AFR Men’s Summit Speaker Series — Speaker #3 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 at No Cost: AmericanFamilyRenaissance.org/summit/#register
Ask most men what success looks like, and they’ll describe a number.
Revenue. Title. Square footage. The retirement figure they’ve been chasing since they were thirty-one. And if you push a little, they’ll admit that faith and family are important too—right after the business stabilizes, right after this quarter, right after the kids are a little older and there’s more margin.
Faith and family become the footnote. The thing at the bottom of the page in smaller type. The part you’ll get to.
Here’s what nobody tells a man until it’s too late: you cannot build a life on a foundation you keep postponing. And the men who figure that out late almost always figure it out in a hospital room, a lawyer’s office, or a driveway at 2 a.m., wondering where twenty years went.
Tom Ziglar has spent his entire life around this question. On September 14, he’s bringing the answer.
Who Tom Ziglar Is
Some men inherit a business. Tom Ziglar inherited a mission—and then spent nearly three decades proving he could carry it.
- CEO of Ziglar Inc. for more than 28 years, the personal development company founded by his father, Zig Ziglar, the man widely considered the greatest motivational speaker of the twentieth century.
- Bestselling author of Choose to Win: Transform Your Life, One Simple Choice at a Time, 10 Leadership Virtues for Disruptive Times, and Born to Win.
- Host of the Ziglar Show, one of the most listened-to personal development podcasts in the world.
- A global platform reaching more than 6.5 million followers, with the Ziglar brand training coaches, leaders, and organizations across the planet.
- He has coached leaders from startups to billion-dollar corporations and has spoken at Harvard and Cambridge.
But here’s what I want you to notice about Tom, because it’s the whole reason he belongs on this stage.
He grew up as the son of the world’s most famous motivator. He had a front-row seat to a man who could fill arenas. And the philosophy he chose to carry forward wasn’t about hustle, or closing, or getting to the top. It was his father’s central conviction: that you get everything you want in life by helping enough other people get what they want.
That’s a servant’s philosophy. From a family that could have sold ambition and made a fortune doing it. Tom has spent 28 years refusing to reduce success down to achievement, and in a culture that has never been louder about the wrong scoreboard, that’s not nostalgia. That’s courage.
Learn more at ziglar.com.
What Tom Is Speaking On
Tom’s summit session takes on one idea:
How faith and family are the foundation, not the footnote, of a man’s success.
The Ziglar framework has always insisted that a life is built across several areas at once—spiritual, family, mental, physical, financial, personal, and career—and that a man who wins in one while losing the rest hasn’t won anything. He’s just chosen which loss to hide.
Tom makes the case that faith and family aren’t the reward you get after success. They’re the load-bearing walls. Move them to the footnote, and the building comes down eventually, no matter how impressive it looked from the street.
The Problem He’s Solving
I coach men who are winning by every metric they were taught to care about and drowning by every metric that actually matters.
The pattern is almost boringly consistent:
- The career gets the best hours; the family gets the leftovers, and the leftovers keep shrinking.
- Faith becomes something he affirms rather than something he practices, a Sunday position, not a Monday operating system.
- He tells himself the sacrifice is for his family, which is how a man justifies being absent from the very people he’s absent for.
- Then something breaks. A marriage, a kid, his body, his integrity. And he realizes the foundation he thought he’d get around to pouring is the one thing he needed the whole time.
Tom’s answer isn’t balance in the soft, fuzzy sense. It’s a sequence. Put faith and family in the foundation, and everything else you build has something to stand on. Put them in the footnote, and you’re stacking weight on sand and calling it progress.
That’s not a motivational idea. It’s a structural one. And it’s why his session matters even to the man who thinks he’s doing fine.
Why I Asked Him — and How We’re Working Together
American Family Renaissance exists on a single premise: God, Family, and Country. In that order. That order is not decoration on a logo; it’s the load order. It’s what we believe a rebuilt man actually looks like, and it’s why we say, “Build the man, strengthen the family, restore the nation.” You cannot skip a step and get the result.
Tom Ziglar has been teaching the same order for nearly thirty years, from a completely different platform to a completely different audience. When a message shows up independently in two places, that’s worth paying attention to. When it shows up in the Ziglar body of work, a legacy that has shaped American business and personal development for fifty years, it means the thing we’re saying isn’t a niche opinion. It’s a durable truth that keeps proving itself.
There’s a thread running through this lineup worth naming, too. Chris Widener, who speaks immediately before Tom, was personally chosen by Zig Ziglar to co-host his television show, and Zig endorsed Chris’s two novels, the only fiction he ever put his name on. Now Zig’s son takes the stage right after him.
And it goes further than that. Scott Schilling, who opens the summit, was mentored by Zig Ziglar himself and has known Tom for years. So, look at what the first three sessions of this summit actually are: a man Zig mentored, a man Zig hand-picked to sit beside him on television, and Zig’s own son. Three speakers, one root system.
That is not chance. That is what happens when a man builds something true and then hands it to people willing to carry it. Strong collaborations and lasting legacies are built exactly this way — one relationship, one introduction, one man saying yes to another man’s mission. It’s the same pattern that built this entire summit, and it’s the pattern we’re asking every man in the room to start in his own home.
Here’s the clearest way I can say it: Zig laid the foundation of God, Family, and Country. Tom has maintained it for nearly three decades. American Family Renaissance is building on it. We are not inventing something new. We’re picking up something proven and carrying it into this generation for men who need it now more than their fathers did.
What struck me most in my conversation with Tom wasn’t the résumé or the name. It was how humble he was. Genuinely, disarmingly humble, the kind you can’t manufacture for an interview.
And it was clear he has put in the work himself. The work his dad taught. In a world where it would be easy to coast on a well-known brand name, where a lesser man would have spent thirty years collecting royalties on someone else’s reputation, Tom has kept the actual practice alive: serving people, impacting people, helping others win. The Ziglar legacy isn’t preserved in a museum. It’s still operating, still producing, still changing men’s lives.
I was honored to meet and talk with him. And the men who show up on September 14 are going to understand why within about ninety seconds of him opening his mouth.
Tom lays the foundation. I’ll close the day with my keynote, The Power of Asking for Help, drawn from True Man True Ways—because a man who knows what to build still has to be willing to say out loud that he can’t do it alone.
Why You Should Be in the Room
If your business is thriving and your house feels like a place you sleep, this session is for you.
If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll be more present next season, and you’ve been saying that for four seasons, this session is for you.
If your kids know what you do for a living but couldn’t tell you what you believe, this session is for you.
Here’s what Tom’s session gives you:
- A working definition of success that includes the parts of your life you’ve been quietly sacrificing — from the man who has carried the Ziglar standard for 28 years.
- The reason faith and family belong in the foundation, structurally, not sentimentally — and what it costs when they don’t.
- Practical next steps from a proven framework, built on the idea that a life is changed by one right choice at a time.
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
Tom Ziglar speaks third, following Scott Schilling and Chris Widener, and ahead of 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. No Cost to Watch. Your foundation isn’t going to pour itself.
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.
Know God. Know Yourself. Live Fully.