GA 538 | The High Achievers Success Cycle with Nina Sossamon-Pogue

You don't want just the status quo. You're not okay with what you know right now and you don't need anything more. You want to do better, be better, get better at something. Maybe it's for financial gain, maybe it's for personal gain, but you don't, you're not okay with just being who you are right now. You want to keep getting better.

Today I'm excited to welcome Nina Sothamon Pogue to the show. Now Nina has a very, very, very diverse and interesting background. So she goes shares her, her story. But the Cliff Note version is that she was a Olympic level athlete, a gymnast who then went on to a very successful college, LSU gymnastics career, got into tv, then into tech and so forth. So a very diverse background. But one of the general themes behind everything that Nina's all about these days is just the whole idea of handling success, handling failure, dealing know, being resilient in situations to where things are difficult or not going the way that you planned. And so really that's the emphasis of today's episode is just, just really her story and how she's navigated that along with all the things that she's learned. And then how. I think what, what I took from the conversation was just how we can align really our, our lives and our purpose of what we're trying to accomplish as human beings with just a, just a vision. And so we had a lot of talk about kind of the difference between like the process, like Nick Saban's process versus just trying to be successful all the time and sort of that wheel, that wheel of success. So lots of good stuff. It's not your traditional Lean Zig Sigma type topic, but I think all the things that Nina's about are very, very complementary to what we're trying to do in our continuous improvement world. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 538 and then be sure to connect with Nina over social media. So just scroll down on your app. Everything is going to be linked there. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Nina, welcome to the show. How are you?

I am doing great, Ryan. Thanks so much for having me on.

Yeah, awesome, awesome. Well, I'm really excited for this, for this episode because we were sort of chatting before we hit record that maybe slightly different topic than our normal sort of Lean and Six Sigma kind of flavored episodes, but I think all the things that you're about and that you're passionate about are going to really resonate with Our, our listeners. And so right out of the gate, Mina, we like to begin with our guests sharing a quote. So do you got one?

I do. I actually have one that I wore around my neck for a long time and now it's on a bracelet on my arm. It's my favorite coat. I'm big Emerson fan. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. And I speak on resilience, so that makes a lot of sense.

Okay. Okay, awesome. Well, I told you before the interview I was snooping around and YouTube and some other podcasts and things that you've done and to learn more about your background. And boy, you've got an interesting background. So I don't know how I know your part of your background is your story. So before we maybe dive deep into the various topics of the different things that you've done, maybe just tell us a little bit at a, maybe just a high level elevator pitch about who is Nina. And then we can sort of drill in deeper into maybe different segments of your, of your life and really your career and, and where you are now.

Excellent. Thanks so much. It's a big open ended question there to start with. And I will give you the Cliff Notes version or the Blink version. I don't know. Cliff Notes aren't even a thing anymore, are they? Now you know how old I am, ladies and gentlemen. So I was very young on the US Gymnastics team. We'll start way back at the beginning. As a teenager, I was on the US gymnastics team training for the 84 games. Moved away from home when I was 13, living in that space. And then I didn't make the Olympics. And then I pulled myself together after thinking my life was over at the brave old age of 16. But then I became a gymnast at LSU, one of the top D1 programs in the nation. And I'll stay on the top line stuff. After that I went on and got into television and I was successful as a journalist, successful as a news anchor, won an Emmy for best newscaster in the Southeast. Had some big wins up there too. And then I got out of TV and switched to tech after about 20 years in television. And I jumped into a friend's SaaS startup and I had great success there. Was on the leadership team there for 12 years. We took the company public. I kind of took my winnings and left and went and did new things after that. So I can talk a little bit of tech, know enough engineering Six Sigma stuff to probably just sound like I sort of look, sound stupid to your crowd, so we won't go there. But I'm an open book. What I really talk about and what I do now, I've written two books and I speak full time. And what I really talk about now is not that stuff. What I call above the line things you'd find on my resume. I talk about all my struggles and failures and all the things that did not go right or part of as did not go as part of the plan and how I got through them and then how other people, through my research that I've learned got through things. So I can share that with audiences on how they can get through anything that life throws at them.

Yeah. Okay. So I don't mean to probe or you know, into a. Probably obviously a very not good part of your life, but I, I gotta ask about that early experience as a, as a young gymnast. Like how old were you when you first started in gymnastics?

Yeah, so I was about four when I started doing gymnastics. I was five when I started competing. And I'll tell you, you're not probing. I wrote a whole book on this and that's what I talk about all the time. I am an open book, literally. So I was very young and who have given my whole life to my sport. It was a difficult thing to lose. And it seems silly to talk about now in my 50s, way back to all those years, but this is why it's important to your listeners more so than to me. I can look back now and see that at the ripe old age. So I didn't make the Olympic at 16. And then I went to college and competed and I blew out my knee when I was 19 and I could no longer do gymnastics at all. So yes, not making the team was embarrassing. Shame I bombed a meet. I mean it was just a shameful time. I didn't even make it to the final trials. It was a qualifier after I traveled all over the world to Japan, Hungary, Germany and been on the US team. So 16 year old shame and blame and thought my life was over. The 19 year old me blows out my knee and truly loses my sport. And when I was 19, let's do a little math. When I was 19, gymnastics was most of what I knew in my life. If I do the Math, it was 75% of my life had been spent in a gym. You know, you hear young people today saying that like, it's just my whole life. I give my whole life to this sport. Anyone who's really dedicated to a sport or to music or to Whatever your thing is. So I felt like I lost my identity in that moment. But it was 75% of everything I knew in life. And I share that because I can fast forward it. And by the time I was 50 and my kids left for college, it was 28% of my life. It wasn't my whole life. I'd had a bigger piece of my life that had been in television and a bigger piece of my life that had been parenting three kids and a bigger piece of my life that had been in tech. But it felt so big at the time. And then if I play it forward even further, and if I live to be 100, you know, in this math timeline, if I live to be 100, then it's only 15% of my life. So I talk a lot in timeline thinking. Part of, you know, getting through anything is looking at your life in this timeline manner and realizing we have tough chapters. But a bad chapter doesn't make a bad lifetime.

Yeah, I'm curious. I mean, hindsight's always 20 20, but I'm sure you've been asked this, but do you, thinking back to those early years, do you sort of regret, like, essentially giving up your childhood in some ways, right, like, to live in a gym. I mean, I can only imagine how many hours in a week you were in a gym. Probably missed a lot of whatever, oh, yeah, kids were doing.

I was the weird kid in high school that left every day on the bus at noon. I didn't go to even lunch with the rest of the kids. I'd never been to a four football game. I've never been to dates. I've never done did any of that. Certainly grew up very different than most of my peers. I did regret it at the time. You know, at the time, I was just mad when I blew out my knee in college, I felt like, why did I waste? Granted, it had gotten me a college scholarship, but I felt like I had wasted my whole life in this sport, and I did not make great choices. I'm not saying I got it all right. I would get up and, like, take my two per cassette with a shot of Jaeger and think, this is the worst thing in the world. So, yes, I had that at the time when I was in that moment. But it wasn't long. It only was a few years after that was no longer my sport, that I really could look at it in the rearview mirror and see all the things that sport had given me. I've been all over the world. I had such discipline. I've had Such huge success in my life because I'm disciplined and I'm coachable. I went from TV to tech, and I knew nothing about tech. I started in the comms department just because it was my buddy's company. But I went from TV to tech, and I was a quick learner, and I could learn it and get. You know, I was coachable. I could learn quickly. That helped me in that when I was in television, all those times when you'd go live during hurricane coverage or things would go wrong, I just pick myself up and keep going. All those things, I think are from my early days of being a gymnast. I like to tell everyone and everyone listening. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything piles on and becomes part of you. So I do think, yes, at the time, I'm sure I felt like I'd wasted my life and I was disappointed in the way things were going. But now, within a few years, and then certainly now, in hindsight, realize what a wonderful gift it was for that to be my sport. The coaching that I got through that because I'm different than my siblings. I think my coaches raised me along with my parents. I got a lot of advice and became a different person because of them. The friendships I built through the sport, and again, I keep going back to it. But that discipline and coachability. Any athlete, I always say, when I was in tech, when I would hire teams of people, I was always, you know, kind of my eye was. Went to those resumes that had some athletic background because I knew they'd be coachable.

Yeah. Yeah.

So there's more to it than that.

I'm curious then, like, tv, like, how did you get into tv? And like, in New York, obviously, I saw some video clips, like, very good. Right? Like, at it. And very comfortable and natural even. Like, where did that come from?

Yeah. So after I blow out my knee, I'm at lsu, and they. In order to keep your scholarship, you had to work for the athletic department in some way back then, you don't anymore. But I had to do something to keep my. My scholarship. And I ended up working in the laundry room at lsu. And not, like, cute little gymnastics leotard laundry room. I was working in the athletic department laundry room. I'm washing football, baseball, basketball. Like, gross. I used to say my claim to fame almost was that I washed Shaquille o' Neal's jock strap. Okay, so glad I didn't stop there. But I was working in this laundry room, and I would, you know, switch out everything, and then I'd go sit outside in the sunshine. And it was in the part of the campus where all the other athletes were walking to practice, you know, so I'd see everybody else walking to practice. And here I am with this mangled leg and this big cast back in the day and, you know, trying to get my act together. And I had one of the. They didn't have mental health, you know, teams of people like they do now at the college athletics and the departments at LSU and other big schools. There was not anybody to help with that piece, but this one counselor, who was an academic counselor, would walk by every once in a while and plop down and say, you know, how you doing? And I would say something flippant, like, perfect, everything's great. But he, you know, cracked that nut and got to me and said, well, what would your life look like, you know, 10 years from now without gymnastics? What do you want to be doing? And he actually, I give him so much credit. He got me to think about what life would be like outside of that world that I was sitting in, so unhappy. And he, you know, did a little due diligence on figuring out who I was and said, why don't we get you a job telling the stories of the other athletes and working in sports information and writing, Because I wrote a lot. And so he got me my first job in sports information, which led to a job in television. My first job in television was a reporter, a sports reporter. And I went from sports to politics and politics to general assignments, and then from general assignments to becoming a news anchor and had great success on television and for many, many years. But I. I really credit him for opening my mind on what else I could be good at, you know, looking at my talents and talent stacking way back in the day, before we knew that was a thing. And he saw something in me and. And got me to see life outside of the gym.

Yeah. It's interesting how low moments in time, like a simple conversation, can really, truly change a trajectory of someone's life. Right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I've lost track of him for many, many years. And until social media and things became a thing again, I tracked him down, but I. I don't know. You know, I always say you never know how many lives you touch. You know, I don't know how many lives that. That he touched or that I've touched since. So through him, he touched.

Yeah.

But I do think that, yeah, he. He was an impetus for that. And then I fell in love with journalism. And I. You know, I have a son, my oldest son, Played baseball. And he had Tommy John surgery, you know, so he was playing ball. He was a really good ball player. His dad was a pro ball player. And here I was at this gymnast. So, like, little super jock. And when he had Tommy John surgery and lost his sport, I could see in his face the same thing that I felt. And I knew. I mean, I couldn't say it because I just sat on the back porch with him in this porch swing with his arm all bandaged and iced. And he was so sad, and it was this sweet teenage boy, but I knew. I was like, it's just going to be a matter of time until he's going to be great at something else. But I didn't say it at the time. I sat with him and let him be unhappy because he kind of had to do that. But within a. Within a few months, I said, hey, you're going to pick something else to be great at, and you're going to be so great at it. And he has. And now he's just finishing up med school, and he's gonna. He's in neurology, like, truly chose something else to be great at, and he's gonna be great at it. So.

Right.

Yeah, it's a. It. It's a moment in time. It's a bad chapter, but it's not your whole life.

Right?

Right.

So I know something that. That you've. You're passionate about is someone might call, like, a hype, like, high achievement. Right. Like high achievers out there. And you've talked about something called the. The success cycle. Like, what is that all about?

Yeah. And I think this is something that everybody should think about a little bit. We can. We can put ourselves in this spot. So the High Achievers success cycle is sort of the stress cycle that we all live in. And it's because people like you and me and anyone who's listening to this podcast, you actually are already in this cycle because you don't want just the status quo. You're not okay with what you know right now, and you don't need anything more. You want to do better, be better, get better at something. Maybe it's for financial gain, maybe it's for personal gain, but you don't. You're not okay with just being who you are right now. You want to keep getting better for some reason. So you're already trying to achieve more. And so what this looks like is if we are at the beginning of the year, if you're a person who sets goals or maybe you have KPIs you have to hit or maybe you have, you know, some weigh, a vision board that you put together that you're trying to, you know, manifest something. But you, you're working towards something. So the success cycle is, hey, you set the goal, New Year's resolution, a number or target, a financial target, whatever could be a vacation you take, could be whatever. You set the goal and then picture it as a circle. You try some things and then you figure out what works. And then you work really hard at it. We're going around a circle here, try some things, work really hard at it, and then we get to work and do the hard work. And then we're persistent because we really want it. We're going down, going down, going down that road. And then towards the end, it's really hard because that's just the way life is. And so we have grit. So we keep pushing at it because we really want this thing. And in the end, we're all the way around this circle, from the learning to the trying to the doing the work to the working to the persistence to the grit. And then we achieve. We're back at the top of the circle. We achieve the thing. Yes. We take the vacation, we get the promotion, we buy the house, we get the girl, whatever it is. And then you know what we do? Start over a new target, go around again. So this is the success cycle. We may celebrate, I hope you stop and celebrate your wins, but we celebrate for a second. And we do it each year. We set new goals for the. At the beginning of each year, if you're in sales, you get your, you know, you carry a number and every quarter you carry that number. And then you gotta work towards it. At the end of the year, you get to be happy for a moment. Maybe you make Presidents Club, maybe you get whatever the bonus is, but then you go back to zero and you just start all over again at the beginning of the year. So this is this success cycle, also the stress cycle of constantly being what I call in the game. Do you remember, Ron? You'll remember this. I don't know how old you are, but I'm guessing you got a little gray hair. You might be not too far from me.

51.

There we go. You're in. You're in the game. Do you remember those old metal merry go rounds on the playground? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You jump on it. You jump on it. Like burn the back of your legs. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. You jump on it. Kind of burn the back of your legs. You'd Stay until you're sick. There'd be some bully who'd be like taking his foot and smacking your fingers, trying to get you off, you know, like stomping on your hands anyway, so you, you stay on as far as you could and as hard as long as you could. And then it would throw you off and you'd end up in the dirt because back then it was actual dirt. Remember that? And then it would slow down and then what did you do?

Jump back on.

Yeah, jump back on. We're the kids who are in the game. No matter how many times we get thrown off, we're going to jump back on because we want to do more and be more and you know, be in the game. We're not okay with status quo and just flatline. This is what it is. So I think that that's that high achiever success cycle, that's that churn that we're all in, that spin that we're in. And in my head I see it as all of us, you know, grown up kids just playing on the playground, getting thrown off and jumping back on.

So I'm curious though, do you think that that's a healthy way of approaching life or like, you know, I'm no, I'm no Nick's. I mean, I'm no Alabama fan, but, you know, I do appreciate Mr. Saban and all of his wisdom, you know, and talking about, you know, the process, falling in love with the process, you know, Alabama football player is like, it's. The wins are going to come when you win every moment of every day. Right. And you focus on the process versus the championships. The championships will come when you follow the like. So where do you align yourself? Are you more like focused on the process or the success cycle or is it sort of the same thing?

It's a little different. I, I like now I went to lsu, so I'm not saying anything. I know, right? You just did that on purpose. Because I'm not going to say I'm.

An Ohio State guy, so you probably, you know.

Okay, that's okay. My sister actually taught there. I will not say anything nice about Nick Saban or agree with him just because. No. On another note, I need to do my silly little hand clap here. Anyway, I, I don't agree with that process piece Completely. Completely. When it comes to our lifetime, maybe for sports and for in the process and wins and losses, but in life, I don't think we're always going for the win. We're trying to build a successful lifetime. So in Your head like picture what does success look like? You picture like shiny car, swimming pools, jets, like that's probably what people like. That kind of idea of what does success look like come to you. But what does a successful lifetime look like? It is not the wins, it's not the shiny. It is a lifetime of constantly achieving and learning and growing and being around people we care about. Success looks different for me than it does for you. Only you know what success looks like for you. So my thinking is instead of just the process and always going for the win, it is enjoying the journey as some people would put it.

Yeah. And in fairness to Nick Saban, I think he's actually saying the same thing as you and that yeah, she sure they're going to ultimately try to win right in the end. But sort of like even within our continuous improvement world, we would say, you know, do fall in love with the process of improvement. Like, like find joy in the day to day grind, if you will. And you know, and then, you know, like you said, celebrate the wins along the way. But it's not about the wins necessarily. It's about, you know, getting up every day and doing your best kind of thing.

Yeah. And I forget exactly. For your audience, it's not always like first pass, yield. It's what you learned, it's what's your root cause analysis. Let's not make sure we don't do that again. It's all of the things that become the learning process. So in my world, more so than the process, I really lean into the struggles and the failures. Where are you learning? Where are you growing? The word resilience? I didn't even know I was studying that for a long time. But the difference between the word persistence and resilience I find fascinating. So persistence is going at it like all the time, doubling down, going hard, keep going in this direction. That's not resilience. Resilience, if you look up the definition of it from the center of resilience, it's your ability to adapt in a positive way to whatever happens in your life. So it's the adapt, pace piece of it. You can't just keep going. The best example I have for this is January 2020. You woke up, all of us did. We Woke up on January 1, 2020 with our new Year's resolutions, ready with a whole year ahead of us. I was going to like hit my financial targets, I was going to lose some weight, I was going to build better relationships. You know, I had all of my, like so many of us do. I Had all my goals set for the year. And then what happens? The pandemic Covid hits and we can't just double down and go hard on those plans. You can't do the vacation you wanted to do. There's no planes going anywhere. You can't just hope for this, you know, push hard for this promotion because you're hoping your company stays, you know. Yeah, solvent. So it was. We had to adapt in a positive way to whatever was happening around us. And there are many different ways you can do the adapt in a positive way, but that's that if it persistent, you couldn't just go hard and double down and have a great year in 2020. The people who were resilient looked at it, got to acceptance, they went through the stages of grief, they get to acceptance, and then they move forward and they adapt to what's happening around them, to their environment in a positive way. And there's a lot of examples of people who really did that well. And the companies who did the best and the individuals and the entrepreneurs who had the most success during that time when everyone had to change were the ones who got to acceptance quickly and adapted quickly and made those changes anyway. So the persistence and. And resilience are different. So this word resilience, I didn't even know I was studying it for a long time until I hit that and I realized, oh, that's what my life has been. I'd hit moments in my life where I just couldn't keep going in that direction. It wasn't going to be a viable option, you know, So I had to adapt in a positive way. And it doesn't have to be blowing out your knee. You know, a divorce is that way when you know any. That's not part of the plan. You don't get married plan for divorce. It's not part of the plan. So you have to adapt in a positive way because your world's not going to be the same on the other side of it. When you get fired, you've been working hard at a job, you get fired, you have to adapt in a positive way. These big things that hit us and take us in a new direction. So the adapt piece is what I really lean into.

Yeah, yeah. I was, I was thinking while you were talking about that, I never thought about the difference between persistence and resilience. And I totally agree with your. Your definition. I wonder if. So like, obviously you need to be resilient. I think of in a parallel way, even though they're totally different. I think about like the virtue of fortitude, having courage, being courageous. And they say, well, so there's this idea that, well, people who are brave and have courage, that they don't. They don't battle fear. Well, it's not the case at all because without fear, really, you can't be courageous. Right. There's nothing to be courageous about. Right. And so, like, that's this idea that fortitude, people with high fortitude or very brave people, they're never scared? Well, no, they might be scared a lot, but they battle through it. Right. So maybe this is your resilience. I'm wondering, is perseverance sort of like, you know, the. The athlete, you know, who's doesn't want to get out of bed, but they got to get up day after day, Things are going well, training is going good, I'm getting better, hitting a PR every, every other week and all the rest of it. This is this perseverance, sort of like maybe not necessarily the good times, but there's nothing bad going on. You just. It's the grind, if you will. Is that where sort of perseverance kind of comes in?

Interesting. I think that is discipline. The athlete who doesn't want to get out of bed, that's just discipline. You don't have success in athletics without discipline. That's you, you know, that's part of it. Perseverance is going hard when it gets harder. I guess I think of it that in my head, when things get much tougher and you keep going, that's perseverance, fortitude. Your courageous piece was really interesting. It got me thinking about survival. Someone once asked me the difference between, like, survival and resilience. Like, and I think of it this way too, when you survive something, say you. You climbed a mountain, you survived it, you were in a horrible accident, you survived it, something happened, you survived it. That's. You got through it to the other side. That's survival. Resilience is everything. From that point on in your life, your resilience is all the things you learned from that accident and from the overcoming. How you take it into the rest of your life is being resilient. So the resilience is how you've adapted. It's. It's the things you've learned from that experience and how you live the rest of your life. On the other side of the thing, you survived.

Interesting.

And I don't think courage. I don't think courage and resilience are go hand in hand. Absolutely not. There are plenty of very resilient, even young children and people who've gotten through, you know, wartime in their. In their countries, or cancer.

You know, a young child gets cancer, you know, awful at that.

I have a friend who was a college football player who was paralyzed in a boat accident, and he is paralyzed from the chest down. A little younger than I am. He's married, he has three kids. He's a three time Olympic paralympian in wheelchair rugby. His j. His name's Joe delagrave. Y' all can Google him. He's a great guy. He's also does some speaking. He's actually the head coach of the wheelchair rugby team right now. And I see him as resilient. Like, what an amazing story of resilience. Yes, it took courage, but really it took so much more than just the courage to get in the chair. Yeah.

Yeah. So very cool. So another thing that I've heard you talk about, Nina, is the highs. What is this all about?

Yeah, so I think, you know, when I think about my lifetime timeline, a lot of people will talk about, you know, the now what moments is what we've been talking about. So you get injured or something happens or you lose your job or, or your product, you're working on fails, whatever it is. Those are those now what moments at the bottom, like when the bottom falls out. There's also these highs, these moments. Like you just, like, we took a company public after all that long stretch to the IPO and the roadshow, and it's so much. We took that company, it was such a high to take the company public. Athletes who win the Olympics, like they've trained their whole lives, they win the Olympics and then they're on this highest pinnacle, literally, like, you can't get any higher than being the gold medal in the Olympics. And the reporter says to them, this is the best day of your life. And they are 16 years old, or maybe they're 22 years old, they're like, oh, this is. There's only down from here. Like, this is the best day of my life. You see this in young actors, child actors, and obviously in athletes at the Olympics. We have to learn the word. This is where I'm talking about the highs. Or still these now what moments? Now what? Same thing at the bottom. Now what highs? Now what those high. Now what moments. I always say you have to just use the word yet. We have to learn to use that more. It's the best day of my life yet, you know, it's the. This is the hardest thing I've done yet. But we. The now what moments at the top can be just as difficult to find a path forward as the ones at the bottom. Because we work so hard towards something and we hit the highs, there's still now what? And when something hits us and it knocks us down, there's this now what. So the idea of resilience is adapting in a positive way through this journey that is life, you know, to anything that happens in. The highs are. The highs are included in that. It's what I. That's what I mean by the highs.

Yeah. It's interesting. I know that you've. That you've studied the Stoics a little bit, and I love. I love reading and learning from the Stoics as well. And. And I've actually coached new sports over the years, various sports, and especially if I'm coaching, like, high school boys in particular, you know, they're so emotional. And I coached football before, and, you know, these boys, I would. I would just. My message to them was play in the middle, you know, and, you know, it's okay when you make the great play or you score the big touchdown, okay, first of all, hand the ball back to the referee, act like you've done it before, you know, celebrate a little bit, but then get back to the middle.

Good job, coach.

Conversely, you blew it, you know, and blew the coverage or through the interception or whatever it was. And you're feeling so bad. Get back to the middle. Right? And so in a way, like, that's something that I've tried to instill in and even my children is, is control what you can control, and that's your reaction to the stimulus that is presented to you. Right? So, like, where do you fall on that, the whole idea of the Stoics and kind of staying neutral.

I am a huge fan of stoicism. I've spent lots of time in that space. Love Ryan Holiday, love all his books. Could sit and listen to Marcus Aurelius. Dissected a different 50 different ways from lots of different people. But I'm on the same page with you that you have. All you have is your reaction to what is happening around you. And in the middle. I like the, like, fall in the middle part. What I used to always tell my kids. So my daughter would come home. She was a beautiful dancer. She danced with Joffrey New York. Like beautiful ballerina bun head dancer. Or my son. One son played basketball, the other one played baseball. Very competitive athletes, all of them. But I used to always tell them, whether it was at schoolwork, you know, in their education, if they did took A test or if it was on the playing field. There's always somebody behind you that wishes they were you and there's always somebody ahead of you. You. That's just the way life is. There's always going to be someone if you are the best at the best. In high school, there's a lot of people in college that are already way ahead of you, you know, and then if you're in college, there's the pros who are ahead of them. And even if you're a pro athlete, that the playing field changes all the time. And there's people who've, you know, been a pro athlete and also, I don't know, whatever their level of success is, raised a family or started a company or, you know, went full Michael Jordan and owns his own empire, whatever. So there's always someone ahead of you and there's always someone behind you that wants what you have or wishes they were as good as you. So that's not so much in the moments like you had. I, like, find the middle. If you're in the middle of a game, find the middle is good because you have to get your head back in the game in that moment. But in this level, this is more of a gratitude. Practice is there's, you know, I guess it's more so than being in the active part of a game, but this gratitude of someone wants to be where you were. If, if you have a job right now, you are probably not the only person that applied for that job. And out of all the resumes and the interviews, you got it, you won. Somebody wishes they'd have gotten that job, the one you're doing right now that you're bitching about or complaining about. You can edit that if you need to.

But.

But someone also applied for that job and didn't get it. Yeah, yeah, so. Or got into the school that you didn't, you know, didn't get into the school that you got into or, you know, a million different things. Someone wishes they were where you are. So there's always somebody behind you and there's always someone in front of you. My. My counsel to my kids for their whole lives has always been, hey, and when they were little and then when they were like little tiny kids going off to kindergarten or then in middle school and then in high school, and even when they're off to college and now that they're adulting, they hear me say it all the time. I'll say, hey, go be you. Everybody else is taken.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah, go be yeah, go be you. Everybody else is taken.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's beautiful. Awesome. All right. Hey, this has been a lot of fun, Nina, if folks want to connect with you personally, what's the, what's the best way?

Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. Nina Saucerman Pogue. I'm right there if you have an event you want me to speak at or if you just want to reach out and learn more about the work that I'm doing. If you'd like to follow me on social, I do a lot on Instagram and it's Nina Speaks. But it's. There are several Nina speakers out there and their other ones are lovely. Lovely and effective as well. But so mine is Nina Underscore sp, as in saucemanpog. Eaks. So horrible. We thought we were super clever. We came up with it. Horrible thing to say on a podcast. But it's Nina Speaks. So you gotta do Nina Underscore before you start hitting Speaks and you'll see it.

Got it. Okay, well, we'll, we'll link to it in the show notes. So everybody, you know the drill to scroll down in your app and we'll have it all there linked up.

So, but I'm all over social. You can find me there. Reach out. I always answer personally and I appreciate any feedback or I, I love to have the conversation and be a part of it.

Wonderful. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me, Ron. All the best to you.

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