Cody Deaner Discusses Maintaining a Positive Attitude & His Giv’er Charity Work

– Spencer Love recently interviewed Impact Wrestling star Cody Deaner, who discussed his charity work for Giv’er Charity. Below are some highlights and a video of the interview sent to us by Spencer Love:

Cody Deaner on maintaining a positive outlook: “I would say the thing that has saved my life that way is my family. I have a wonderful, beautiful wife, and I have four amazing kids. So for me, being on the road for 19 days was awesome, because like I said, I’m a road warrior. But then, all of a sudden, I’m just taken off the road, and I’m just at home. I have that time, I’m like, ‘okay, I can either focus on panicking right now and like jumping on my computer every day and trying to make things happen that just can’t happen. Or, I can just, you know what, I’m shutting ‘er down, and I’m just gonna play with my kids.’ I was on the road a lot, man, and now I focus on my kids. I’m present more, and whenever things kind of get tough, whether whatever industry it’s in, and people get negative, I just, I refuse to focus on that. I mean, there’s things that are more important than wrestling. Wrestling, I love. I’ve loved it since I was five years old. But, my family and my kids are just so much more important to me. So, I can have some political crappy thing happen to me in wrestling, but then I just take one look at my kids, and it, just that all just goes away. So it’s really focusing on those things, man, the things that really count.”

Cody Deaner on his work with Giv’er Charity: “Again, something that just kind of happened by accident. Just because of the nature of independent wrestling and the way it is, I was just meeting a lot of kids. I found – I don’t know what it is about me, people have asked me this before, I don’t know what it is, I think it’s just like a god-given gift or something – but whether it’s speaking at an elementary school, or when I go down to the ring. I think it has something to do with the fact that I love kids, and I approach wrestling remembering what I loved about it as a kid. I think young children are drawn to that.

“So, I’ve just been meeting a lot of really interesting kids, and through my travels, kids that have had a rough go in life, kids that are deaf, or kids that have special needs, or kids that are autistic, and I have so many stories of just these kids that I’ve made a connection with. I just kind of got this idea one day that I want to give back to those kids somehow. I just decided to – I didn’t want to start my own charity, because there’s already so many great charities out there, I just decided to kind of be the middleman fundraiser for all these amazing charities that are already happening across Canada. So I just started doing fundraisers, and I usually did them – I do them alongside my fans and kids that I’ve made a connection with. We raise money for causes that are important to them (and) things that have helped them out in their life. So yeah, man, that was kind of the idea from it. And I really never knew how much it was going to blow up. My idea was like, if we can just raise a couple hundred bucks for a couple charities, that would be great and maybe keep this connection with these kids. But I started in 2018, and to date, I’ve raised over $16,000 for different charities. That is not something that I planned or really expected to happen. But, it’s something else that really motivates me. As a business person, I’m motivated by money, but that’s not the only thing that keeps me motivated in this industry. It’s not just money. Sometimes I would go to the show and rather than thinking about, you know, how many t-shirts can I sell at the merch table, which is a motivator, any wrestler will tell you that, I was like, how much money do you think I can raise at the show? It became a whole other motivator for me. It’s really kept me motivated. Going back to what you asked me earlier, it’s something else to focus on it’s positive when there is a lot of crap going on. I mean, seeing young fans and being able to help out some kids that are in need, it really puts things in perspective.”