what's interesting. So I had a friend of mine in London reach out to me, probably six to nine months after I got out.
Jon Antonucci - 42:56.012
She was asking about my transition and her partner was getting ready to get out of prison. And apparently he had told her that it was really tough because when you've made that your life for so long, it's really hard to transition into the free world. And as soon as I heard her say that, I said, he's absolutely right. And she goes, well, then how did you do it? I said, I never made that my life. I never made incarceration my life. And this was something that was a tremendously difficult thing.
And I didn't understand this till I got out. So I spent 12 years trying to do the right thing, coming up against roadblocks and not genuinely not understanding whether or not I was the problem. You have an individual, as you said, my entire adult life from 19 to 31, I was behind bars, did not see fresh air, if you will. And you're in this situation and you're trying to do good things.
You're building programs and you're trying to invest and you're working closely and you're just giving your all to make it a better place. And I said, my job is to do my best to make this a better place when I leave than when I found it. Whether I succeed or not, I can't control, but I can give it my best effort. But there were consistent and repetitive patterns during my time of incarceration that left me with questions. And one of those patterns was a reoccurring theme that would often be spoken to me.
and it would sound something like, Jon, I know you think you're doing good things, but you need to remember what color you're wearing. Or you need to remember where you are. Or you need to remember you're an inmate. Or you need to remember, you know, just some sort of reminder that it doesn't matter what you do. And in some cases, you shouldn't be doing what you do because you're wearing orange.
And at certain point, I talked about getting put under investigation, that was one of those points where I got told basically, you I don't trust you, you're doing too much. And at this point I had my own office, I had a computer, I had a lot of things inmates don't normally have. And it was like, you need to remember who you are. You can't just walk around here and go to your office. And I was like, but I literally have permission. I've got like a literal memo from the deputy warden telling me that's exactly what I can do, but you're telling me that I'm being too much.
Jon Antonucci - 45:07.094
And so you start to wonder, at least I did, because I'm trying to work on my ego, I'm trying to make sure that I'm being humble and serving from a pure place, trying to make sure it's not about some office, but rather about an opportunity to serve this community. So you start to wonder, man, am I the issue? All these good things, is this just another facade? Is this just another 500 students that I was teaching martial arts to? And you start to wonder. And I genuinely didn't know until about three days after I got out.
Two days after I got out, I got a text message from my brother. And my brother is also my best friend. He was an incredible support to me while I was in. he was the one that picked me up the day that I got released. Second day was out, he sent me a text message and he told me that it was really interesting watching me as I engaged with different family members and things on that day of my release. And then he said something, the last sentence of his text said, in some ways it was like you never left.
That was a deeply, deeply meaningful text to me because for 12 years I'd been being told by people, especially people in Orange in prison, that I didn't look like I belonged there, which I took as a great compliment having been there for over a decade and still not looking the part. Especially, I stayed in general custody the whole time. was, you know, main line, whatever you want to call it. And so it was very meaningful to be able to have that impact. It wasn't until day three I'm reflecting on the text message and I have this just
light bulb moment that I've only ever had one time since then. And I realized that during all those occasions where people would tell me I didn't know my place, it was not that I didn't know my place, is that my place wasn't there.
Hmm.
Jon Antonucci - 46:55.0
I had to serve in that place, I had consequences, I brought that on myself. But my life was bigger than that choice. And that was a powerful recognition. So I got out, I had a plan, I had done a lot during my incarceration to try to make sure that my mind was still ready to engage in the real world. And all of those efforts paid off really, really well. I didn't really struggle with most of the things. I had people telling me.
You know, it's going to be crazy. You're going go into the grocery store and there's going to be this whole wall of cereal and you got to pick one. It wasn't that difficult for me because I'd been making choices and working on things. used to, my mother, she, she for 12 years, every week I wrote her every week she wrote me. And one of things she would do is she would send me kind of like a journal of her week. She asked me early in my incarceration, do you really want to know all this stuff? And I said, please, I don't want to forget that in Arizona, part of life is going to the water store to fill up the jugs.
I don't wanna forget that you go to the library to pick up books. I don't wanna forget that these things are a part of your day-to-day life because I need to remember those things will be a part of my day-to-day life someday too. And my brother who's an IT person, he kept me abreast of different technological things and different things that computers and phones were capable of. And I was able to remain mentally centered in what was important. And so that allowed me to transition.
almost ridiculously easy. I kept waiting for the shoe to drop. I kept waiting for it to go to a PTSD attack or something like that. And we're almost four years in and it hasn't happened yet. So I'm thinking we're probably in good territory. But what happened was I had the opportunity to serve an organization. All of that training development put me in a position where somebody asked me to come in and develop some training for them.
two weeks into my 1099 contractor position, they asked what it was gonna take to keep me. And two months after I got, or three months after I got out, two months after I started working for them, they offered me the role of training manager. And so I built that company's training department from the ground up and had the opportunity to serve them for two years as their training manager before they promoted me to director of revenue. And then I took responsibility basically for the other half of the business, because the training was on operations and then.
Jon Antonucci - 49:15.384
the director of revenue was in charge of basically everything sales and finance based. And it was during that time that I recognized we had a challenge within our organization and that was that we were doing great at training people to do their jobs and horribly when we promoted them to their first level of leadership. And I went out to find a solution for it and realized one didn't exist and kind of through a series of steps, that's where the company that I've now founded came from.
Wow. It's pretty remarkable that after you're 19, 20, incarcerated for 12 years, 14, but you were working, so we'll say 12, behind bars. And then within two years of being back in the workforce, you end up being director of revenue. And director of revenue is not where you put somebody who's been in jail.
You
Jon Antonucci - 50:14.944
No, you know, you're absolutely right. And that's something I'm becoming a little bit passionate about because I think we have this idea that yeah, people that get out need a second chance there. And we put them in the blue collar, we put them in the workaday, we don't say, hey, maybe they have talents, the engineers and architects and things where they can add value. We don't really think of that. And so you're right. It kind of breaks the mold a little bit.
Yeah, for sure, for sure. Okay, so now you're doing, you founded this company, tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing there and what the mission is.
Yeah, you mentioned you're a leadership coach and I would say I'm more of a leadership trainer. And the difference that I'm making there is that the goal, the mission, the vision that we have, the company is called SML Consultive. SML stands for Servant-Minded Leadership. And our goal is to help people transition from operational excellence to relational excellence. We like to say that we serve the forgotten leaders. And what we mean by that is that often when people are hired,
They're hired to do whatever job it is they're hired to do. About 10 to 15 % of them do really, really well. And what do you do for people that are doing really well? You promote them. And what happens most often is that once they get promoted, they're given almost no tools and resources to effectively lead their team. And so we provide various trainings that are designed to provide real world resources for these frontline leaders, these forgotten leaders.
to be able to effectively engage with their team. And we think that that helps with the culture of an organization. We think that that helps with the productivity of an organization. If we can simply provide what are really soft skill tools and soft skill trainings for these frontline leaders, helping them to, they already know their job, they know the operation, but they don't necessarily know the relations of how to deal with people and how to engage with different personalities and how to hold an effective meeting.
Jon Antonucci - 52:13.75
and how their attitude is gonna impact the attitude of the rest of their team and those types of things. And so we offer workshops, we offer certification programs, and then we do a small amount of coaching, but unfortunately it's very rare that an organization wants to coach their frontline leaders because they view them as transitory. And then shockingly they act transitory. But that's a whole nother conversation for a different time probably.
But yeah, that's the idea in a nutshell, and we're excited to be able to partner with organizations that want to, or least recognize that there's something missing like we did at the organization I was with as the training manager and subsequently as director of rev.
Yeah, you're speaking to my heart, Jon. You're speaking my language right now. Yes. I think I want to have you back just to geek out and talk about that. that. It's definitely a problem I see very often as well. It's like they're not performing well. Did you give them any support? Did you give them any training? You just threw them in the deep water.
That's right. And nobody recognizes that when you promote someone, I had one CEO say, well, all I want them to do is make copies of themselves. Well, first of all, that's not possible. So let's just scrap that idea. But second of all, you just changed their whole career. They were sales, sales, sales, or they were production, production, production, or they were fill in the blank. When you move them to leadership, they are no longer that, they are now people managers. That is a career change. And if you gave them no skills, like you just said,
you're setting them up to fail and then blaming them for the fact that you didn't give them any training. And it's, I'm passionate. Just as you are.
Gary Montalvo - 53:51.63
I get it, get it. Not to mention the interpersonal dynamics of all of a sudden your peers are now the people that you have to, it gets complicated. All right. Well, Jon, I think you have a great story and I know you've done some dumb, you've done some dumb. You know, if we're gonna.
Absolutely.
Gary Montalvo - 54:19.586
drop an F-bomb, a little word there. But you, but I, you know, I think the way that you have taken responsibility, taken ownership and had your life be about service and making an impact, it's just remarkable. And I really applaud you for it because what you've been able to turn around from the tragedy is just, you know, I think your friend,
would be proud of you and what you've been doing. So I appreciate you coming to the show and telling your story. Thank you.
Thank you, Gary. It's been a pleasure to be here.
Jon's mistake is so utterly stupid that it can be a little difficult to forgive him. mean, a life was lost after all. But as I reflect on our conversation with him, I can't help but be impressed by the depth of his accountability. It's one thing to admit that you've made a mistake. It's another to fully own it, sit with the consequences, and use them as the foundation for your life's work.
Jon turned one of the darkest periods of his life into purpose, into service, into leadership. His journey reminds us that you don't need to have all the answers or perfect past to be a leader. But by taking responsibility for the choices you've made, learning from them, and using those lessons, you can be of great service to others. And that's leadership. That's ownership.
Gary Montalvo - 55:57.998
So my question, my invitation to you is where in your life can you step into being of service? Maybe it's at work, maybe it's in a relationship that you're in, maybe it's in your community. Think about where you can shift the focus away from yourself and towards the needs of others. How might servicing, supporting, or uplifting someone else not only add value to their life, but also create deeper meaning and connection in your own. Remember, servant leadership isn't about grand gestures, it's about small, intentional actions that show others that you care and that you are invested in their success. So what's one step that you can take today to lead with service and purpose? Well, that's our show for this week. If this episode spoke to you,
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button so that you can stay up to date when new episodes drop every Tuesday. And of course, share the episode with someone who you think really needs to get that reminder that transformation is possible no matter where you start. Until next time, keep owning your story, keep leading with service, and keep playing the ownership game.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Ownership Game with your host, Gary Montalvo. Make sure to like and comment on your favorite podcast platform, as well as subscribe so that you never miss an episode.