AFR Men’s Summit Speaker Series — Speaker #2 of 8 Summit: The Power of Asking for Help — Creating the American Family Renaissance Date: September 14, 2026 · Online, join from anywhere Meet the full lineup: americanfamilyrenaissance.org/summit/speakers Reserve your seat: AmericanFamilyRenaissance.org/summit/#register
There’s a lie most men are carrying, and the cruelest thing about it is that it doesn’t feel like a lie.
It feels like maturity. It feels like responsibility. It feels like being the man your father was or the man your father wasn’t. It’s the story running underneath the whole operation, the reason you don’t call anybody, don’t say the hard thing out loud, and don’t let your wife see the ledger of what you’re actually carrying.
Most men will defend that lie to the grave. Some of them literally do.
Chris Widener is going to name it on our summit September 14. And then he’s going to show you what replaces it.
Who Chris Widener Is
If you’ve spent any time in the personal development world over the last thirty years, you already know the name. If you haven’t, understand what you’re getting:
- Author of twenty books with three million copies in print in thirteen languages, plus more than 450 articles on success, leadership, sales, and motivation.
- Member of the Motivational Speakers Hall of Fame, named one of Inc. magazine’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers and one of the Top 50 Speakers in the World.
- Jim Rohn’s last protégé. Rohn — Tony Robbins’ first mentor — hand-selected Chris to work alongside him. Together they co-authored the Jim Rohn One Year Success Plan and Rohn’s final book, Twelve Pillars, which became an international bestseller.
- Personally chosen by Zig Ziglar to co-host his television show, True Performance. Chris’s two novels, The Angel Inside and The Art of Influence, are the only two works of fiction Zig endorsed in his entire life. Read that again.
- A client list that reads like a roll call of American enterprise — General Electric, Cisco Systems, Microsoft, Harvard Business School — and stages in Germany, Spain, Russia, China, Egypt, Singapore, and Australia.
- A builder, not just a speaker. Chris grew a publishing company into a business moving tens of thousands of personal development programs through Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, Target, and Barnes & Noble before selling it in 2009 to focus on speaking, writing, and coaching.
Jim Rohn called him the leader of the next generation of leadership and personal development experts. Brian Tracy called him one of the best speakers in America. He has been coaching since 1988 and now takes only ten clients at a time.
Two of the most consequential voices in the history of this field, Rohn and Ziglar, looked at a room full of talented people and chose Chris to carry what they built. That’s not a credential. That’s a commissioning.
Learn more at chriswidener.com
What Chris Is Speaking On
Chris’s summit session goes after one target:
The biggest lie men believe and why leadership begins with humility.
Here’s why that message belongs at the front of this event.
Every man in that room will hear eight speakers tell him the same truth: you were not built to do this alone, and the strength you’re looking for is on the other side of an ask you haven’t made yet. But a man can’t act on that while the lie is still running. The lie is what makes the ask feel impossible. It has to be exposed before anything else gets built.
That’s Chris’s assignment. He’s not there to encourage you. He’s there to take something away from you that you’ve been defending for twenty years.
The Problem He’s Solving
I sit across from men every week who are competent, respected, and completely stuck. And when we get far enough in, it’s almost never a skills gap. It’s a belief they’ve never examined.
You’ve probably got a version of it:
- If I admit I don’t know, I lose the room.
- Nobody’s coming to help me, so I’d better not need it.
- Strong men don’t say that out loud.
- I’ll deal with it once I get through this next stretch. (There’s always a next stretch.)
The results are predictable. Men lead from control instead of influence, because control is what you use when you’re afraid. Marriages where the wife hasn’t heard an honest sentence about her husband’s interior life in years. Teams that follow the title but not the man. And a whole lot of guys quietly wondering why doing everything right produced a life that feels this thin.
Chris’s answer isn’t a mindset hack. It’s humility, and he’ll show you that humility isn’t self-deprecation, weakness, or thinking less of yourself. It’s the posture of a man secure enough to be teachable. It’s the only ground real influence has ever grown in. Chris has spent his entire career on the mechanics of influence, and he’ll tell you plainly: the men who gain trust, respect, and loyalty are not the men who perform certainty. They’re the men who can be led before they lead.
Why I Asked Him — and How We’re Working Together
The whole summit is built on one conviction: real strength begins when a man is honest enough to ask for help, surrender his pride, and step into what God is calling him to lead.
Read that sentence again, and you’ll see why Chris Widener is on this stage. Surrendering pride is humility. My message and his are the same, just coming from two different directions. I come at it as a coach who has watched Christian men suffocate behind competence. Chris comes at it as the man who studied influence at the highest level in the world and found the same answer waiting at the bottom of it.
Scott Schilling, our opening speaker, connected Chris and me, and it’s worth pausing on. Scott is on this stage because I asked him for help. Chris is on this stage because Scott made an introduction. That’s not a coincidence; that’s the entire basis of this summit playing out in the building of it. Every good thing on that September 14 lineup traces back to somebody being willing to ask and somebody else being willing to open a door.
What struck me about Chris in our conversations wasn’t the résumé. It was the respect, the wisdom, and the plain common sense he brings, all of it anchored in a Biblical understanding of people. One thing he said has stayed with me: even when we don’t agree with the other side, even when we’re looking straight at opposition, we can still pray for them.
That’s American Family Renaissance in a sentence. We don’t have to agree to have a caring conversation. We don’t have to win an argument before we can carry someone to the Lord in prayer. A nation doesn’t get restored by men who only know how to fight the people across the aisle. It gets restored by men strong enough in their identity to stay in the room, listen well, and pray for the man they disagree with. Chris models that. It’s one of the reasons I wanted him speaking early, before we ask anybody to open up about anything.
There’s a piece of continuity here worth naming, too. Chris co-hosted television with Zig Ziglar. Tom Ziglar — Zig’s son and the CEO of Ziglar Inc. — speaks right after Chris as Speaker #3. Legacy is not an accident at this summit. It’s the whole point. We’re bringing together men who received something from the generation before them and refused to let it die with them, because that is exactly what we’re asking every man in the room to do in his own home.
Chris’s session sets up mine. He removes the lie. I’ll spend my keynote, The Power of Asking for Help, drawn from True Man True Ways, showing you what to build in the space it leaves behind.
Why You Should Be in the Room
If you’ve built a career on having the answers and you’re exhausted from maintaining it, this session is for you.
If you lead people who comply but don’t actually follow you, this session is for you.
If there’s something true about your life right now that you have never said to another human being, this session is for you, and honestly, so is the whole day.
Here’s what Chris’s session gives you:
- The lie named out loud. Once you can see it, it stops running you from the shadows.
- A working understanding of humility as strength — the version that builds influence instead of surrendering it, from a man who has taught influence to Fortune 500 boardrooms and the Air War College with the Air Force.
- The posture shift that makes everything else in this summit possible. You can’t receive from seven more speakers with your guard up.
The Details
The Power of Asking for Help — Creating the American Family Renaissance Eight world-class speakers. One transformational day. Built for men who are done drifting and ready to lead.
September 14, 2026 · Online · Join from anywhere
Chris Widener speaks second, following Scott Schilling and ahead of Tom Ziglar, Jim Britt, Vince Miller, Bob Tiede, Bob Beaudine — and I’ll close it out.
Reserve your seat now → Meet all eight speakers →
Seats are limited. The lie has cost you enough already.
Build the Man. Strengthen the Family. Restore the Nation.
About the Author
Mike Van Pelt (MVP) is the Founder of American Family Renaissance and True Man Life Coaching — a movement dedicated to restoring the foundation of God, Family, and Country by rebuilding the heart of the man. He is the author of True Man True Ways: A Roadmap of Discovery to the Masculine Heart, host of the True Man Podcast with 250+ episodes, and creator of the Master Class The 9 Marks of a Restored Man. Through coaching, speaking, and brotherhood, Mike helps Christian men break isolation, reclaim their God-given identity, and lead their families with faith, character, and conviction.