The Chip on My Shoulder That Became My Superpower with Steve Mellor | 005

And we're back. Welcome to another episode

of From Barriers to Breakthroughs. I'm your host,

Rebecca Mountain, and today I am exceptionally excited to

introduce you guys. Steve Mellor coming to us live from Baton

Rouge Louisiana, talking to us about his story and some of the

challenges, obstacles and barriers he went through to the

breakthroughs, the strategies, the mindsets, the actions, the

habits. There's a whole bunch of stuff in his story that I can't

wait to dig into to get him from that feeling of being stuck into

an actually amazing life. So welcome, Steve. I'm so glad to

have you on the podcast. I

am equally as exceptionally excited too as you

are. This has been a long time coming. We met quite a while ago

now, and so I'm just excited to be here and have some some good

conversation with you.

Rebecca, yeah, and you know, and your story is

really great. So before I dive into the story, why don't you

give us sort of the depending on what country, and Cole's notes

for Canada, Cliff's Notes for the my American listeners tell

us a little bit about sort of, like, where you where you

started from in your bio, like, what do you do? Who do you have,

that kind of a thing. And then we'll just get right to it.

Yeah. And so I tell everybody today that I'm

British born, Baton Rouge based. And typically I say that because

when I walk around conferences today, it says Steve mallor

Baton Rouge. And then I start talking, and they're like, this

doesn't make sense. So yeah. So born and raised in a small town

called Chester, England, I got into sports. Early, swimming

became my sport of choice, and I ended up swimming to a national

level. Firstly, within within Great Britain, was able to make

some great britain senior teams. So I eventually became an

international swimmer. Moved over to the United States for

college in 2005 where I swam collegiately for four years

before then going into swim coaching for a while, which then

brought me to Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 2011 2012 and I

then spent about eight or nine years as a swim coach before

then starting the work that I do today in 2021 which is that of a

high performance coach, to executives, to leaders, and more

so than anything today, to entire organizations. That's a

lot of the work that we do for my company. Growth ready. And so

it's right there in the name we you work with a marketing expert

for like, six months, and then you realize it's like, why don't

we just call ourselves exactly what we do? And so we help

organizations get growth ready for the growth that it is they

they wish to see, and they're ready to do the work for. So

that's me in a nutshell, right there.

That's a great nutshell, but you forgot

something over your sweet little shoulder. Over there. You're

also

this is the accountability I need from

people. It's like, literally everywhere we go. And I give

people that same story, my wife, like, hits me with her elbow,

and she's like, and you wrote a book, idiot? And it's just like,

yeah, I wrote a book. I wrote a book. Yeah. So, shock the world.

Shock the World a competitor's guide to realizing your

potential. It was very much a story of my greatest success

from the world of swimming. It also aligns with about 17 or 18

short stories from my podcast, previously called Career

competitor, now called growth ready, as we did all the

marketing and the rebranding a year or so ago. But yeah, it

was, you know, here we were talking about writing right

before we press record. And for me, it's something that I

learned really quickly, was that despite every English teacher my

entire life telling me how incapable I was when it came to

the ability to write, it turns out that all of that feedback

that I've been getting back then was an actual sign that I was on

the right path to writing this book, because I get to write it

in my own voice as you you are all too familiar with, and

there's some there's something about that ability and that

openness to be able to write in your own voice when you're

writing your own book, as opposed to all this different

ways in which you're challenged to write, obviously going

through English class, especially In the home of where,

you know the language itself was born. You know it was, it was

nothing but nothing but red lines and x's my entire

childhood through school. So to then write that book, I think

the first people that I acknowledge in the

acknowledgement section are all my English teachers. And be

like, who, who had the last laugh now? Who had the last

laugh now? So I hope you

mailed them all a copy. I should have. I

should have. Seriously, you're like, Thank you for telling me I

couldn't do something because I took the attitude of hold my

beer and it's hard. Like, when you look at the stats of like,

book writing, 81% of Americans want to write a book, but I

think between one and 3% actually get them out there. I

mean, because the perception we have, like, oh, you know,

everyone's writing a book and it's all out there. Yes, we need

to write these things and it looks and I'm the same as you. I

write in my own voice, and then I have to clean it up. Get off.

You can't say, like, really, can I actually, my funny, my I can't

see it's got all frame. But like, dragging on the goat,

actually. Two editions. I have the explicit edition, and then I

have the cleaned up, tiny one. So depending on if you're trying

to hand it to your child, that one right?

Bedtime Story versus not bedtime story

exactly,

if you want the raw like trailer trucker

kind of that, yeah, that's the other one. Anyway. So Steve, I

love your story, and I know we connected years ago and have

stayed in touch since. But I'm super glad that you're here

because you went something through something that for many

people would have been like a catastrophic end, right? And a

descent into madness or sadness or both, and then people often

stay there. So back in 2012 I know you talked about the

coaching that you were doing as an Olympic swimming coach, but

something happened to you in 2012 that was that just

absolutely rocked your world. Can you tell us a little bit

about that? Yeah,

absolutely. So as I, as I alluded to there in the

story, that of my my bio, I spent one year Firstly, in Baton

Rouge, Louisiana, coaching for LSU. And the promise had been

when I first came was that, listen, it's very

straightforward. You come in, you have this one year visa when

you finish school in the United States. And what we're going to

do is we're just going to, over the course of that year, we're

just going to take it on our the University says, well, we'll

take responsibility for taking care of this next visa, which

will give you at least four or five years. And so we're all

good, so come on over. We'd love to have you and me just getting

to work as I always did. I didn't really think much about

it. And then you get to about month five, month six, of this

12 month time block, and you start thinking, Hey, I wonder

what the status is with this, with this whole visa thing. You

know, I was, I was told, hey, there was this, some of this was

supposed to be finalized in the in the coming weeks. And for

then about three to four months, as I kind of joke about in the

book, like about three or four months, I kept getting told, Oh,

we should be good in a couple of weeks. I'm like, well, when

three or four months go by, and you keep getting told it's going

to be a couple of weeks by about the third month, you're like,

how many more couple of weeks are we talking about here? Yeah,

alarm bells start going off, right? And I'm looking at the

timer, and I'm like, Hey, we're getting down to the last month

or two of this 12 month clock. And lo and behold, we run the

clock all the way down, and I just sort of say what's going

on, and it turns out that people have been making decisions and

making promises that simply weren't qualified to do so

within the university, and so I was the person that felt those

consequences. In the space of three weeks, I went from mapping

out and planning the future of Louisiana State University

swimming as one of the sort of high up and coming younger

coaches in the country at the time, based on what I was

actually able to produce within three weeks, I had to have

packed my bags, sold my car, gotten rid of everything, and

moved straight back across the pond and start life over With no

network, with no opportunity. I was 2526 years old, having

really lived a life of independence since I was about

16, suddenly thrown back into Hey, shit. Where am I going to

go? Oh, Mom and Dad, could you just take me in for maybe a day

or two, or a week or two or a month or two? I have no idea

what's coming. And you talk about kind of how a person may

respond in that moment. Consider every stereotypical response you

can possibly imagine a person could do in that moment. And I

checked every single box like I I fought with my family, I

pushed people away. I hated the world. By about and this was

just to give you a little bit of a timeline. This is about

August, September, when I initially moved back of 2012 and

by December of that year, I had completely fallen into a pretty

bad spout of depression. There was few I'd gone from being a

very physically active individual to being someone who

just didn't see any need to get out of bed, you know. And again,

like I said, any person that was wanting to support me at that

time, I wasn't giving them the opportunity to and I was so

fortunate that when, when I got into my darkest point, for

whatever reason, this little former athlete in me, right at

the back of my brain, just started, started talking. It was

just like I told everybody in my life to shut up. And the last

person that seemed to be around still that I needed to hear from

at that time was this former athlete self, Steve, and it was

that little, tiny voice in the back of my brain that eventually

struck a chord enough for me to start responding. But at that

point, Rebecca like to say it was bleak, was an

understatement. I was I was living in a house with five

strangers, because I got to a point where I fought with my

family, so I had to get out of the house. I found a job in a

city that I didn't know. I'm living in this house with five

strangers, like I say, and the House has got these thin walls,

and I remember it like yesterday. I can still go right

back to that bedroom. So. I'm sat in this bedroom. I can hear

everything in every room throughout this house, and I'm

literally just looking at the ceiling, like, how did we get

here? Like, how did we get here? This was not supposed to be,

where we were, where we were supposed to be going, and here

we are anyway. And, and, yeah, like I said, I it's one of those

moments in life that you can just close your eyes and

immediately put yourself back in that room. And I just remember

being in that bedroom, hearing all this noise around me, and

just thinking shit like, how did this all happen?

Right? And so you got, you've got, to that

point, push everybody away in that tiny little voice. And

isn't it wonderful, we keep that little voice with us, and we're

just like, we can do like the La, la, la, not listening thing

for so long. But, I mean, it's like when people always try to

try to run away and find themselves, and I'm like, but

you're taking yourself with you. So like, right? But that's kind

of what the same idea is like, we're always with us, and so

Okay, so you got deported in a horrible fashion, and said

somewhere, like the job, that super quick question, the job

that you got, was it in the same line of work, like, was it in

athletics? Was it not at

all, not at all. Let's again, this is great if

you can, if you could just take a pick at, like, the complete

opposite of what a sim coach would be. No matter how creative

you got, you still wouldn't write down recruiting for people

in North America, in the mining industry, you wouldn't, you

wouldn't put that. You wouldn't have guessed that that wasn't

the one thing you would have guessed like that was not on the

bingo card. And yet, I was literally just like, hey,

listen, screw it. Find a job, do something that is maybe remotely

like you used to do. So there was a little bit of recruiting

involved in college athletics. So I was like, go be a

recruiter. Turns out that nothing about that world was

appealing to me. I went into it for maybe six months and got the

hell out of it. Turns out, there's not a lot of

transferable skills in recruiting for the mining

industry in North America once you've been a some coach. So

okay, so, so let's, let's take that picture.

So you're in a room of five people, you can hear absolutely

everything. So it's like 1000 voices in your head, but still

little, small voices, the one that you're actually starting to

listen to. You're in a job that you're like, What the fuck am I

doing? And we start to move up. What did you do? And this is why

I love this podcast, because, you know, sometimes the barriers

are put in front of ourselves are self inflicted, right? Like

we hold ourselves back. We make choices that, you know, create

this either catastrophic or just like, kind of a living. In your

case, it was just like, slap here's life. It's gonna get a

kick in the ass. Then now you have to, you have to respond.

And so you did respond. You went down, and now you're at that low

point. What did you do? So sort of a two parter question here,

and sort of this is going to sort of inform the rest of the

podcast today. So what did you do to pull yourself out, and how

does that inform what you do today?

Yeah, I love that you can even that question is

such an important question to ask, because that's what I get

to lean on now, you know, we work in this world of coaching

where certifications and qualifications and all these

things are looked at, and then sometimes you just sort of go,

Yeah, you know what makes me a great coach, the shit that I've

been through, like, that's, that's actually what makes me a

great coach. And so for me, for me, me to lean on these, these

moments. So back in back at that time, when that voice started

talking up, what that voice was, it's something I eventually

started talking with athletes when I, when I eventually got

back into swim coaching, was that, you know, we had this

thing. There's this idea in life that a chip on the shoulder is a

negative thing. It's a bad thing. It's just like, what's

it's an attitude thing. But for me, it's like, well, if you, if

you look at that chip as something that is part of you as

opposed to hurting you, then you start to think, okay, how can I

actually use this for my advantage? How can I use this in

a way to be more productive as opposed to pulling me back? And

so I've This is a term and a concept that I've now been

working on for over a decade with starting with athletes and

into the work I do now. But it really started there, back in

2012 is when I realized that, hey, that chip on your shoulder

made you the athlete that you were. That chip on your shoulder

gave you the opportunities in the United States that it did

now because some incompetent individuals made some really bad

promises that was completely out of your control. However, the

one thing you have is a lifetime of evidence that when that chip

is front and center, you have the ability to do whatever it is

you want to do, right and so for me to be able to just that

little voice like I talk about, I started listening to that

voice more consistently each and every day, and it became more of

a sense of the world. I've always looked at the world as

this thing that didn't see the potentials, didn't see the value

that Steve could bring, didn't see the outcomes that Steve

could create. You. Yeah, and eventually I got to this point

where I was like, You know what? The gap has never been greater

between where you currently are and where you want to be, right.

So do we want to live in the gap and just accept the gap for what

it is, or is it time that we start bridging that thing, you

know? And so for me, that is where the work began. I was just

simply able to make that connection, of, like, what's

that future self? What's that future status, and what might

have to change in order to make that happen? And so even to fast

forward now from 2012 and that's what's bonkers about our

conversation, Rebecca, honestly, is like, here I am referring to

2012 like it was 50 years ago, but like it really wasn't that

long ago. You know, 13 years is 13 years. And here right now,

look at my myself, my business, the family I have all these

things, like, if you told that guy when he was moving into that

house, he said, Look, dude, just if you can just get out of this

shit, if you can just pick yourself up and you can start to

wear that chip on your shoulder daily the way you have done the

first 25 years of your life. Let me tell you what's coming like.

Let me tell you what's coming like. I can't even imagine how I

would have received that in that moment, but where I was going

there is that, in terms of the work I get to do today, is that

every client that I work with, the first thing I'm trying to

help them see is that you are experiencing, or you are on one

side of a gap. That's it. That's all it is, all these problems

you talk about, all these issues that you see, all these stresses

that you're coming from, all these voices and people in your

organization that keep pulling you left, right, center, all of

these things are nothing but a gap. You have a current state,

and you have a future state. We can call that future state

whatever you want. We can call it ideal. We can call it really,

whatever you want. But at the end of the day, you have an

opportunity to decide, Is there a gap in front of me? Yes or no?

Yes, there is. What do I want to do about that gap? Do I want to

bridge that gap? Do I want to do that work? Or do I just want to

accept the fact that this is a state that won't change, and the

gap is the gap is going to remain right. And that's, that's

the world that you and I operate in. We we already know that when

we say that there's going to be, there's going to be the right

response that we're looking for from the client. However,

however, that's what's crazy, is that even the greatest high

performers today today still don't realize that sometimes it

can be as simple as just simply saying, You know what, my

current state versus my future state. There's a gap right there

right now, and I need to simply address the gap and ask myself,

What do I have at my disposal, the tools, the experiences, the

perspectives, what do I have within me that can actually

start helping me bridge set gap

right so in and I love that metaphor. I also

work on the gap, because the problem that I that I am, like,

obsessed with, which is, why don't people do the work they

know they should be doing? Because I kept coming up against

that as a coach, like, Did you do the work? No. And I'm like,

why? Right? And so, you know, off I go, and I've the picture I

have in my head is, like you have two cliff sides and a gap

in the middle. Nobody knows what's in the middle, so you

don't know how to build your bridge. And everybody's bridge

is different, right? So, and I'm sure you find with your clients,

is it's you know what they need to bridge that gap is going to

be different. We'll talk about that in a second, because I want

to ask you specifically about the methodology in your book and

how that, again, informs what you do today with your with your

clients, with the organizations you work with. But a question

for you about the chip on the shoulder, because depending on

who's listening, they will look at that as being either, oh

yeah, you know, like, hold my beer, or they'll be like, Well,

that sounds like you're going through the world like an angry

person, right? So talk to me about, sort of, the idea, the

philosophy you have about, you know, the chip on your shoulder

is not a bad thing. It's actually a really, really good

thing, because the connotation of chip on your shoulder is

negative, right? You've been like, oh, like, that's what it's

like. You push against the world you like you did when you were,

you know, in your death spiral, right? You push the world away,

you push the family away. You push the shoulder away because

you have a quote, unquote chip on your shoulder. So talk to me

about how you sort of re looked at that, because clearly that

was a huge factor in what it brought you out of that state,

and gave you that motivation, gave you that tenacity to be

like, fuck this show. I'm going from I'm going for this, and

then what I again, we're going to circle back to then how, how

you then incorporate it with your clients, but talk to you

about

that. Yeah. So the the negative connotation for me

is like we, we perceive the chip on the shoulder as this person

is using this chip as a reason to resent, as a reason to

prevent like, whatever it may be, we're using the chip almost

as an excuse for why circumstances are the way they

are in our world. And so it's very, very much this sort of

like, hey, to use the word of your podcast, it's a barrier

that we say. This chip is going to be my barrier. It's going to

be my reason for why everything around me is the way it. Is, and

I'm going to make it very clear how I feel about that, and very

few people are going to like me because of that. Suddenly, now

if we turn it around, we just say, Well, wait a second, this

very same part of ourselves that sees what we see for the sake

for the for the way it is, we can now use it as the tool to

overcome said barrier. So suddenly, now it's like, okay,

let's say, for instance, in that moment back in 2012 all I wanted

to do was blame. All I wanted to do was blame. I didn't want to

take any ownership for it whatsoever. And I just flipped

that on my on myself. And I said, Okay, if you were for one

moment, Steve, if you were to blame yourself, if you were to

bring this back on yourself. If you were to assess yourself,

you're doing all this assessment of everybody around you right

now. You're so comfortable to doing that. But what if you were

to actually now flip this chip and put it on yourself, just for

one moment? What might you say if there was anything you could

take responsibility for when it comes to the situation you found

yourself in? Turns out, Rebecca, I could come up with a list of

like 10 different things, and it's just like I still to this

day, the evidence shows it was a colossal fuck up on the part of

many other people. But when I actually go back and did the

work, just to say, but what could you have done? When could

you have intervened? How could you have maybe applied yourself?

And even harder questions, like you didn't necessarily behave

like someone that truly wanted to be there, the path that the

way in which you just sort of allowed this thing to become

what it eventually became. Why didn't you button sooner? Why

didn't you make sure that something got done like this is

how I started to talk to myself, and that was my initial approach

towards the gap to say, Okay, wait a second. Is if there were

something you could take ownership for in this thing, how

could that reflective work now help you in terms of doing

something about it, and who knows, getting your ass back to

the United States and getting back into collegiate coaching.

And to fast forward two and a half years to the end of that

little, little juncture in my life where I was back in the UK.

That's what eventually happened, and it came from me willingly

asking myself the kind of questions that I was so busy

asking everybody else. And that's that's for me, is the

beauty of the chip, is that if we can just turn it on ourselves

for a moment, the way I used to do with athletes, like athletes

would just be like, no one's ever believed in me, and I hate

all of you, because no one's ever believed in me. And I'm

like, Yeah, but do you believe in yourself? And they would just

go, I hadn't thought about that. I'm like, You're so busy

questioning everybody else belief. The only person's belief

I give a shit about is whether you believe in yourself. And

you're so busy pointing at all the fingers everybody else, I'm

not sure you've actually ever asked yourself that question,

and suddenly now they realize, like, hey, if I just turned that

energy that I'm putting out to the world negatively, counter

productively on myself, there's a world where this could become

my most powerful asset, not just an asset, literally my most

powerful asset. And for me, that's the beauty of the chip

when we use it internally, versus wasting all that energy

at times, pushing it out into the world instead. Yeah, I

mean that. That just totally gave me

goosebumps, because in the work that you and I do, we come up

against every excuse known to man as to why someone didn't do

what they're supposed to do, or take that step, or, you know, do

that self check, because it's easy and it's it's funny,

because of a couple of weeks ago, because I'm launching a

whole new division of my company, I came across that

mentality, and I can't remember where I heard it from. It could

have been like an ad that I was like, oh, because, like, just

little ear worms get into my head, and I'm like, and I'm

like, I wonder. I wonder. Because I don't think I'm using

excuses, but I wonder if I am. I just wonder. And so I was having

tea and coffee with my husband, and I started doing a self

check, right? That that whole like, sort of, instead of going

like, Oh, like this, what let's look at this is, is the external

excuse. First of all, what was my excuse? And I realized I was

using a lot, and this is coming from a person who, like, drives

hard, loves hard, does stuff, right? Nothing hold me back. But

then I'm like, I wonder if there's still been playing,

because a lot of my childhood was, you know, in guilt and

shame and all that kind of stuff, growing up in the cult

and then, you know, the different challenges I had. I

got fired three times, and I felt abandoned, blah, blah, all

that kind of stuff. And I realized that there were some

very subtle excuses that I was using, but when I said, Okay, if

I dismantle those excuses and say, but what's real, and what

can I control? Oh, my God, did I get so much more done, and I'm

already getting more done than the average bear, right? And so

I absolutely love that idea of the self check of like, okay,

ask yourself the questions you're asking of everyone else.

Look here. And what you're going to find, and this is what I'm

sure you find with other people, is they're way more resilient

than they're giving themselves credit for, right?

100% and because that's what's That's the irony

is that in those cases, like the athlete, the athlete that I just

explained there, and that was so normal in the world of and

people are surprised to hear that sometimes, like, you get to

the point of where you're on the cusp of an Olympic level, and

you've actually got this more stereotypical version of the

chip on your shoulder, like there's this attitude, there's

this resistance, there's this barrier that you put out to the

world, and that, for me, is was always a separator in those that

were great at what they did, and those that made Olympic teams,

those that competed at the Olympic level like that. That

that was it. It was just that willingness to sort of go

listen, that that very chip, in the more, more stereotypical way

of the of the term, has gotten you this far. So it's clearly

served you to a point. It served me to a point as an athlete as

well. It was like, Screw you, screw you, screw you. I'm gonna

do it anyway. And like, got it cool. It got me to a point. But

in terms of excellence, in terms of elite, it turns out that that

tiny, tiny step that's left to get you from great to elite,

from great to excellent, can be as simple as just like, let's,

let's go ahead and drop that part of you now. Let's let that

part go, because while it served you to this point, it's now,

it's now left you with this little 98 99% of the growth that

you still need to hit. That's actually what's preventing it,

that inability for you just to own the way in which you're now

getting in your own way you've got, you've used it to this

point, but now you're the one that needs to own the fact that

you're the last person, you're the last person to get past in

terms of getting to this point of excellence to being the best

at what it is you do. And all the high performers that I work

with today are guilty of that in some way. And it's not those

beautiful aha moments when you sat there in a boardroom, when

you sat on a virtual call with an athlete, as I am sometimes

still to this day, it's like you're sitting there meeting

with them, and you're helping them see, like, listen, it might

just require you looking a little bit more inward, as

opposed to so consistently outward, just to make that final

little jump, that final breakthrough, to getting through

that barrier that is preventing you from actually reaching your

true potential.

So here's my question about that. So imagine,

I'm imagining I'm an athlete, which I am not. I play baseball,

softball, softball, right? And I have a blast doing it, but I'm

old. My knees don't work anymore. So I'm imagining I'm an

athlete. I've used this chip as my driving force. You're now

telling me that I need to either let it go or change the way I am

sort of processing that, or the way that I am experiencing that.

How afraid are people of doing that? And then, how do you help

them overcome it?

Well, it's the it's the immediate realization

that you're going to get way more comfortable with me, myself

and I right. You're gonna have to, actually, and we were joking

about this before we press record, like that, resistance

that you have like you have to literally get in bed with it

every single night. You have to, you have to sleep with it. You

have to love it. You have to get to know it, befriend it, all the

things you know, you go through all the bases as quickly as

possible with that and so and I, and I say that jokingly, but

it's so serious. It's like when you start to live with it, and

you embrace it to such a point you realize this thing is just a

part of me. This is a makeup of my DNA, me challenging and

questioning that, or me trying to just overcome it and move it

away so it's never there ever again that's not going to work,

because that's going to take a huge part of me out of myself

that has clearly served me to this point, right? My challenge

is just like, hey, listen, if you can get more familiar with

it, if you can start to become significantly more self aware of

when that energy is become counterproductive, when that

energy is no longer serving you the way it could, and you can

just flip it for a moment and say, Wait a second. It's getting

away from me again. It's getting away from me again that I'm

getting I'm getting more caught up in the belief of others, and

I'm forgetting the importance of believing in myself. How can I

just bring this back? And it's just that daily practice, that

daily awareness of being comfortable with oneself and

getting to know oneself and to admit I'm really flawed. I'm

flawed, but those flaws, in a way, have served me to a point,

but now it's about me getting so comfortable with those flaws

that they can actually become my greatest asset. And so I love

that part of the work that we get to do is that you get to

help someone see like that moment when you bring it to

their awareness, the way I was talking about before, they

immediately go into a state of like, judgment. Like, oh, how

could I do that to myself? Like, no, no, no, no, don't do that.

Don't go to judgment. Don't go to judgment. Judgments. What

you've been doing to everybody else. Don't go to judgment. You

know. Now let's go to a state of acceptance. Let's actually

accept, like, this is just our energy, this is our DNA. This is

who we are. This is actually. Great part of us, but we need to

learn how to use it to our advantage as opposed to our

detriment. That's it. We don't have to change ourselves because

of this. We're just flipping the script and making it more about

how it can serve us as opposed to how it can hurt us. You know,

that's me. Like, that's, that's what I love about that work.

Yeah, and I love that because the fear that

I can like, I can imagine, because I'm imagining you

telling me that, and I'm like, Well, fuck you. I'm not letting

go of that. It's driven me to where I am today, so I'm not

letting go, which, by the way, I have had a conversation along

that line with my therapist, you know, and so. But I love the

idea it's like you're not letting that piece of you go.

You're not changing that part of you. You are actually adding

rocket fuel as opposed to dirty diesel fuel, right? So before,

you're like, kind of making a mess and it's kind of stinky,

but now you're just, like, clean burning, and you're just, you're

allowing yourself that extra, like, jump to the very, very

top. And I love that. So here's where I'd like to, sort of like,

take it, take a bit of a pivot. So we've talked a lot about,

like, different sort of strategies in your book,

because, like, we talked about before

recording a sticky note. Sticky Note makes me

happy.

You know, you talk about, like, so there's,

there's three distinct sort of stages, and then there's phases

within each one. So we've got inward step process steps and

action steps. And then each one as sort of phase one, phase two

and phase three. And what I love about this, because, again, for

those who are listening and we're watching, it's called

shock the world, a competitor's guide to realizing your

potential. You know the idea of shocking what, what drove you?

Because, clearly, because it's like, shock the self, shock the

mindset. You know, there's, there's a bunch of, there's

nine. See if I can do mental math really quick. You know,

nine different ways that we need to kind of shock the system,

right? So first of all, why do you use the word shock and then

again, in your growth ready company right now? And all the

things you do is this sort of, the methodology that you follow,

or have you expanded from here, because I know, for me, I've

written three books. I'm writing my fourth. My methodology is

like this little oh yeah, oh, I love that

you're acknowledging that, because that

helps me a lot. Immediately, be like it's been so I wrote that

we're probably exactly three years, pretty much to the day of

when I closed the manuscript, finished all the editing process

and send it off to the printers. And it went it came out October

of 2022, and everything that I was doing at that time was about

potential, potential, potential, you know, like, how do we reach

our potential? I'm obsessed with this whole thing of potential.

And not that I, not that I no longer am. I very much am. But

to answer the almost the second part before the first part of

the question, what I question, what I wanted to just

acknowledge was that the work that I'm doing today in growth

ready, and the work that I've done on myself and reflecting in

my career in sports and the work that I do with organizations, is

that as much as we can look at that ceiling, so to speak, of

Our potential, all the evidence shows in my work and in terms of

bringing the best out of people, is that when we focus more on

the what I call now the floor, the standards, the values, the

principles that we operate with each and every day, the more we

then dictate and better influence just the height of

that ceiling, You know, so when we make it about the ceiling,

when we make it about the potential, sometimes we can

devalue the process in getting there, whereas what I've come to

learn is that nothing used to drive me more insane as a swim

coach than when an athlete would would let their values and their

standards drop far below what they were capable of, as opposed

to missing out on those opportunities to do the work, to

be at their best every single day. And it's this thing that I

call the minimum standard, which I touch on in the book, is this

notion of, if we have a minimum standard, if we have this floor,

and we invest in that floor daily, all the ceilings, all the

potentials, all that kind of things, those things those

things will start to take care of themselves. It's those very

values in that, those core principles that we live on each

and every day. But now to go back to the first part of the

question, what I love about this is the it still very much aligns

with this notion of the shock, the shock, what it does is, it

implies is that this should be a significant feeling, that what

you're doing, you should notice that you're doing the work. And

that was really where I was coming from with the shock is

shock does sound obviously, it's abrupt, it's intense, but at the

same time, it's something you notice. You feel it. You

recognize that something has changed from the second ago when

you weren't being shocked to the second later, when you have been

shocked. Like that is something that you notice and that you you

recognize. And so for me, to put that word shock at the front of

every single chapter was so intentional, because I wanted

everybody to immediately get on board at the beginning of each

chapter with like, Hey, here's the next round of work. Hey,

here's the next round of change. Hey, here's the next round of

growth. And like, for me, that was that. So intentional. And

the only, the only other part of the book, though, too, I will

mention is that the whole book is based around this story of

this athlete from LSU that I took from pretty much unknown

over an 18 month period to being an Olympian for the United

States and for me, for me, like when we first talked about the

idea of him being an Olympian, I told him there and that, like

right in front of them in the office. I said, Listen the whole

way you're presenting this to me, in terms of the plan, the

outlook, et cetera. We need to do some work on that. However,

you've probably picked the only office in the United States that

coming in and sharing this with me. No one's laughing you out of

here like I am in I am in with you. I hear you. I can tell you

thought about this, but I will tell you this, if you can pull

this thing off, we will shock the world. And I told him that

right at the beginning, and lo and behold, the story came to

fruition. The kid, the kid went and did it, but at the same

time, like for me, that story is something I'll never forget.

It'll always be part of me, but it's why it made so much sense

to make every single chapter of the book a shock in itself.

Yeah, and I like the word shock too, because

it implies sometimes a little bit of pain. And you don't grow

without fear. You don't grow without pain, without

discomfort. That's why the comfort zone is not comfortable.

It is like a prison of like nail rusty nails and like solar at

the same time. It's a terrible place to hang out, but it's

familiar, even though familiar isn't good, and so sometimes you

just kind of gotta, you know, you know, get your paddles out

and glare Right, right? And you do that to yourself. But I love

how you like, okay, but you can't do it to all of yourself

all at once. You kind of have to, like, break it down into

stage. So even if, like, the current work you're doing at

growth ready is not exactly what's following here, what it

sounds like is the idea is still the same. You got to kind of

shock the system, you know, kind of like, do the wake up call,

whatever you want to call it, right? But you can't. You have

to get to that point of out of the comfort zone, out of what's

familiar, out of your current patterns, and into something

that's different, like I did a meeting with some clients

yesterday, a team of people, and I'm trying to get not only new

behaviors, but new attitudes. And so there was a very simple

tool, very, very simple tool that I needed them to use. It

was just different, basically, they were doing it backwards,

right? Instead of, you know, setting an appointment and then

having something, you know, an appointment thing, go out, they

were basically going, Oh yeah, I had an appointment, and they

were kind of logging it. And so as a high performance coach, I'm

like, okay, but a high performer doesn't log because you could

forget, you start first, and you do it that way, and that shift

people had to make, you could tell it, because they're

starting to squirm, and they're not making eye contact, and arms

go like this, you know. And you know, you read the room, you're

like, Okay, guys, so this is not comfortable. And you know, we're

not, I'm not making you do it like you know, in two days, you

got to flip your behavior where give you a timeline. But there's

an end to that timeline, right? And it is. It's so funny, like

something so simple as, like, just set an appointment before

you have it, versus logging it afterwards. Because what would

happen is the system would kick off an invitation in the past,

and then all clients get confused, right? But you know

that sometimes it's tiny shots like that, where it's like a

small little adjustment to a habit or a sta or an activity or

whatever. And then sometimes it's you like the ceiling that

someone has set for themselves is slowly lowering, like you

said, they're lowering their standards, lowering their

standards. And I wonder if so, when you were talking about

this, I'm a very visual person. We talk about that sealer. You

were talking about that ceiling. There's often the ceiling of our

potential. Do you think, in your professional opinion, that at

some point, if someone gets to master the art of self

reflection, right of anytime they go like you, they're like,

Oh, hang on. A second me, and they flip that script and they

get really, really, really, really, fucking good at it. Does

the ceiling disappear?

I think it does. I think it does 100 and that's,

and that's, for me, is the, I really appreciate the way you

allude to the pain point of the shock. And at the same time, you

also mentioned this idea that sometimes it's just the initial

shift, the initial shock, that we need just to get out of this

sort of redundant behavior, or just plateau that has been, you

know, it's no longer a plateau if it's been going on forever,

like, that's not a plateau. That's just the way of being

right. It's a pattern. Exactly so for me, the one, the one

consistent feedback I get from every and when I say every age

demographic, like, holy smokes, I've had everybody from their

from their late teens and their 20s all the way up to their 70s.

Read this book and it's the same response with every single age

group is, while they may not need the entire book, there's

something within one of the chapters that says, I had not

thought about that for a while. I appreciate you challenging me

on that, because it's helped me see fill in the book. Blank.

It's helped me realize fill in the blank, and so for me, for me

like that was that was a big part of the book, how? But now

to go back to your point, is this idea that the ceiling can

be non existent, that it can all be about if we just focus on the

standards, the values, the principles, the behaviors, and

behavior is such a big part of this, once we start to invest

fully into that, and the behavior of self reflection, the

behavior of self awareness, all these sort of things like these

are behavioral traits that take practice, daily practice. And

the irony is, of all this is that while we're doing this

internal work, we have to be brave enough to do it in front

of other people too, because typically they're the ones that

are telling us, are you doing it well? Are you not doing it well.

It's the beauty of a coach. It's the beauty of a team. It's why I

love working with organizations, as opposed to simply in one on

ones, like for me, like that, seeing someone have a moment of

self awareness in a group coaching setting, let's say, in

an executive team, that is one of the most powerful things that

can happen for the growth of that entire company, never mind

just the executive team, for that person to be seen in front

of their fellow executives. They're doing it right now.

Watch that. They're reflecting, they're practicing. They're

seeing something about themselves. They're recognizing

it, and then they're going to process it right here in front

of us, and we're going to watch that happen. That is, that is

the power of this work, that is a little shift of that flaw that

I that I speak to that immediately, to your point,

either raises that ceiling more or just completely obliterates

it to the point of Yeah. But now we've done that, guys, what's

possible now, like, think of the potential. Think of where we can

maybe go now that we've had this initial realization, for

instance,

yeah, and how freeing is that to never feel

trapped or held back, whether it's by us or circumstance or

whatever, again, again, we blame the system on, you know, the

I've always it's actually one of the things that led to me

getting fired once, because I was always of the mentality of,

but what if I want to do more? And so I was working at a, you

know, credit card company, and I was working with compliance. And

compliance tend to be, like, rigid, right? Because they're

obviously, they have to be compliant. They're worried about

risks all the time. Whereas my little, you know, creative

marketing brain was like, Bob, what if I want to do like, 7200

different versions of a marketing campaign and, you

know, all that kind of a thing. And I got myself in some, you

know, righteous trouble doing that. I actually got written up

in my performance review. It's my like, I should, I really wish

I'd kept this performance review, because it was, like, my

goal, my gold standard, but like my highest score on, like, bad

reviews. And I've had bad reviews, it was I left carnage

in my wake. And I'm like,

Oh, wow, that's evocative, wow. And it was like,

my

performance review, and I'm like, well, and

I'm like, wow, somebody off. And then I got, no, I quit that one,

that one I didn't get fired from. That one I quit. Got fired

a bunch more times, but, but that concept that I was, I've

always been chasing of that limitlessness, right? Of like,

there's nothing I can say. I can't do that. And yet I know,

you know, for most of my life, I did not do that self reflection,

and the lack of self reflection is actually what creates the

barrier. So I can push hard, I can run million dollar

companies, I can write books, talk on stages to 1000s of

people, and just hit that artificial limit every single

time it's like, wait. And so, you know, a lot of the work I've

been doing over the past couple of years as I've been working

through just some adjustments to my one on one, coaching, turning

it into hybrid, then creating a scalable model, which I'm, you

know, is going, it's just going super awesome, because I'm

trying to bring high performance to the masses at a price point

that everyone can say, I can do that, because that's missing.

You know how much what we do and how valuable it is. You know

what it costs? And anyway, so this is my mission. This is this

is my passion, but I'm never going to achieve that if I keep

that barrier, and the only way, like you've said, and I

completely agree the barrier, that barrier, that upper limit,

is self inflicted. There is no circumstance in the world that

creates that. Now, are there circumstances that make it

harder to reach that absolutely because like you, what happened

to you that was technically out of your control. But I love the

self reflection of but could I? Could I have done something? And

that's what that takes a tremendous amount of mental and

emotional courage to take that look and go, Okay, I'm going to

turn the flashlight from here to looking inside, because we might

not really like what we have to see, or we might not understand,

or it might not be clear, right? So there's certain things that I

explore within myself, and it's not clear to me yet, but I'm

just like but there's something there, and it's the but the more

I sit with it and I envision it, and there's all these different

strategies, which I'm sure you use and share with your clients

that you. Can use to achieve that clarity, but you're not

going to achieve the clarity by avoiding it and not paying

attention right to do that. So talk to me a little bit about so

we've got the whole idea of shocking. How has that evolved

into the work that you do to date with your organizational

clients?

Yeah. So where it's really shifted now is to,

again, to use that word behavior, the one, the one thing

I try to do at the beginning of every session is to help a

client see before we sit down behaviorally, how have you been

showing up since we last met? Like, yeah, you're gonna tell me

that you made three commitments. You hit all three commitments.

Awesome, great. Let's, let's talk a little bit about the way

you've shown up, the behaviors you've shown up, because we do

believe that that is what's driving these outcomes. And so

one of my favorite questions that I get to ask now have

these, like three or four questions in a worksheet takes

clients, like five minutes to fill it out every time before we

before we meet, I say to them, I say, Where have you been

experiencing Slade? Now, Slade, as a word, is a old English term

for a very small valley. Okay, so it's just this sort of

acknowledgement of just like, Hey, there's this little

potential dip that you've experienced between since we

last met and today. And what I do is I actually break that word

down into a five word acronym of stuck, loss, avoidance, doubt

and excuses. So those are the five words I use across this

term slave. Each one of those represent some form of behavior

where you've allowed yourself, maybe, dare we say it, that you

yourself may have allowed this to happen, to go into this this

slave. And you know, what's so funny is that about 80 to 85% of

the time, clients will put stuck, like it's the first one

of the five word acronym. And they're like, I'm stuck. I'm

stuck. And then we work through whatever it is they believe

they're stuck with and we quickly realize that it's

actually one of the other four. One of the other four has been

at play, one of the almost 75% of those 90 those 85% of the

times it's like, it's some form of being lost, being avoidant,

having doubt or creating excuses, and we just have to

explore a little further. But the reason I start there in the

work is that I shift it straight to the behaviors, because it

would be so easy for them to come in and be like, tell me

about all the great things, all the commitments that you follow

through with. And it's not that I don't acknowledge that and see

the importance of that. But the fact of the matter is, the

continuation of their growth will not come from the

completion of their commitments. That is, that is not how we

continue to grow. The growth comes from the consistent

attention and investment we're making on those day to day

behaviors and the moment we make it about the results, ie, the

ceiling. The moment we start to potentially create those

barriers, we start to get so caught up in the barrier, in the

results, that we suddenly now limit ourselves to the results

when, as we make it about the behaviors, the behaviors are

abundant, they are endless. They are so you know, they're so

powerful when you actually see them being given the attention

that they deserve to when a client will potentially say,

Yeah, I hit these three commitments. But let me tell you

about, firstly, the behaviors that drove those results, and

secondly, how I might want to evolve said behavior moving

forwards for similar outcomes, and suddenly, now here we are

coming all the way back to the self awareness, the self

acknowledgement, self ownership. They're starting to practice

that now, like that's the whole point of you and I existing

Rebecca, is that we're not there. We're not there to spoon

feed these people to the finish line. We're there to get them to

the point of where they own their shit. They own all of it,

and they start to now take the lead role in our work. They're

bringing this stuff to the to the sessions that they need to

be bringing for you, and I then to do what we do best, to then

consistently assess, okay, but what else are we still missing?

What else could we still be covering that gets harder and

harder as somebody grows, but it's always there. The

opportunity is always there to do that work. And so for me,

like that's, that's where my work has changed so much when I

think about where I started four years ago, and I was definitely

guilty of, you know, looking at how other people were doing it,

and trying to sort of copy them. And then I realized, again,

dude, you've got this whole body of experience from when you were

the best at what you did, quite frankly, in the world of

swimming, along with many other coaches. But you were, you were

right up there with with other people, and you had this way of

doing it there. Why are you trying to change this? Why? Why

are you not taking what worked in this world and bringing it

into this now corporate space? They may not be wearing Speedos,

but it still works. It still works. Oh, they might

be wearing Speedos, yeah. It might get

weird, yeah. It makes it interesting. Yeah, you know

that's that's so interesting, because in the coaching world,

right, when people are like, oh, did the coaching work, there's

usually a single metric that they look at, did it make more

money? Yeah, right. And yet that masks so many bad behaviors and

so much pain and so much doubt that they could be operating in

immense. It's like, almost like, mental tragedy and catastrophe,

but they're pushing through, but it's not in a healthy way, and

it's not in a high performing way. High Performance achieves

the great results, like you said, because they have the

actions and behaviors, because coming back to, like, the whole

self reflection, it's what they can control. I can't control the

market, I can't control politics. I can't control what

other people think or do, and as humans, we think we can. I mean,

how many times have you come across people that are like, oh,

you know, I'm not going to do this because, and then they

string out this crazy story about what could potentially

happen, right, whether what other people think or do or say,

or, you know, how the world will react around them, and like, 99%

of the time, we are so wrong, right? Like, I saw this little,

it's this funny little graphic yesterday. It was like a circle

with a line on my stuff. The circles like this, the line was,

like, right here, so there's a tiny little sliver, you know?

So, like, what actually happens? And then there's the rest of it

is, like, what we worry about? Yep, right? And it's just, and

that's, and that's the world. But if you take that worry and

turn it into self reflection. So whether it's worrying about the

world, because sometimes people it's not so much that they blame

the world, they just worry about it. And they're like, oh my god,

right. So some people like, well, I don't blame the world,

and I'm not gonna check

check yourself. Yeah, fine. Just to, just to

speak to that, like my I've been in therapy for like, eight years

now, eight years, nine things actually about as, about as long

as I've known my wife. When she makes a point about, she's like,

does this, does this only work because you're in therapy, or

did therapy allow this to happen? Like, I'm like, Yeah,

depends on the day, depends on the day. But the fact is, like,

I have been a I'm a product of a DNA that worries, like my

parents worried. Their parents worried. They all worried. And

so I framed it as this, like, worry, worry, worry. And my the

work I've done with my therapist is like, we can keep sugar

coating it and calling it worry, if you want, Steve, or we can

call it obsessive. We can just acknowledge that you're being

obsessive. You've decided to focus on something, and you've

you're preventing yourself from seeing any of the perspective.

You've decided that this outcome is potentially going to happen,

and now that's your only focus. You can call it worry if you

want, but that kind of protects you from the actual behavior.

The behavior is obsessiveness, and that work for me has been

huge again. Here I am able to now ask myself a better

question, as opposed to me being like, I'm worried, I'm worried,

I'm worried. I get to now say, Okay, wait, see, you're getting

obsessive about this. What is it? What is it we're missing?

What is it you're focusing on too much here, that's preventing

you from seeing what you need to be seeing elsewhere. And

suddenly I can start to calm myself in that moment simply by

just being able to reposition it from No, this is not worry,

because worry sounds like it's kind of out of my control to

whereas obsessive, it's like obsessive is I'm choosing to

obsess. I'm choosing to obsess about this. Now, do you want to

continue to choose to do that? Or would you like to make a

different choice here? Yeah. So like that, that is, it's such a

it seems. So it may seem insignificant in terms of the

difference in the terminology, but it's so significant for me,

personally, to actually separate the two and say, No, worry is

not this inherent thing that you can't control. It turns out it's

an obsessive behavior that you very much can control. I

agree 100% and my other word, so, you know, the

Your word is, like worried, my word that I can't stand to hear

that everyone hides behind is, I'm a perfectionist, right? So

it's got the word perfect. Oh, so that's so nice, and you want

it to be perfect. Oh, that's okay. No, you are afraid of

launching another one that people use all the time is, I'm

a control freak. No, you're afraid of your leadership

skills, because if you weren't afraid of your leadership

skills, you'd be able to handwrite. And a lot of work I

do is, please stop doing all the work. Yeah, like you can't. I

use a lot of mountain metaphors, not because it's my last name,

but it's also the name of my methodology. It works. Thank

you. Ex husband, last name, but it came up with came he came in

handy. But the idea is that we climb mountains all our lives,

and we strive to, like, achieve things, but over time, we start

a lot. I am, you know, it's good enough. It's fine. I don't have

time, I don't have money, and so instead of climbing the

mountain, we we go halfway, or we go like 10% or we don't even

start because of the excuses that we've been talking about

today, because we don't think we have the abilities then, because

our perception, based on the quagmire of emotions that we

have not got a handle on, is such that we look at this

mountain and it could have a 5% grade, but we assume it's like a

45% you know, or 90% cliff face, and there's no way we can do it

when really it's just a mirage that we've created for

ourselves. And so I just, I really love the idea that we

have more control than we think, and if we stop using our excuses

as a part. Because what do you think we line our comfort zone

with? It's like a padded cell of excuses, and they feel

comfortable to us, because it's not our fault, and if I don't

have responsibility, well then I can't change it. And yet, you

know again, that padded cell was full of knives, and it's not

very comfortable, and you don't like being there, so I hate that

term of. Comfort Zone, because it's the most uncomfortable

place in the whole, whole wide world. So So Steve, I have

thoroughly enjoyed this this, there's so many pieces that I

want to like, pull out and shine a light on and make sure they've

got to shake people like this part. But if you were to kind of

sort of like, as we're wrapping up, you know, our chat together

today, which I'm sure we're going to have many, many more,

because now I have so many, so many more things I want to dive

into. But for the sake of today, in this podcast, not being four

hours long, if there's one thing that you really want to like

that we've either talked about or that you want to kind of

summarize that if people are going to walk away from today,

you really want them to remember this

for me, if there's, if there's one part

that I want folks to take away today, it's like, if you can

identify that one component of self, of personality that you

say, I really would never want people to sort of know this

about me, because it's it's certainly the part that is

keeping me from being My best or the part that I know that I'm

not ready to lean into. I hope that you can just see the power

of leaning into it, the power of doing the work to get more

comfortable with it. If there is that part of you that you feel

as though, for whatever reason, has been holding you back all

these years, identify it. Discuss it with somebody, ask

them maybe if they've experienced it and or can relate

to it, and just start having conversations about this piece

of yourself that you've been so private and withheld about for

so long. And once you do that, I guarantee it will seem less

terrible. It will seem less awful. It will now seem like

this very real part of you that you can eventually learn to

love. Dare I say it, you can go from resenting this part of

yourself or hiding this part of yourself to literally loving

this part of yourself. And for me, like that is where I see the

potential for true growth, and what I really hope today, based

on my story and some of these insights we've been able to

cover that folks are going to take away,

that is something that I'm definitely

going to take away and to fall in love with the pieces of

myself that I've like you said I've been hiding or minimizing,

or just like kind of going, Yeah, I don't, I don't like that

part of me. But what if I fell in love with it instead? And

falling in love with that part of me, like falling in love with

yourself, is one of the hardest things to do, because there's

lots of reasons that we can give ourselves as to why we're not

lovable, why, you know, I got abandoning complexes from, you

know, whole bunch of shit that went on in my past. And so you

know that that whole feeling of like, oh, everyone's gonna

leave. Like, I always would say that I feel like I'm going

through life and I'm on a path, and there's, like, these

invisible wires, and every wire is attached to a grand piano in

the sky, and at any point in time, I'm going to trip a wire

and get squished, right? I'm going to make a mistake, or

someone's going to leave, or whatever, whatever. But you

know, and you think, how can I fall in love with that part of

me? How can I fall in love with that scared or angry or shame

filled kind of a person? But the beauty of this is that you can

because other people have fallen in love with us, right? We have

our parents that I love us, our spouses, our friends, our

children. There's a lot. There's at least one person in the world

that loves us, and they love us for a reason. Can we see it for

ourselves? And I often find, I'm sure you find that that's where

people struggle. So everything that you shared today, I think,

has been absolutely magnificent and so incredibly helpful. So to

get your book, Steve, where do people go to get this beautiful

book?

It is I am a small entity, so I keep things very

straightforward. Amazon is your place to find my book or or if

you want to, you can always just shoot me an email. Steve, at

growth ready.com I'll send you a direct link to buy it from me,

and I will sign it. I'll send you a little bit of a goody bag,

all this kind of thing signed yours. So I will, I will hook

you up for sure, but either way, that's where you can get the

book. But more than anything, Rebecca, I just truly appreciate

this time, and this conversation has been a true gift for my soul

to start this Friday morning as we as we speak.

Yeah, and you know what? I feel like I've

gotten a gift too, and it's something that I've got a really

busy weekend ahead, but this is something I'm going to be

thinking about, and I think you've helped me in such a big

way. So thank you for coming onto my own podcast, you know,

and chatting with us about that. So, so, all right, that is it.

We're going to wrap up this episode of from barriers to

breakthroughs. We've heard, heard a lot about breakthroughs

that we can now use, the tools we can use, and hopefully you

have something that you can put in your toolkit. Thank you,

Steve, and I can't wait for the next time when you're on,

because there's going to be a next time.

Can't wait. Can't wait.

Okay, thanks, oz, thanks so much.

Thanks.