Transcript of Journey of Resilience: J.R. Martinez on Embracing Change and Inspiring Millions

Welcome to Mic Unplug, where we ignite potential and fuel purpose. Get ready for raw insights, bold moves, and game-changing conversations. Buckle up. Here's Mic.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Mic Unplug, and we've got a great one for you today, from a soldier's battlefield to the dance floor spotlight. He's shown the world the true meaning of resilience and reinvention. As a motivational speaker, best-selling author, and dancing with the stars champion, he inspires millions with this story of overcoming adversity and embracing life with purpose. Get ready for an empowering conversation with the resilient, the inspiring, the Unstoppable. My man, Mr. J. L. Martinez. J. L, how are you doing today, brother?

Man, that introduction was money, man. I appreciate you so much. I feel like everybody should have somebody that just reads their quick bio or LinkedIn profile while, whatever, when they wake up in the morning. Everybody should have the opportunity to hear that because I think in the world we live in, man, it's just so fast-paced, and there's so many things that are happening and changing constantly from our profession to our families, to our feelings, to just everything that we don't have an opportunity. We really don't give ourselves time to sit back and reflect and appreciate the journey. When you were saying what you were saying, I was just had a moment of just like a soldier reflecting and just thinking I guess he's talking about me. That's me. I've done those things. That's fine.

Yeah. No guesswork, man. That really is you. Like I said, I'm honored to have you on. We were talking a little bit offline, man. I get inspired by people like you. More importantly, I get inspired by you, by J. R. Martinez, man, because your story is more than storybook. It's more than movie theater-esque. It's real. To know that you are the person that lives that journey is freaking impressive, bro. Freaking impressive. On Mic Unplo, we talk about your because, that reason that's deeper than your why, that true purpose that you have that makes you the person that you are. If I were to say, J. R. Martinez, today, what's your because, brother? What's your purpose? What's that reason that motivates you every day to inspire the millions that you do?

It all boils down to service. It really does. My military career was cut short due to my injury, but in the short amount of time that I was in the United States Army, I was introduced to that concept of service and really started to understand what that really meant. Then after I was injured, I was still obviously around the military community and around a lot of my friends that I met who were equally wounded and had served. The more that I learned about it and listened to other people's journeys regarding service, it just really was something that resonated with me and I fell in love with. I think that was why for me personally and so many of my friends that have equally been injured in the military and had to medically discharge prior to the time that they wanted to, I think that's why we struggle when we get into what we call civilian life because we feel like that ability to serve, to give back, to be part of something, I think we believe it's taken away, and then we're not going to be able to ultimately fulfill those things. I think for me, I think that's the same thing that I navigated for a long time was, what's my purpose?

What am I doing? Why was my life spared at 19 years old despite this horrific injury that took place. During a lot of, at the time, journaling, a lot of quiet time, a lot of real deep conversations with myself and a couple of people, not as many people, but couple. It really got to the root of, you know what? I can use my experience and what I've learned to serve other people, to help other people. The way I used to say this early on was if I can pass on to an individual the things that I've learned, and I've learned these things by having to go through something tragic. But if I could pass these things on to people and prevent them from having to go through something tragic, but they can essentially learn these things and implement it into their life, isn't that the goal? Isn't that the goal to try to help one another? For me, that's just my motivation, man. It's just to try to serve people as much as possible, try to learn as much as I possibly can. They say knowledge is power, and I do believe in that. However, I believe the knowledge applied is power.

You can have a bunch of knowledge, and that's fantastic, but if you don't apply, what's the point to have in all the knowledge? Then it's just cocktail talk. Then you're just a person at a cocktail hour that can pretty much hold a conversation about anything with anybody. But at the end of the day, do you really understand? Are you really either living that? Are you rooted in that? Have you applied it? For me, it's just really been about collecting data, knowledge, and then trying to pass that data and knowledge onto other people. What has worked for me, what has not worked for me? I never intended, man, I never intended to be an inspiration. That was never the goal. I was a young 19-year-old. I didn't have the mentality of... I think it was... I could be wrong, but I think it was maybe Charles Barkley. He was like, I'm not here to be a role model. That's not my goal to be a role model. I'm a basketball player, right? I don't think my goal was ever to be an inspiration, was to be this figure. But what I started to see is that people There was something that I was doing, something that I was saying that became the lifeline for people.

When I realized that pattern, it was like, okay, I don't have to force this inspiration. I don't have to force this motivation. I could just keep me and me. If I just keep operating from that place, clearly people rock with that. That's essentially been what I've always tried to do. Now, there's been things that have swayed me away, but for the most part, I try to stay solid in that.

That's amazing, my man. That's amazing. And so a couple of things I want to unpack there. You talked about your military career ending and obviously the commitment that you made to the United States Army, the commitment that you made to us, civilians, to keep us protected. One, I want to thank you for your service. I appreciate that. Two, I want to go back to your decision to join the military. What was the driving force for JR to say, I want to go protect my country?

And I appreciate that. And just If I can pivot real quick for a second, I want your listeners to... I want to challenge them. I want to challenge them that anytime we come in contact with military personnel, whether they're active or retired, we have a tendency to simply say, Thank you for your service, and we end the conversation there. What I would love to challenge people, and I have been challenging people, is to think differently. Instead of simply saying, Thank you for your service, why don't we approach those individuals once we've that they've served in the military or in any capacity of serving, whether it's a first responder, anything, and just re-approach them and say, Tell me about your service. Because I think when you approach it that way, then when you say, Thank you for your service, it ends a period. There's no follow-up conversation or dialog. If there's a, Tell me about your service, now you give the microphone to somebody else and gives them the opportunity to vocalize as much as they feel comfortable. They may not be a lot. It may be a lot more than you expect. But I think the reason why I think that's so important is because then it creates this intersectionality and this connection that you often don't see, and we talk about, is missed too often when it comes to military, to civilian personnel.

Anyways, that's just that quick bit for just everybody out there. But I had this big dream, this big goal. I wanted to go to college and play football, and it wasn't panning out the way that I wanted. I was just going through the motions after I graduated from high school. The military, my senior year of high school, just was in that spear, if you will. You would see the recruiters at the school a couple of times. You obviously passed them all the time. You went to the mall. Then one of my football coaches was in the military at one point in his life. I just heard about it. It wasn't this foreign concept. I'm a first-generation born in the US. My My mother's from Central America, my father's from Mexico. I am that story, and I am that story of immigrant parents coming here looking for a better opportunity and then me being born here. I just felt like, what do I want to do? Now, not to draw this out too long, so I used to go to Central America, to El Salvador a lot as a kid to visit my family. Growing up a single mother, I know, I think you grew up the same way.

My father wasn't in the picture, and it was just my mom and I. That's it. Needless to say, I remember going to El Salvador as a kid several times and just looking around and just saying to myself, Wow, where my family lives in Central America, it's rural. They're living on the side of a mountain. You're going to the creek to get drinking water, to bay, to wash clothes and dishes. You're going to the restroom outside in the woods. I mean, that's how it's very much what we would consider a third-world country. That was a pretty rocking experience for me, but it was probably some of my best memories in my youth come from that time of being there for the week or two weeks that we would spend there because it was just so simple. Life was simple. It wasn't about electronics. It wasn't about the fast pace of going here, going there. It was about... I love coffee. One of the reasons why I love coffee so much is because it reminds me of going to El Salvador as a kid when you woke up in the morning, not because an alarm went off, but because the roosters were.

That's when you got up and then you had this smell of coffee. Then my grandmother and my uncle and Anne and my mom would be sitting on the porch and sipping coffee, straight up black coffee, because to get milk, that was a luxury. I was like, Can I have a small cup of coffee? I'd sit there and drink my little black coffee with them. It was just something that just meant so much to me. But what that did is that gave me perspective. Because growing up in the United States, I was at that point in my life as a teenager that I was comparing what I had to what my peers had. I didn't have a lot. My mom made no more than $40,000 a year. We barely had enough to get by. But I started to look at it and say, You know what? This country is giving me freedom. This country is giving me the opportunity to go to school. If I want to go grab a burger down the block, guess what? My mom could give me to go to Mickey D's and grab a meal. I still had a lot of freedom and a lot of beautiful things that I needed to learn or appreciate.

When 9/11 took place, I was a senior in high school. I think a lot of people all over the world were confused and scared. I was one of those. But equally, I thought to myself after graduating from high school, when I was like, What do I want to do? I looked at the military because I was like, You know what? That's an opportunity for me to give back. That's an opportunity for me to travel the world, for me to get some experience. I grew up in small towns, man. I think there was some root as well where I was like, Let me get out of these small towns a little bit. Let me get out to the world to see what the world has to offer. But that was essentially the driving force, the motivation behind it all. When I initially joined, it was only supposed to be three years. Then soon into my deployment, I started recalibrating that thought process and thinking, I might want to do this for a longer period of time. Then, of course, life decided to and said, No, not yet. No, we're not going to do this. We're going to go a different route.

Yeah. Let's talk about life interjecting, man. Talk to us about that. Take us to that moment in the mindset and the resiliency that followed, brother.

Yeah. On the fifth of April of 2003, I was driving a Humvee in Iraq when my front left tire ran over a roadside bomb and immediately was trapped aside, was engulfed in flames, and completely in and out of consciousness for five minutes. Once I was pulled out, started the medevac process, and I ended up in San Antonio, Texas. There's a big burn center for the military there, and that's where I recovered. I just remember 19 years old, coming out of my medical-induced coma and just like, Man, what? What is going on? Where am I? What happened? I think the biggest blow at the time, the biggest challenge was, yes, the injury, of course, but the reality that I was not going to be allowed to stay in the army, that I was not going to be allowed to go back to Iraq and finish my deployment with my unit. That was the thing that really weighed on me. Yeah, man, to say that I fell into a very dark space, I think it would be somewhat of an understatement. I was incredibly angry at safe, had people resentful. That was my grieving process. Even though I tell people, I was like, I was alive.

Yes, my life was spared, but I still had to grieve. I think that's something that we don't give ourselves enough ability and space to do is to grieve. Everything that we do, we have identities, and our physical is part of our identity. When suddenly I looked in the mirror and that was not there, I didn't recognize the individual based on the burns and the third-degree burns to my face, body, hands, you name it. In my mind, I was like, I'm a different person. I had to grieve the loss of the old me, what I looked like, and what I thought I was going to do with my life, and the loss of all of that and now try to embrace this new look and this new world and this new possibility that existed, which honestly, I didn't even know what possibility there was besides the fact that I was just going to be put out into the world. It was a very difficult period for me, but I'll tell you the thing that really changed my life. There were a lot of these cool little moments over the course of my life. Six months after, I was asked to visit a patient who was having a difficult time recovering, essentially accepting the new norm for him and embracing what has transpired in his life.

I was asked to visit him, and I was 20 at the time, and I was like, No way. They were like, Why not? I was like, Because I'm 20, what am I in this day. I'm 20. Finally, I just decided, Hey, I'm just going to jump in there, see what's up. I went into the room, and it was really uncomfortable when I walked into the room. It felt heavy. You could feel the weight in the room. I still approached that individual's bed and ended up having a conversation with him for about 45 minutes. Then when I walked out of that room, a light bulb went off. Instead of ignoring that feeling of, Wait, I did something that felt really it really hard, and I leaned in and had a great experience. What I did with that information is that I was like, I'm just going to start visiting patients every day. I started visiting patients every single day at the hospital while I was recovering. What that did is that gave me my sense of purpose back. That gave me a little bit of that identity that I started to create for myself in the military.

It gave that back to me. I always talk about my daughter's 12. She plays select softball. I've been coaching her for about four years. That's what I talk about with the girls, with the team. I'm like, You got to look at celebrating the small victories, because they may be small in the scope of your life. When you read my resume, when you read the things that I've accomplished, no one's going to pay attention to me going into that room and visiting that patient, but in the grand scheme of my life and what I've accomplished. But that moment was so pivotal, was so big that it helped give me life and carried me and allowed me to say, Hey, there's something potentially to this life that I could be living. I just continued it to just stay the course with that. There are a lot of other things. I mean, listen, there would be things, small victories that I would celebrate, and then guess what? Life would kick in. The underlying trauma would start to resurface. I would be triggered by something. Then guess what? It would be a setback. Then I would be this angry person.

I wouldn't be a pleasant person to be around. I dabbled in that roller a cluster of emotions. It was my best friend, about four and a half years after I was injured, one day was like, Hey, man. As a man, he's 17 years older than me. He was like, Man, you need to cry. I was like, What? I don't need to cry. My father wasn't in my life. Crying was not something. Being a Hispanic, we don't cry. We don't talk about our feelings. There's a lot of communities that follow that same belief system. He told me, he's like, Man, I love you. Not like, Hey, man, I love you. Out of nowhere. He'd always been telling me every time we get off the phone, he'd be like, Hey, love you, man. In person, Give me a hug. Love you, man. I'm like, Why is this dude always telling me he loves me? Then the night that I really had a breakdown, he, instead of pushing me away and running away from me because it felt uncomfortable, instead, he leaned in. He told me he loved me and he told me it was okay. I needed to cry, and I started crying.

How pivotal that moment was, man, is right after that conversation. I was the first one. I looked at him and I said, Hey, man, I love you. I appreciate that. Thank you. It's because I felt safe and I felt like I had been vulnerable and I'd been seen and been heard and hadn't been judged. That's unconditional love. My life turned. My life changed after that, man, in a different way. I got involved in the entertainment industry, got into some acting, and then another big opportunity presented itself, and then life just took off from there.

I love it, man. I want to give you the floor to give advice to the listener, the viewer right now that's at that moment of needing to reinvent themselves. Because I think of all people that I know in the world, you are the authority for this message right here. For the listener, the viewer that's like, All right, JR, what are the first two or three steps that I need to do for this reinvention process? Because Because I've seen a ton of your speeches, I've seen a ton of your interactions, and that's the message that you have about reinvention, because a lot of people think it's like, Okay, I need to start over. Well, starting over isn't just enough sometimes. There's a core There's something inside of you that needs to change, that needs to reinvent. So, Jay, our further listener, for the viewer, what are two or three steps people can take to start the reinvention process?

Yeah, thank you for that. I think it's obvious and it's an easy narrative to follow about, I'm starting over. I'm starting over. Listen, if we all are aware of what's been happening in California with the fires and how people have lost in some cases, lives and their homes and a lot of personal items and just essentially been displaced. When you look at the aftermath of all the devastation that the fires, caused, you see the structures of those homes that are burned to the ground. But what you still see when people are posting videos, you still see the foundation intact. What I mean by that is that there are a lot of things like the structure of the beings and the stucco, whatever your home is made of, all this stuff that we like to see and look at, that stuff gets rocked and damaged through all the storms that we navigate in But at the end of the day, is your foundation, how is your foundation? I think that's the bigger question for a lot of people. What's your foundation like? For me, my foundation was cracked. I didn't realize it was cracked. I didn't realize it had this…

It was unstable. There were a lot of emotional things that I experienced in my youth that I never addressed, didn't ever lean into. Again, my mother, we're Hispanic. Again, I can't express that enough. We don't talk about our feelings, and we just hug each other, tell each other we love each other, and go eat a good meal, which was a work back then, but that's not sustainable. I think the biggest thing for me is changing that narrative and that mindset of, yes, I understand it's easy to go to this place and say, We're completely starting over, but you're really not because there is a foundation of things of how far you've already come. You don't realize all these experiences have created this really strong structure that you've built everything on. That's still there. It might need some work, but for the most part, that still there. You're not completely starting over. It's not completely. I had to start over, but I didn't completely had to start over. I had a foundation. A lot of what prepared me to overcome what I overcame came from my youth, the good and the bad. It all was part of my foundation.

Anyways, with that being said, I think the biggest thing is people have to be willing to grieve. You have to be willing. It's okay. It's okay. I was grieving. My mother was grieving. People that loved me grieved as if I passed away. And yet I was in front of them, hugging them, talking to them, hanging out with them, making plans for tomorrow. There's a lot of men and women that never got that opportunity to do that with their loved ones. But we needed to grieve, and it's okay to grieve that things have changed for us. Give yourself grace. That's the first thing. I think the second thing for me is I practice a lot of gratitude. Gratitude is important. It's easy when you get caught up in this space in life, when you're looking around and you're like, I've lost everything. I have nothing. Man, Mick is killing it. I'm not on the same scale of him. Clearly, my life is not doing as well, or I'm a slacker, or whatever term, whatever creeps into your mind. You look at people on social media all day long and you're like, Yo, this person is living their best life.

I should be living my best life. What's wrong? Why am I not living the way that they're living? When you pause, when you pause, truly pause, not pause and look at your phone and pause and look at a computer, pause and put a podcast in. When you truly pause, disconnect from electronics, whether it's for five minutes, whether it's 10 minutes, whatever your capacity is, whatever life lots you, in that moment is practicing gratitude. What do I have? What is in my life that I should be grateful for, that I do have? Because you lose those things when you're too caught up trying to compare. Practice gratitude, I think that is key. I think in that moment of silence, it's equally a great opportunity that if there are things that come to light that you're not happy with, well, guess what? I think that's an invitation for you to say, Okay, what do I need to change? That's what I had to learn I had to do in my life is that I had to sit here in those moments of silence. I realized there was a lot of emotional things that I had been carrying that I needed to heal, I needed to address, I needed to work on.

The more that I leaned in to heal those things, guess what? Now my foundation is solid. Now I can go out to the world and build. But I was trying to build a home with a rocky foundation, and everything that I was trying to get up, it couldn't hold it. It would just fall, and it just would fail, as people would say. I think you equally have to be honest with yourself in those moments of silence and when you're practicing gratitude of what it is that you want, what isn't working, what are you feeling? Then I think For me, probably the toughest thing, I think, although sitting with yourself is really tough for a lot of people. I think we learned that during COVID, people cannot sit at home or be with themselves for five minutes. We need distraction. We live in a world of distractions. But I think the next thing for me, I think is you just really can't... I'm sorry. You just really can't give a shit about what other people are thinking. There comes a point in your life where we got to stop playing this game where I'm like, I need everybody's approval.

It's like, listen, it's okay for people to give their opinion. I'm fine with that. Give it to me in a constructive way. I'll listen to it, I'll look at it, I'll see if there's some truth to that, so some to what you're saying. But I'm not going to walk out of my house, and I'm not going to live my life every single day to sit here and try to impress other people. I'm doing what makes me happy. If what makes me happy is making $70,000 a year, and I'm with my family, and I get to do a job that I love, or I get to have quality time with my family, my kids, or I get to... Cool. If it's whatever it is, I don't do anything. I don't operate from this place because the moment that you start, comparison is the thief of joy. When you find yourself in this space of always trying to please and compare yourself to others, you're going to fail because now you're not even speaking from your voice. You're not even acting the way you would. I'm trying to do what Mick's doing or speak the way Mick's speaking.

That's not me. Mick's not me. That's why you have your success in what you're doing, and I have my success in what doing. We can respect each other for what you're doing and what I'm doing. But at the end of the day, I don't need to be like you, and you don't need to be like me. I think that the moment we stop trying to keep up with the Joneses, as they say, and I think we just live in this space of like, I'm just going to live my life. Guess what? I think things start to flow for you and things start to look a little bit differently. I used to care a lot, and I still do, don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm just dismissive of what people say and what What people think. Yeah, I don't want to put my best foot forward. But at the end of the day, I'm just not going to operate from this place of where I always need to like, Please, please, please. For a long time, and I'll tell you real quick, so I've had a lot of surgeries, a lot of surgeries. Now, one of the things, if you look at one of the first major interviews I did, it was about eight months or so after I was injured.

It was on 60 Minutes. I was on 60 Minutes. They came to the hospital, interviewed the five I interviewed five troops. I was one of them. When I go back and look at that interview, there's something that I say in that interview when the reporter asked me, he says, You must notice that people, when they look at you, when you're out in public, they It's like a double take. He said, How does that make you feel? I said, I do notice that, but I know why I look like this. I know what happened to me. That's all that matters to me. Then I go on to tell him, and the doctors have said that there's procedures that can help me get back to what I used to look like. Now, you listen to that. Now, I listened to this probably about four or five years ago when I heard that I was like, Oh, my God. I've had so many surgeries, and part One of the reasons why I've had so many of those surgeries is because whether those doctors, I guarantee those doctors never said to me, We can get you looking like you used to look like before.

I guarantee they wouldn't make that guarantee because it's not going to happen. But in my mind, my identity and the way I was embraced and accepted by people was on my looks. In my mind, that's what I heard, and that's what I needed to hear, and that's what I needed to tell myself to survive. I started, Yeah, Doc, can we have this surgery? Can we do this? I heard you guys talking about this procedure. Let's do that procedure. Did I need that procedure? No. No. No. But I was stuck trying to go backwards and just hold on to who I used to be instead of breathing, embracing the new JR. Here I was just constantly delaying this growth opportunity in this process because all I was doing was looking back because in my mind, I was like, The only way I could be accepted in this society is I have to look a certain way. I'm at the point now, I walk out of the house and I'm like, This is what I got on, whatever it is. I I like to dress up. I like to look fly. I like to look nice. But you catch me day to day, you're going to see me at the grocery store and I'm like, Yo, that's just me.

You know what I'm like? That's me. That's how I get down, and I'm cool with that because I've let go of that pressure of needing to be this. I'm going to be me. I've learned that people have learned to accept me and embrace me because of who I am as a person and not what I look like.

Absolutely, dude. I want to talk about dancing with the stars now. Talk me through the process of, I don't know if you audition, I don't know if you got a phone call. Walk me through the, I'm going to do this part of that, and then we're going to go into some other stuff. Check this out, man.

I was born and raised in the South. I know you live in the South as well. In the south, a lot of times, a lot of places people say those are coincidences. In the South, we I hear, we call those Godwinks. There's no such thing as coincidences. I've learned to really lean into that and say, Yeah, there's really no such thing as coincidences. What do I mean by that? So there's been... Man, we can do a whole episode where I could tell you all these moments where people have said things, or I've had these experience where things just aligned. That's data. We hear constantly companies, brands talk about collecting data, data, data, data, data. Everything is driven by data. And what we have to start doing as individuals, we have to start looking at it as ourselves as brands. We ourselves are brands. We're a product. We are the brand. We as the brands are collecting data. We as people collect data every single day with our spouse, with our partners, with our kids, with our best friends, with our colleagues, with people in our communities. We're collecting data all the time The more data you accrued, you start to say, Okay, well, this is a pattern.

This thing works. Let me keep following this. Or, This ain't working. Maybe there's something I need to pay attention to that pattern. It works both ways. You just got to be honest with yourself and which one are you going to be willing to do. Needless to say, dancing. Somebody said to me about a year ago, they said your DNA could be changed by your environment. We I had this conversation, and when I got off of the call with this individual, it really resonated with me, and I was like, Wait a minute. Okay, I think I can rock with that. I think I understand where that's coming from. I said, But not only your environment, your experiences as well. Let me tell you a quick little story before I get into the dancing thing. When I was growing up in Louisiana, because that's where I was born, when I was growing up in Louisiana, my mom was dating a man at the time who played the piano in the house, and he was singing Spanish love song. I was about five, six years old, and Spanish was my first language. I actually didn't learn English until I went to kindergarten, although I was born in the United States.

I would sit next to him and I would watch him play the piano and sing, and I'd start singing with him, too. He started noticing this, so he would take me down to this hole in the wall bar in Louisiana, and he played a piano, I would sing a dance talking about heartache and heartbreak and how this girl left me and cheated on me. I'm five years old. I don't know nothing about that. The only love I know is my mama, and she was at home. But the reason I tell that story is because that's who I was born to be. That's who I was born to be that energy, to be that presence in any space that I occupy. There are these things over the course of my life that try to take that away, these experiences, not only the injury, but things that I experienced in my youth and et cetera. Well, dancing, how that came about is in 2008, I was auditioned to become an actor on a soap opera called all my children. I got the job, and they told me it was going to be three months. That was it.

I was like, three months on all my children? I'm like, I watched all my children as a kid. My mom watched all my children as a kid. I'll take it. My mentality was, if it's only going to be three months, I'm going to make it the best damn three months. When I wasn't on set working, guess what I did? I stayed on set. When the other actors came up to do their scenes, I would watch them, and I would study them, and I would say, Oh, I like what he did. I I like what she did there. I'm going to try that in my scene. The more that I tried and I asked a lot of questions of how to do this better, the storyline took off. People said, Hey, we like him. Well, guess what? The crew took notice of this, and I mean the producers, executives, and they were like, Let's extend you another three months. Okay, six months. Let's extend you another nine months, another year. I was on that show for three years. When the show finally announced that they were going to go off the air, I was actually at an All My Children fan event.

I was sitting up on the stage. Nobody was asking me any questions because I was still the young storyline in the show. Everybody was talking to Susan Lucci and the Michael Knight and the Darnells and all the big actors. Someone looked at me and said, Yeah, our question, would you ever do Dancing with the Stars? I was like, Where did that question come from? I was like, Yeah, it'd be fun. Ha, ha, ha. I just laughed it off. Moved on. Well, fast forward, 2011, when the show announced that they were going to cancel all my children, I reached out to the executive producer. I said, Hey, quick question. I keep hearing everyone talk about this dancing thing. What are your thoughts about that? She was like, Oh, my God. I think you'd be great on that show. She called up the casting director of Dance With The Stars, made an introduction. I had a meeting, and then they dragged me along for a while because at the time, I don't know if you knew this, but there came a point in our society where not everybody was watching soap operas. They weren't really popular as they used to be and are as popular.

They were trying to find some other talent that they could potentially cast for the season. I guess they felt us some dead ends there. They said, Well, we got this guy, JR. Let's call him up and see if he'll do it. They asked me to go on the show, and I immediately said yes. I knew it was going to change my life, and this is why I knew it was going to change my life. I remember crying. I remember calling my uncle and crying. The reason why was not just because of the excitement of the opportunity, was because I said to him, I said, This is going to allow me to show the world who I really am.

Yes, sir.

Because prior to going on that show, I had been boxed in, being labeled as a disabled veteran, being labeled as a burned victim. The whole time was trying to scream from the mountaintops that I'm like, I'm not disabled, and I'm not a victim. Trying to change that narrative, and it was just really hard to get people to see that. And dancing was going to be the opportunity That show was going to give me the stage to show the world that I was so much more than that. And honestly, I was never nervous. I was never sweating it. I took it one routine at a time. I'm pretty competitive, so I always challenged myself to really go all out, rehearse. But again, the reason I tell the story about the DNA is because the reason I think I excelled on that show is because I just got back to my DNA. I just got back to who I was born to be, who I was when I was five years old, just to be this energy. I just leaned into that energy and the energy in the space, and it carried me, man. I ended up winning the freaking competition, which was why I'm saying, This is what I know about JR.

If there's an opportunity to win, he's going, right? If there's judging going on, if there's a score, I'm going for the top.

Oh, yeah. My My wife is always like, she's my big supporter. She's always like, I don't doubt you. I don't doubt you. I think part of that comes from when you come from where I come from and people the same backgrounds and youth that I had. When you experience near-death experiences, man, it's like, Life is short. What am I going to see here? Worry about this or worry about that and spend time over thinking. I'm going. Let's go and let's have fun. And whatever happens, happens. I'll live with it as long as I'm having a good time and doing the best that I can. I can live with the results.

There we go. Joe, you've been gracious with your time today, man. I know you're very busy, but I don't want to to overlook what I think is one of the greatest pieces of work, and that's your best-selling book, man. Talk to us a little bit about when you decided to write it, and then what I feel like has been one of the greatest responses, the response that you've gotten from the book, bro.

Yeah. I had a little bit of that imposter syndrome, even though before that was a popular term when I wrote the book. But like me, write a book? Am I qualified? All the questions that you fill your head with regarding that process. Ultimately, what motivated me to do it was because I really wanted people to... Because I was still getting the question of, how did you survive what you survived and overcome it. I really wanted to lay it out and again, really talk about those moments that transpired in my life prior to this big event that helped shape me and condition me to prepare me for the biggest test of all. I just really wanted to lay it out, and I just leaned into it. I was pretty vulnerable. There were some things that I identified after the process that, oh, maybe there's things that I could have been a little bit more detailed and vulnerable about. Maybe that's the second part. I don't know what I end up doing in life. The fact that the response that I got, and I remember when I got a call from the agent and was like, Hey, man, you're on the list.

I was like, What list? That's how naive and just unaware I was. I was like, What list? He said, The New York Times bestseller list. I was like, Wow. For me, that was the ultimate. What got me into the speaking space, Mick, was back in 2000. I was injured in '03, so it was early '04, when I was asked to speak at an event on the military base here in San Antonio. I remember when I spoke for about 10-ish minutes, and I was so green. After I spoke, people come up to me and said that they could relate to me. I was like, Wait a minute. I'm looking at these people that look on the exterior, look perfectly fine. I'm like, Have you been burned before? They're like, No. I'm like, Was you raised by a single mother? They're like, No. Both of our parents were in the I'm like, So how can you relate to me? The more the people explain, what I realized it wasn't the actual event that people could relate to. It was the emotion that people can connect with, the feeling. When we're all navigating what we're navigating, change, uncertainty, the identity is like all these things, we all understand those feelings.

I don't understand the feeling of losing someone you love, but I I understand the feeling of losing something that I love. It's not the same, but I understand that, Oh, I know how it hurt me, so I know how you must be feeling. I can only imagine how you must be feeling. It's the emotion that brings all of us together. The book, I think, was the solidifier of that when I'm getting people that are... Burn Survivors didn't make this a New York Times best seller alone. There were a lot of Burn Survivors that supported me. Them alone didn't make The military community alone did not make this a New York Times best seller. There were ordinary, ordinary people out there that purchased this book because they connected with it on some level. That was the ultimate solidifier of It doesn't matter what I've been through, what you've been through. We can connect on the human level of what we felt as we navigated what we both had to equally navigate.

Amazing. Again, JR, you've been awesome with your time. Where can people follow and find you? You know we're going to have to do a part two because there's so many places I want to go, right?

Let's do it, man. I'm always here, brother. It's been a fun conversation. I think that's probably the challenge you run into from a podcasting, from a host standpoint, is you start talking to people and you're like, Oh, there's so much more that we can lean into. Where do we start to unpack all the rest of this stuff? I've seen it. But yeah, listen, man, you tell me. I'm always down if people feel like they want to know more, I'm down to lean in. But where people can connect with me is obviously my website, jrmartinez. Com. That gives you a little bit more in-depth detail about who I am, what I'm doing, how to reach out if there's any Or if you just want to connect, obviously, social is a great way to do it on Instagram. I am JR Martínez. I just encourage, if anybody takes anything away from this, feel free to share with me on social and obviously tag you as well. I just love hearing from people and love connecting with people. Man, that's what life should be about.

We're definitely going to make all of that happen. I'm going to make sure in the show notes and the descriptions for listeners and viewers, you're going to have links to, obviously, JR's website, his social. Also links to the book because I promise you it's going to move you. One of my mentors, Les Brown, says, People don't remember the things you say or even all the words in a book, but they remember how things make them feel. That's what I got from your book, is just the feeling of connection that I had with you. The same thing that you just said a lot of people tell you. The book really was a way for me to say, I know JR. Then when we get to meet, it's like, I'm talking to one of my brothers because I know you, man.

Yeah, 100%, man. But you're absolutely right. I think if we can all move through the world as all the challenges that present in society, that if we could just all move through the world with a little bit more compassion and empathy for one another and love and understanding and patience, we end up finding a bigger community than we ever thought we knew we could have.

Absolutely. To all the viewers and listeners, remember, your because is your superpower. Don't unleash it.

Thank you for tuning in to Mic Unplug. Keep pushing your limits, embracing your purpose, and chasing greatness. Until next time, stay Unstoppable.