Redefining Success: The Hidden Costs and True Rewards of Winning - 206

What does it mean to truly succeed? Is winning worth the emotional and relational costs? Join me, Sean, as we question the societal norms of success often dictated by external pressures from parents, bosses, and mentors. We'll uncover the tangible rewards like status and material gains but also confront the hidden costs—strained relationships, endless pressure, and the fear of losing it all. This episode promises to offer a balanced understanding of the high stakes involved in the pursuit of success.

Together, we challenge the conventional definitions of winning and success by venturing into the complexities that high achievers face. We'll explore how the relentless chase for larger-than-life accomplishments can lead to burnout and unfulfillment, despite outward appearances of triumph. Yet, there's hope. The skills and experiences gained from these pursuits can be repurposed for future endeavors, and often, our most profound growth comes from our struggles and losses.

Finally, we'll redefine what it means to win by sharing insights from special operations and coaching. Hear compelling anecdotes that highlight the dangers of setting unrealistic expectations and the value of genuine effort over superficial victories. Discover the importance of true friendships that go beyond mere accomplishments, and learn how to balance external and internal success for a more fulfilling life. Tune in for a thought-provoking exploration that promises to reshape how you view winning and success.

Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Reload, where we help unconventional leaders craft the life they truly want by questioning the assumptions they have about how life works. My name is Sean and I'll be your host on this journey. As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, I help high-performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives. All right, that fuel their lives All right. Welcome back, sean, since it's been about three weeks since I posted an episode here. Sorry for the delay. There had a lot of work, travel recently, and while I was gone I've been oh, I don't know. I've been reflecting on this idea that follows up from the previous episode that I did about performance anxiety, and that's episode 205, conquering Performance Anxiety, and then something else I don't remember the full title and then I guess tangentially it also relates to episode 201, grace and Grit Steering Through Leadership Challenges, and I think what that episode was called. So during this time that I was away, I was thinking about those episodes and really trying to dive into this understanding of what does it mean to be a winner or what does it mean to be successful, as many of the people that I interact with, and certainly the ones that I coach. They don't necessarily frame success as being a winner quote unquote but oftentimes it's useful. It's useful for us to begin to think about it in pretty direct terms. Yeah, what does it mean to be a winner versus a loser? Oh God, being a loser. Nobody wants to be a loser, right? At least that's what we're all running around telling ourselves and each other. So I thought it'd be useful for us to dive into this conversation Now, before I go any further.

Speaker 1: 2:07

It's been a while since I've made this public service announcement. I do not script my show. I have some bullet points that I follow, but ultimately, what I'm attempting to do here is I'm attempting to have a pretty organic experience with you, and what that means is I can only organize my thoughts so quickly before having to spit them out onto the microphone here. So you are not going to offend me in the slightest if you turn up the transmission speed up to whatever is comfortable for you. Plus, we'll both have the benefit of me sounding a lot smarter, like a winner. All right, let's get going.

Speaker 1: 2:45

So, first and foremost, what should we take a look at? Well, I think one way to organize the conversation is to start with this understanding of why being a winner or being successful is beneficial in the first place. Some of the obvious benefits that seem to come forward are status, having a sense of pride in one's accomplishments, a sense of alignment that what you have envisioned actually came into being. On a more material level money, title, more stuff and on a more emotional level, I guess you know, a sense of adoration, people like a winner. But is that true friendship? More on that later. I'm sure the list is damn near infinite, but that probably gives you a pretty good place to start.

Speaker 1: 3:51

Now one thing that's always interesting for me when I actually have these conversations with clients of mine. They've never seemed to really think about the costs that come with this concept of being a winner or being successful. It's like in their own naivete, their own innocence, they haven't actually contemplated that, oh shit, this I'm trying to cuss less ah, failed. So you know, in their own innocence they haven't really come to the recognition that, oh yeah, winning or being successful can also have cost. And what might some of those costs be? In case you are also one of those just summer children who cannot begin to recognize where winning or being successful might be costly, well, from what I've seen and had people express to me is that fixation on winning can lead to a variety of consequences Unhealthy relationships or perhaps, more specifically said, sacrificing one's relationships in order to win.

Speaker 1: 5:13

Oftentimes, when we look at the stories of individuals who rose to the absolute tip top of their profession whether it's business, sports, arts, military, even the non-profit world, scientific discovery I don't know of any field of endeavor where the people who are at the absolute quote-unquote bleeding edge of their industry have not made tremendous sacrifices in their personal life. Many of the clients that I work with are CEOs and I can tell you they have made tremendous sacrifices in their personal life to get to that level of success, personal life to get to that level of success. So that's for starters. Now we can add in there what so many of my clients have relayed to me, which is a sensation of constant pressure. A sensation of constant pressure and in some cases it reaches a point of being debilitating. They don't want to be in the game anymore, and I don't mean it in a literal sense of like they're playing a game, I mean it in the business sense. But other people might actually be athletes, for instance.

Speaker 1: 6:42

There's also a lot of self-loathing that comes forward when they're not winning. Everything is great, they're flying on a cloud of pressurized emotional tension. And then when they lose if they happen to have lost then their world kind of starts to fall apart because so often they have put all their eggs in the winner basket and they cannot begin to recognize who they might be and how that person might have value if they're not winning. And, of course, woven through all of that is a fear of losing status, right? So if status, having status, was a benefit when you're winning, then the flip side of that is also true.

Speaker 1: 7:34

In the costs section, and given that humans are so capable of forecasting into the future, they often have a real, intense fear that a single loss will turn into a never-ending downward spiral, that somehow one loss means and I've had plenty of people really truly begin to question their own ability to be successful when they had a loss, when they had a loss. Now, predominantly, this occurs at the beginning of somebody's career or the beginning of their track record, and the more seasoned professionals begin to recognize that, yeah, okay, failures or a lack of ability to accomplish one's objective is part of this process, and that if you are playing at a very high level and you are challenging yourself to play and again, air quotes, right, play at the absolute highest level of competition. Well then, it's not unlikely for you to rack up a fair amount of quote-unquote failures. Now, having wrapped out some of these pros and cons of what being successful might mean and how that plays out, the next place that I think would be worth exploring is okay, if we looked at last week performance anxiety well, not last week, but three weeks ago.

Speaker 1: 9:08

Performance anxiety and why it is that performance anxiety matters, because so often what we have if you haven't listened to episode 205, is individuals who recognize that they are playing, again, air quotes below their level. They have a proven ability, level capability in practice or when the stakes are low, but then, when it comes to their moment of truth, then all of a sudden oh God right, they choke and they don't live up to that capability that they have actually already demonstrated, which is part of why it can be so mind-boggling for people. You know, if I can do it here, why can't I do it there? And, as the episode went into, it's how much we care about the win, the success, however we define it, and this is why defining it is so important. Now most of my clients define success or winning with some version of optimal or perfect. Now when I say it that way, does that sound realistic to you? Most individuals are probably shaking their head right now that it is unrealistic for us to expect perfection.

Speaker 1: 10:36

But what's interesting is that we have organizations out there that have that as either an explicit standard or as some sort of implicit standard. You know, when I joined Navy Explosive Ordnance Disposal excuse me, the motto at the time and there was some rumblings of like changing the motto. But the motto at the time for Navy EOD was initial success or total failure. And if you knew anything about the EOD community, it's Navy bomb squad. And so yeah, no kidding, you're going to have a very high standard there, because oftentimes if you do not disarm the explosive device meaning you have initial success with disarming it it goes boom and it kills a lot of people, probably you and so you go from being a living human to dead. So you can see that when the Navy EOD community was formed that there is this impulse to say, oh yeah, you better be successful up front or you're total failure, you're gone.

Speaker 1: 11:52

But what's interesting to me is what happens when we narrow our field of view on what success can be. So often when that happens, we put ourselves in that pressure cooker. Moreover, we don't allow ourselves the nuance and the diversity of experience we don't connect oftentimes with. Why is it that we pursued this course in the first place? So imagine that you wanted to start a business because, initially, the inspiration was that you wanted to positively impact people's lives impact people's lives. But if you allow yourself to be narrowed in your field of view about what success might mean, for instance well, yeah, I want to make a difference in people's lives, but it only counts if it's a million or more people. It only counts if it's a million or more people Well, you may have actually been doing a lot of good in the world, but then, all of a sudden, you label yourself a failure because the endeavor didn't achieve a certain scope.

Speaker 1: 13:19

Or you know another way of looking at that is maybe you didn't have necessarily a quantitative metric, maybe it was a geographic reach metric. So you're not so wrapped around the axle about the number of people you help, as long as you're helping people from all over the world, but in reality, maybe the endeavor or the organization that you started was really helping people in your own neighborhood. And I got to tell you, right, there are individuals out there that have this mindset that, well, it doesn't count if it's not big enough, even though what was actually already being produced created a tremendous amount of benefit, albeit at a smaller or more localized level. And then some of those organizations just pack up shop, call it quits, and then what about the good that was actually being done? Now it's not my place to tell someone, oh, you better continue to stay in business. I mean, if somebody doesn't want to do it anymore, that's up to them. Likewise, if it's an individual endeavor, you know, for instance, maybe it's if we think back to this the buddy of mine from Muay Thai, I don't know, maybe one day he's kind of like okay, yeah, I've kind of I've had enough of the competition thing because my body is getting beat up a lot and I sort of like scratched that itch, that's fine. So I'm not here to moralize about whether somebody should continue their endeavor or not.

Speaker 1: 14:59

Dangers of looking or defining success as only the optimal or the perfect or the larger than life success story. Now, on top of all of that, what is the cost if we allow someone else to define what success is for us. Well, in that situation, I think at least from what I've observed and then also what I've felt, because I think anyone with parents has had some experience of somebody putting on you the definition of what you ought to achieve, whether you really care about it or not, and as we go through life, I think we have different surrogates that show up into that spot, whether it's a boss or a teacher, a mentor. That spot whether it's a boss or a teacher, a mentor there's no coach, and hopefully not the kind of coach that I am, but maybe more of a sports coach. But we have all these different examples of individuals who do, I think, oftentimes in good conscience and in good spirit, in good conscience and in good spirit, see potential in us and it's that potential that that individual recognizes and hopes to foster for your benefit, hopefully right Fingers crossed that they're not crappy people.

Speaker 1: 16:39

But even if it's meant benevolently and with your best interest at heart, it's potentially not your goal, it's not your actual vision of what true success would look like. And so oftentimes in that scenario, yeah, you get strained relationships between you and the person that has a different vision of what success ought to be and the one that's not actually. It's not their life right. You also end up getting a lot of burnout. A lot of the high performers that I've worked with that are really burned out. It's because they're carrying a torch that belongs to somebody else and they finally reach a point where they are unable to continue to beat themselves down.

Speaker 1: 17:34

I'm sorry, I don't think it's funny per se, but there's a certain ludicrousness. The extent to which some of these people have gone years and years of grinding and sprinting at top velocity on the quote unquote hamster wheel of corporate ascension, pursuing what they've always been told they ought to be pursuing, and they look from on high because most of the people that I work with are very high ranking and they've amassed a tremendous amount of success, but it doesn't mean anything to them and they wonder was it all a waste? Now, as a brief aside, I don't think that it is. I think that there are core experiences and skill sets that we learn on this pathway and that we can, like a Swiss army knife, we can pull out any fixture that we need to and we can begin to put it to use. And so often I think that is one of the more I don't know.

Speaker 1: 18:45

The higher level skill sets in life is to be able to recognize okay, yeah, maybe this experience didn't go the way that I had planned, maybe I was quote, unquote unsuccessful in the endeavor, I did not achieve the objective that I had set, and yet I learned a lot. Or, out of that chapter of life that now feels so wasted, I actually gained certain very real skills and experiences, and I'm able to parlay those into something beneficial tomorrow. And, of course, I don't mean that literally, but when we allow others to write the definition of what success ought to be, I think we end up also disconnecting from our inner self, the true self, if you will, the one that has a real, keen insight on, yeah, how do we want to go through life, what is it that we're looking for? And one of the concepts that I attempt to relay to clients of mine, not as a belief that I'm attempting to push on them, but as a possibility that I'm hoping that they will entertain, so that it can broaden their thinking and hopefully allow them to move from a place of self-recrimination in many cases to having more options available to them, more ways in which to feel a fulfilling life, a happy life, joyous life. A fulfilling life, a happy life, joyous life. And that is if we look at ourselves as limitless beings. I know we're getting crazy here, right, but if we look at ourselves as eternal beings that temporarily house themselves in a physical body, why would an eternal being do that? If you think about it as a spirit or a soul, why would a soul that is eternal house itself temporarily in a physical body? Why is it not just zooming around amongst the stars, going wherever it wants to in the cosmos? Well, one way of looking at that is that maybe it wants to learn something and maybe there are certain lessons that cannot be learned unless it has the full spectrum of experience.

Speaker 1: 21:44

Can winning feel good? Yeah, that's why I started with the benefits. Yay, here we are winning, love it. And as a very visceral example, when I train with Muay Thai or Jiu Jitsu and I'm able to score points or tap out my opponent or get certain punches and kicks on my opponent, does it feel good? Yeah, it does. Does it generally feel better than getting my ass kicked? Yeah, typically. You know, I'm not going to lie. And it's equally true that I tend to learn less in the matches that I quote-unquote win than the matches that I lose quote-unquote. The matches that I lose tend to actually develop me more, and yet I feel worse about them in the moment. And it's not until I've had some time to reflect that I can say, oh, and with a very wise tone to my voice, generally slower and with more drawn out syllables, that ah, yes, ah, I've learned so much, right, I'm trying not to be overly sarcastic here, but yeah, we tend to do this, and it doesn't matter whether we're children, teenagers, adults, elders. We so frequently have this negative reaction to losing, even though we are gaining so much understanding we're gaining so much insight into oh, yeah, why did that not work?

Speaker 1: 23:33

If you think about it from a scientific method perspective, we have a hypothesis that if we do certain things, we will achieve success. However we define success, but then, when we get the opposite, for those individuals who actually are able to keep their eyes open and focused on the quote-unquote failure, they come back smarter, more clever, cleverer. I don't remember which is the proper form there, don't remember which is the proper form there. They are actually uplifted by their failure. And don't get me wrong, I mean, I really try not to be Pollyanna as a coach or as a person generally, and very frequently I have clients who quote unquote fail, and I don't I keep using air quotes. In many cases they actually do fail according to the definition of success that they had set, and they are very, very upset when they fail, and oftentimes in those moments of upset I don't really try to do a whole lot of higher level coaching around. Well, what's the benefit here and how are you going to grow from this and things like that? Because generally they're pretty pissed and sad and they're not in a proper headspace to begin to look at what the benefits might be of losing, failing, and they want to just kind of spin in a circle, in their moping circle, and that's fine. I think it's powerful to be able to feel whatever one is feeling in the moment. Now, if you languish there indefinitely, you probably have more problems coming, but in the moment to begin to feel okay, yeah, this sucks.

Speaker 1: 25:25

I had a hypothesis for how this would work out and it did not, and so somewhere there's a hole or a gap in my process. Possibly, so many possibles today. Why do I say possibly? Well, I think there's a baked in assumption, at least in the United States of America that if you think long and hard enough about it and you do hard enough, work for long enough, that you will inevitably be successful. And I agree with that to a point. Directionally, I agree with that. Directionally, I agree with that.

Speaker 1: 26:10

The person that sets themselves in a determined way to continually learn from every experience and who does not give up and who continues to throw themselves at a problem or an opportunity, challenge, whatever you want to call it, I believe, will have more wins than losses over time. But I think where we get into fairytale land is this notion that well, as long as I prepare hard enough and smart enough, that I will be able to be successful 100% of the time. And if I think about some of the fighters that I've known and by fighters I mean actual fighters, like people who make their money fighting other human beings physically with their fists they often trained like maniacs and they had a team of coaches and they analyzed film of their opponents until they just were cross-eyed. And then they get in the ring and, lo and behold, the other guy or lady did the same amount of work, or maybe even more, and they won. And then the person that I knew didn't win, and it's like this fantasy for us to think that, well, you know, as long as I'm thinking hard enough about it and I'm smart enough and I'm putting the work in, then I'll be successful. No, not necessarily, and that's okay, it's all right, I promise your head will not explode right on the spot.

Speaker 1: 27:52

You know, when I was in special operations, we used to joke around with each other that the enemy got a vote, and really what that was attempting to convey is that yeah, hey, we came up with this strategy, or we came up with certain tactics that we thought were going to be effective on the battlefield and please remember that. You know, my quote-unquote arena was actually like humans trying to kill each other physically, and so when we were playing, we played for keeps. So you really wanted to win, except for the guys that had gotten so strong out on combat that they were pretty fatalistic and suicidal. So those guys generally didn't give a shit. When we were God, I cussed again. I'm really trying. Those guys didn't care and they were often a liability.

Speaker 1: 28:47

But this expectation that, as long as you put the work in, that it's going to lead to the big W is a fantasy. Now it may be a fantasy that feels good until it doesn't come true, but I think that we tend to do better when we face reality and we say okay, I'm going to define my success according to high standards, yes, but not fantastical standards, not something that belongs in some sort of Disney movie. Belongs in some sort of Disney movie. So, anyways, I think I beat that one to death. Now one question that I've asked a couple people that I've coached, and each time they thought it was pretty thought-provoking. So hopefully it's thought-provoking for you. And that is in what ways is winning actually losing? What did you just say? Oh my God, winning is actually losing. Are you high right now? No, I am not, and we talked about some of the costs that come with being hyper-focused on winning.

Speaker 1: 30:11

But it also shows up in other strange ways. I had one client who came back and reflected on it and said yeah, I spend so much time trying to win the argument that I often lose the relationship. So he's trading immediate, short-term success for long-term failure in a relationship. Managing a positive, mutually rewarding relationship. What about? You win the competition but you cheat to do so? So I actually had a client that did this as well.

Speaker 1: 30:47

Much of that client's early success in life came through cheating, because there was such a high standard set by her father that she couldn't begin to fathom bringing home anything less than success. And so when it came to academics, she would cheat and she would get other people to do her work for her. And I mean, in some ways, yes, it was rather resourceful, I guess, but what she ended up doing is she traded the immediate win for a long-term loss again, but in this case it was a long-term loss to her own sense of confidence, her own ability to go forward and do the work herself, and so whenever she found herself in circumstances where she couldn't charm somebody into doing something for her, she felt tremendous disempowerment first off, and then trepidation that she would actually be able to do anything, and so that was one of the things that we ended up having to confront is okay, yeah, you had this thing that you did, this adaptive strategy that you employed when you were little, and it earned you certain successes, but then it also caused her to drop. She actually was, at one point, a collegiate athlete, and she dropped out because it was the one place where, yeah, no, you're the one that has to go perform. You can't have somebody go do the sport for you and just kind of claim that you were there and that led to real strife in her life and then that sort of compounded into her ability to feel like she could achieve success in business.

Speaker 1: 32:37

So this stuff compounds and oftentimes I don't think that we spend enough time really looking into, yeah, where I might win. I might technically have it on my resume, I might technically bring home a medal that says I'm a winner, but if we don't earn it, if we don't earn it clean, what cost comes of that? There have been all kinds of scandals, of scams that have been perpetrated by really well-known figures and then when it comes to light that there's been something dark or misaligned, or that there's been something dark or misaligned or I don't know, in some way those were ill-gotten gains then they often end up especially in today's culture, they get canceled. Now what about if you win the competition, let's say, but you only faced subpar opponents or subpar challengers in the marketplace? Are you going to feel good about that? A lot of the high achievers, high performers that I've known don't. They feel like they left something behind, that they didn't play full out and they often will look at whatever the marker of success is and just kind of. There's a lot of dismissiveness in that and I think this analysis of when is winning losing can actually work in the opposite as well.

Speaker 1: 34:31

And I'm thinking about my buddy today. You know the time of recording. We had a conversation about how his recent competition went and I asked him about whether he was present. You know sort of going off of episode two or five. I asked him if he was present. You know sort of going off of episode 205. I asked him if he was present. I didn't ask him if he placed first, because I honestly don't care, care if somebody's present, I care if they give their all, they really truly dedicate themselves to whatever their process is, whether it's business, art, fighting, whatever, I don't care.

Speaker 1: 35:10

Did you do your thing to the best of your ability? Because, again, as I said a few moments ago, you can do your thing to the best of your ability and the opponent still gets a vote and the opponent may actually be doing their thing, which the two of you share, better than you can do it. And in some instances and in some niches in our marketplace for instance, sports being one of them. Genetic ability does actually play a factor, and you may come up against opponents who are genetically better than you. It's a real thing and it's not something that we need to be scared of, provided that we have a proper and healthy relationship with this notion of being a winner or being successful.

Speaker 1: 36:06

And so I am conveniently very lucky in the fact that this is a buddy of mine was saying, yeah, that he was present and that he had really really tough fights and each fight went the distance in this competition. And then he ended up in the finals Whoa, yes, winning, but winning, with actually being present, winning and actually facing opponents that make you earn it. And then he got into the finals and he fought and he fought and he fought. And from what the coaches that were there or that watched the fights were saying, apparently I didn't see it, I'm sorry. Apparently, the fights were fantastic, and even that last one, or especially that last one, was such an even match, both opponents really pushing each other to the limit of their capability and my buddy lost. He said he's never felt so good about a loss. He actually feels good because he didn't leave anything behind. And so when we think about how losing might be winning.

Speaker 1: 37:32

And again, I'm just sort of throwing out some ideas here that are coming off the cuff. Here one is where is it that we felt inspired to perform to the best that we were capable of in that moment? Could you do better later next year, in a month, with more training? Probably, yeah, but in that moment do you leave it all on the field, as they like to say? And what does it feel like to empty yourself so fully, to dedicate yourself so fully to that moment? Just let it all go, to let it all out. You know, so often and I'm not trying to turn this into some sort of X-rated episode, but so often we only think of that when it comes to sex. You know, orgasm, just let it all out there. But we can do this in so many other facets of our life. And what does it tell us about ourselves? To be able to play full out and not worry about the repercussions and not think about, oh well, what if I don't win, and what if this and what if that? But to just be so present in the moment. What does that feel like? Have you ever felt that? How long has it been since you felt that, to be truly unencumbered by either past or future and not worry about what the scorecard is going to say at the end.

Speaker 1: 39:06

When will losing actually be winning? Well, for myself, one of the things that I've wrestled with in my lifetime is arrogance, and who knows, I don't know, maybe I'm still pretty arrogant, I don't know. I think generally my associates and friends have said that I've gotten better at that and I haven't gotten any more scathing report cards from my own father on the subject in quite a while. So, keeping my fingers crossed that I actually have made some progress on this. But one way that losing has been winning for me is the times where I was so full of myself, so assured of my own rightness and my own worthiness and ability to have the right answer, and then being called out on that and recognizing oh, I was mistaken, I was wrong, and what that has done to allow me to be more patient and to open up my eyes to the various possibilities that I used to never think existed and to be able to recognize yeah, I'm going to do my best, and sometimes that best is going to fall short in terms of objective measurement against somebody else's performance or even just I don't know societal standard or something, and that it can be okay. It can be okay provided, at least according to my own ethics that I've left it all out on the field.

Speaker 1: 40:51

I didn't hold something back, that I did the best that I could, and sometimes the best that I could means that I'm down on one knee instead of being the winner with hands held high, but I'm still in the arena, and oftentimes, when it comes to the fight training that I do Muay Thai, jiu-jitsu oh man, like there are so many times when I just want to quit In the round Because it's hard and the other person's will feels so strong and so daunting. And so I can lose but still win, because I confirm something to myself that I'm still willing to push myself, that I'm willing to put myself into that arena, an arena that very many people do not enter and I don't mean it literally with jiu-jitsu or Muay Thai, but just any arena of real struggle and challenge Because it's hard. I am not disavowing that it is really really hard, and the number of individuals that are willing to go into a state of challenge and to do it repeatedly are relatively rare, and in that sense, losing is most definitely winning, regardless of what the scorecard of society might say. To confront one's fears, to really face them, not to run away from them, not to put your head in the sand and not to blindly fight them, but to really, truly take a look at them and to recognize where it is that you feel shame, where it is that you feel a sense of less than, and how are you going to stare into that dark spot with your eyes calmly held open. That is bravery, that is winning, that is winning. So those are just some ideas on that particular subtopic.

Speaker 1: 43:26

Now, earlier in the episode, I did this teaser about adoration and comparing it to true friendship. So let's look at this for just a moment here, and maybe we start with a metaphor. The fisher man or fisher woe man understands that you catch certain kinds of fish with certain kinds of bait and fishing in certain kinds of water. Certain kinds of bait and fishing in certain kinds of water. So many high performers and high status people are, deep down, very afraid of not being popular or well-liked, and so they have a fear that their quote friends end quote will go away if they're not winning or being successful. But what type of person does winning attract?

Speaker 1: 44:18

Now, obviously, here I think we're going to have to speak in generalities, because this is certainly not true of everyone, but often, if we think about I don't know, let's say, celebrities, no-transcript, well, who is it that loves you when you're not on top? And so maybe this is another place where losing is winning. I don't know, maybe I should have put it in that subsection, but in either case, I think this question of winning and where it is that sometimes it creates unhealthy relationships. Well, if your whole world fixates on this notion of winning and that your whole sense of value is connected to winning, and you also have a friend group or a social circle that affirms or confirms this belief that you're only valuable when you're winning, because they will abandon your ass as soon as you're not winning, that feels like a very fragile place to be, and it feels, at least for me and my experience and this may not be true for you and you are definitely entitled to disagree but it feels like a place that I would not want to be.

Speaker 1: 45:46

I feel like I would want to have people in my life and I do, thankfully, have people in my life that see beyond just the activities that I'm trying to accomplish, or the objectives that I'm trying to accomplish, and they're able to recognize that I am a multifaceted individual and in many cases, what they value is the quirkiness of that multifaceted-ness. And so, for yourself, what kind of bait are you using to attract people into your life? Where are you going fishing for a certain kind of fish? Where are you going fishing for a certain kind of fish? A lot of the individuals that I've worked with did not recognize that because they were fixated on being a winner, they attracted a certain kind of person to them, a kind of person who only liked them as long as they were winning, as long as they could be in sort of the radiant glow of the winner, or as long as the winner was able to do things for them based on their winner status. So hopefully, that's another thing worth thinking about.

Speaker 1: 47:13

Thinking about Now, what's the path forward? Right, because a lot of times, most of the time, I'm attempting to create something practical here and not just philosophical or conceptual. And here I think really what we're talking about is a blending of success indicators, that we have a set of external success indicators and also a set of internal success indicators. But what I think is valuable to talk about is why is that useful? Why should we have some indicators from both sets and not just focus on one or the other? So if we focused let's say, for instance, we focused only on external success indicators that could be how much money you make, what kind of car do you drive, where do you live, do you have the corner office, how many people work for you, how many people call you sir or ma'am with a tone of respect in their voice.

Speaker 1: 48:09

All of these kind of overt, external, oftentimes societal, metrics of success. Are you a quote-unquote powerful person? Do people want to hold the door open for you? Do people want to have their picture taken with you? If you only focus on that, if you only focus on that, my hypothesis I cannot speak. My hypothesis there is that you are going to have a rather shallow experience in life and that many of the relationships that you do have will have a very transactional feel to them. And that much of your life again, if you're just fixating on external success metrics, that much of your life will involve a great deal of pressure to keep that wheel spinning. That's my hypothesis.

Speaker 1: 49:02

Now what if you only focused on the internal success metrics or indicators? What might those be? One, it's pretty fuzzy for a lot of people to even begin to think about it. Secondly, even if we came up with something so let's say that we focus on the internal stuff is how we feel. How do I feel about my success? Well, emotions can be very fickle, and so what feels good in one instance can feel crappy in the next instance. And what's funny is that oftentimes that transition is linked with somebody paying too much attention to the external metrics. We're happy that we're the highest paid person on our team until we find out that somebody that has a role that's similar to ours on a different team is getting paid 30% more, and then all of a sudden it's like oh, I'm unhappy. But with internal success indicators, how we feel does shift quite a bit. There's all kinds of different ways that that happens. Another thing is our perception right.

Speaker 1: 50:22

So another sort of process-based, potentially internal success indicator is how much did you give? How much did you dedicate? How much did you dedicate? How much is enough? And that's where a lot of my clients have really struggled is trying to understand yeah well, did I give it all? Should I have given it all? Could I have given more? It's hard for us to say no, there is absolutely no way that I could have given more. You know, let's say that you're pursuing some sort of objective and you are sacrificing your nights and weekends to pursue this.

Speaker 1: 51:05

Well, I mean, you could have sacrificed your whole relationship with your spouse in order for you to be able to focus more on this. You could have sacrificed your whole relationship with your spouse in order for you to be able to focus more on this. You could have sacrificed your relationship with your children to focus more on this. I mean, it can get pretty extreme, but the notion that we could always do more, yeah, it's hard to shake, and that's where people begin to say things like well, could I have reasonably done more? Who knows right? Because even there, the standard of reasonableness and I guess that's the law school and me talking right now, because in law school we spent a lot of time talking about the standard of reasonableness and oftentimes certain things were to be done in a workmanlike manner, as though that was an objective standard somehow. But lawyers, and lawyers in training, spend a lot of time talking about reasonable standards for a reason Because, again, humans are very adept at recognizing that more could always be given, and so at some point, when it comes to these internal success indicators, you have to make a decision.

Speaker 1: 52:20

That it was enough? Could you have given more? Probably, or at the very least, possibly Should you have given more. That is a much harder question, one that requires individualized attention and a lot of thought to weigh out pros and cons, and, quite honestly, you're probably never going to get to the bottom of that one because you, like me, do not read the future. But now, if we think about blending external and internal success indicators, hmm, well, there we start to, I think, really get somewhere. I think it's healthy and sane for us to have some lateral checks. What have other people who are like me been able to accomplish in this, whether that's based on age, demographics, income level, whatever, how early you started in that particular activity?

Speaker 1: 53:26

And, again, to draw on a physical example, when it comes to Muay Thai and Jiu-Jitsu, you have ranks. You're a blue belt, you're a purple belt, you're a brown belt, and generally there are certain brackets of expectation that come with these different ranks. If I look at somebody's rank and I see that they're wearing a white belt, for instance, I don't expect a whole lot of them. Now, are there individual variations from that? Sure, sometimes you get somebody in that has prior experience and then all of a sudden they're surprising you and you're like, wow, I thought you were just a white belt, turns out you got some more tricks up your sleeve. And then in other cases, maybe it cuts the other way. Maybe somebody has a higher rank and you're kind of like huh, I'm not really understanding that, but generally there's a set of expectations based on what other people have been able to accomplish over the years, and then generally, if you're wearing this rank, you should be able to accomplish XYZ, and so there's an element of objectivity that comes with these external metrics Also.

Speaker 1: 54:33

External metrics are pretty straightforward. You just, you know, hey, we wanted to make $20 million of profit this year. Did we? No, or yay, whatever, right, but they're pretty clear and it's easy for us to track them. Now, process-based metrics of potential success, right?

Speaker 1: 55:03

So here we're thinking about leading indicators versus lagging indicators. That could be both internal and external, depending on how you word them. You know, were you actually showing up and doing the job? So, for instance, if you're in sales, how many sales calls were you making? Zero, oh shit, and you didn't hit your sales goal. That's weird, or no, I was exceeding the number of sales calls that I was supposed to make, or no, I was exceeding the number of sales calls that I was supposed to make.

Speaker 1: 55:39

Okay, so you succeeded in part of the process, but then you still didn't achieve the end result. So then we might feel bad about not achieving the end result that we had set, but then we might feel good about the fact that it then allows us to analyze and identify was there a breakdown somewhere else in the process? So you can see, it starts to get kind of a slippery here, right, in terms of how do we ultimately feel about this stuff? And that's, I think, also where internal success indicators can come forward, and it can, I don't know, internal success indicators can come forward, and it can, I don't know, ameliorate some of the sting of losing quote unquote and I've done that to death in this instance, this episode. So I apologize for all the air quotes that I've been dropping in here, but I don't have any other way of kind of clarifying it. But you might feel bad about having lost, but then feel good about the fact that you stuck with the process and that you actually learned something from it that you then will use to correct the process the next time. And who knows, maybe then you, you know, lose the ball on item number or item C. So you nailed it with A and B. But then you know, here's one more thing that I didn't account for. And then the learning cycle continues.

Speaker 1: 56:57

But oftentimes it's those internal success metrics or indicators that can help us either feel good about a loss, as I just mentioned, or they can also help us detach from the immediacy and the pull of significance of winning or losing. What do I mean by that? Well, I think, so frequently we are so caught up in what other people want for us or what we want for others, what we wanted to be able to bring home, so to speak, and we lose sight of the fact that, in the grand scheme of things in the universe, it's probably not that important Any single win or loss, any single indicator of success or lack thereof, but we put ourselves through a lot of angst, one incident at a time, because we lose that bigger picture, because we lose that bigger picture, and so the element of internal success indicator can help buffer some of that. You know, as I mentioned, my buddy technically lost. I don't care If he listens to this, I don't care. Honestly, I don't care if he ever finishes in first place. I really don't. Provided that he's able to tell me with that smile that was coming through in his eyes Not just a smile of his mouth, but a smile that came through his eyes that he was really present and that he really gave himself fully and that he pushed himself to his limits. Like that's what I I don't care if it comes in last Shit, oh dang it, I did it again. Oh, I will. I will really endeavor to to do better at trying not to cuss.

Speaker 1: 59:06

But anyway, point is how we define success matters, and I think it's naive to only focus on internal indicators, but that it is equally naive and punishing to only focus on external measures naive and punishing to only focus on external measures.

Speaker 1: 59:39

And what the ratio is for you is up to you to decide. My only suggestion is that you put the work in to try to figure it out, because I think if you manage to get that ratio correct, that you'll be better for it. You'll show up better in your relationships, you'll be more willing to do the hard work, even if it involves loss or losing or being unsuccessful, and directionally, you will improve and that the spirit or the soul or the being of light that chose to inhabit the body that you're currently in will learn more. Anyway, hopefully this has been helpful for you and in some ways, practical as well, like what can you actually do with this? Ultimately, I hope that it's improving you. I hope that it's enriching your understanding of this world, of this universe, your experience in it, and that you choose to share it with people that might also benefit or don't. It's totally up to you. But until next time, take care of each other.