Richard Oostra was three months into selling insurance and sitting in his truck outside a Chamber of Commerce networking event at a golf course in Grande Prairie. He was looking at his own business card.
"Dude, what am I doing here?" he remembers thinking. "What am I gonna say to people?"
He made himself go in. He stayed an hour and met five people. One became a client and one became his business coach. Another started sending him referrals, another became a close friend, and the last one invited him into a business networking group.
That one client introduced him to his employees and his wife, who ran a business together, and Richard ended up writing policies for the whole company. He says it broke the company's sales volume record for a seven-day period, at a company that had been around for about 90 years. His managers wanted to make him a manager. He'd been there three months.
Richard runs High Performance Brotherhood. He coaches men, and he hosts retreats in Panama for the ones who want to go further. He spent years building inside other people's companies, first in insurance and then in network marketing, before he walked away to build his own. Most of our conversation ended up circling one word he's been using since this spring: guilt.
A book the company handed him
Insurance is where Richard first met personal development. The company prescribed reading, including a book by its founder, W. Clement Stone. Stone built his insurance company from $100 and co-wrote Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude with Napoleon Hill, published in 1960. He was so attached to the idea of PMA that it became the ticker symbol of his holding company (Napoleon Hill Foundation).
Richard went all in on it. He'd come from construction, where, in his words, "everybody's extremely negative, nobody likes their work, nobody wants to be there." Now he was in a shirt and tie, sitting across from people and showing them how he could help. The day we recorded, a guy at his gym told him he was "radiating with positive energy." Richard told him that's the goal.
His manager gave him a strengths assessment and told him to focus on what he was good at instead of fixing what he wasn't. For Richard, that was meeting people. Which is how he ended up in that truck.
Likable and memorable
I asked Richard what a young guy should do before his next networking event. His first answer was "look good, smell good." Then get your body into what he calls a peak state. Go to the gym that morning, go for a walk, do some push-ups. Get the blood moving.
After that, it's the handshake. "People will come up and I'll meet them and they'll shake my hand and they'll kind of look away or they'll look down," he said. Look people in the eye. Ask what they do and what they need, and whether there's anything you could do for them.
His test is whether people remember you and walk away feeling good. "If you can make people feel good when you're around them, I think that's probably the biggest thing for networking."
He's also honest that the confidence comes from repetition. You get it by walking in, again and again.
From survival to creation
Most of the men Richard works with are between 25 and 65, and he says a lot of them feel stuck and behind. He calls that survival mode. The whole point of his work is moving men from survival to creation.
When he tried to name what keeps men in survival mode, the word that kept surfacing for him was guilt. Guilt about yesterday, about last night, about last summer. And guilt about what you haven't done yet, like the goal you told your family about or the number you promised your team. As men get older, he thinks hustle culture fades and comparison takes its place.
He's lived it. "I used to look at myself in the mirror and just be like, dude, like what a letdown. What a waste of potential. That's literally how I used to look at myself."
That one hit close for me. There was a stretch when work was so stressful, and I was supposed to be the guy leading the charge on everything. Meanwhile I was in the bathroom every week with the worst migraines of my life, throwing up. My mental health was slipping and my body was following it. I told Richard that having tools like his packaged up would have made a huge difference for me back then.
The formula
Richard's answer is something he calls the self-image formula. He worked it out in 2022 on a huge flip chart in his apartment, breaking it down until he got it right.
It starts with forgiveness. You let go of the past, your own mistakes, and the resentment you're carrying toward yourself and other people. He has the word tattooed on his hand.
Forgiveness opens the door to self-love, which he's careful to separate from selfishness. "Selfish is like, what can I get? Self-love is you love yourself so that you can actually give." For the dad running a business who says he doesn't have time to eat or sleep, self-love looks like going to bed, because the people around him need him rested tomorrow and ten years from now.
Then comes self-work. "If you take a pen and paper and you write down what's the work that you know you need to be doing or you know you should be doing this week, you already know." For Richard it was fitness. He'd taken a personal training course in his mid-twenties and had a textbook full of knowledge. He still lived for years in what he calls, borrowing from John Maxwell, the gap between knowing and doing.
From there the formula moves through self-worth and self-esteem to self-confidence, and finally to self-image. He describes it as a waterfall, each stage feeding the next. I won't walk through all of it here. Hearing him explain how the pieces connect, with a friend who moved from Edmonton to Italy as his example, is one of the best parts of the episode.
His warning is about where most men stall. "If you're not doing those first two, you'll never get to the end."
Start with the body and the first hour
When I asked for practical tools, Richard started with the body. Sleep, food, water and movement are all fully in your control, and he says the food you put in your mouth affects your mental state.
Then the first hour of the day. His phone stays on airplane mode. He drinks water with some mineral salt, makes a coffee, and opens his journal to write down what he's grateful for and what he can thank God for. Then he looks at his calendar. Only after that does the phone come on, and he lets it sit there buzzing for 30 seconds with everything that came in overnight. "You're not in reaction," he said.
He told me you can build a new habit in about 67 days, and he works with his clients in 90-day blocks to really cement it. The research lands close to that. In a 2010 study in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Lally and colleagues tracked volunteers building a daily eating, drinking or exercise habit. The median time for the behaviour to become automatic was 66 days, and the range ran from 18 to 254 days (The Behavioral Scientist). His 90-day blocks give a habit room to get well past that midpoint.
Done with you
I asked Richard about the shortcut. If I could take a shot or a pill and lose the weight, would I end up with the same self-worth as the guy who did the work? "Definitely not," he said.
He sees three camps. The done-for-you camp wants the shot, the injection or the surgery. The do-it-yourself camp wants to figure it all out alone from enough podcasts and books. He was hiking a few months ago with a guy who told him, "I'm a lone wolf." Richard told him that was cool, and that he wasn't there to convince him of anything. His concern with that camp is that willpower only lasts so long.
He was in it for years. He wanted people to see the finish line and never the awkward start. "I don't want to look dumb in the process," he said.
The middle camp is what he calls done with you. Richard follows the same routine he asks his clients to follow. The morning we recorded, a couple dozen men in his group had just finished a 36-hour fast together. They do one once a month, and it isn't mandatory. The group chat was full of what guys had learned and what they were breaking the fast with. "I'm doing this with you, you're doing this with me," he said. "Now I feel stronger than I would ever by myself."
Growth and contribution
I ask every guest what happiness looks like to them. Richard had two words: growth and contribution.
Growth means doing hard things and getting 1% better every day at one thing. He has the word disciple tattooed on his arm in Hebrew, and to him it means lifelong learner. His first book recommendation fits that. It's Earl Nightingale's The Strangest Secret, which he guesses he's listened to a thousand times, including the morning we recorded. Nightingale recorded it in 1956, and it became the first spoken-word recording to sell more than a million copies and earn a gold record (Wikipedia).
Contribution is the multiplier. When a guy tells Richard he woke up feeling low, Richard tells him to send love to three people. Encourage someone. Get the focus off yourself for a minute.
There's research behind that. In a 2008 study published in Science, psychologists Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton gave 46 people either $5 or $20 to spend by the end of the day. The ones told to spend it on someone else felt happier that evening. The ones who spent it on themselves didn't, no matter which amount they got. And when 109 other people were asked to predict the outcome, 63% guessed that spending on yourself would make you happier (National Geographic).
Earlier in our conversation, Richard quoted a verse about vision: "without vision, the people perish." It's Proverbs 29:18, and the King James Version finishes it like this: "Where there is no vision, the people perish: but he that keepeth the law, happy is he" (Bible Gateway). A verse about vision that ends on happiness.
Try this before the weekend
Richard's pen-and-paper exercise is one worth borrowing. Take five minutes tonight and write down the work you already know you should be doing this week. Don't add anything new. Write down what you've been putting off.
Then pick one person and send them something encouraging before you go to bed.
If you want a structure for that list, the Six Fs in my free guide will give you one: finances, family, friends, faith, fitness and freedom. Richard would probably tell you to start with fitness.
What's the one piece of work you already know you need to do this week?
Listen to the full episode of The Currency of Happiness wherever you get your podcasts. If this was useful, send it to someone who could use it.
