Bill Gallagher talks about chasing courses and coaching to fix himself until he watched a senior instructor fail and realized mastery has no finish line. An elderly fitness trainer kept training into his 80s and 90s. The point: continuous development is liberating, not depressing.
Oh. Have you ever felt like you were never gonna be good enough? No matter what you did, it was never gonna be enough. You were never gonna be quite good enough. You were never gonna measure up. There's always gonna be something more. Well, that used to plague me, and I would do thing after thing after thing to try to make it better, and something shifted. I'm gonna share that with you in just a minute. Hi there. My name is Bill Gallagher. I'm the Scaling coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. And we've got hundreds of tips and conversations and interviews and things like that on this and much more@scalingcoach.com or wherever you get your podcast and video content. So find that whole back catalog, everything to do with people, strategy, execution, cash, and the leadership required to grow and develop your company@scalingcoach.com. so let me tell you about this. So for years, I struggled with this. I would do program and coaching thing and course after course to try to somehow fix myself with the notion or the idea that maybe someday I'd be good enough. Maybe someday I'd be done. And then one day I was involved in a training program, and I was really working at something at a skill around public speaking, which is something I've done a lot of and at least I'm fairly comfortable with today. Anyway, I watched somebody who was a senior teacher, instructor, that kind of thing in this work, and I watched him just screw up, like, royally, like something that I didn't think that really at that point and at that stage that I would have to do. And I sat there watching this thing, and I'm like, wow, he's really not doing well at all. And he's supposed to be like my instructor, and he's demonstrating something right now, and he's doing a terrible job. And I didn't think that I would necessarily do better, but I had this other insight that maybe no matter what, I'd never be finished. And that settled with me for a moment. It was depressing, like a familiar thing, like I'm never going to be good enough or whatever, like a hopelessness. But then actually came some liberation in it. And I realized, kind of, what am I doing here? I'm trying to get better at something. I'm working on a skill, and I'm watching someone deal with something, and what if I could actually just enjoy the process? What if my whole life was never going to be finished and I was going to reach the finish line, right? The ending of my life not having finished anything, like core, like Being done with it, right? And I found myself more and more liberated by that. It became a personal value as I discovered this idea of always being engaged in training and development, always be engaged in a lifetime of mastery. And I began to see mastery as a way to live life, not a destination I was never going to. I might achieve higher and higher levels of things, but there'd always be something else, something more to work on. And that, like surrendering to never being done was strangely and perversely liberating. If you hear something in this for yourself, then I invite you to lean into it and make it yours. I found an image and an example example to go along with mine. There was an old. An old trainer, like a fitness guy who lived his whole life training and that kind of thing. And he, you know, late into his 80s and 90s, he was doing extraordinary fitness feats and that kind of thing. And I thought, isn't that guy hilarious? Late into his life, he's still trying to do things that very young people are doing. And I thought, wouldn't that be cool to live my life that way, right? To be still working at something right up to the day that I die, the day that my life ends. And hopefully it's a long and healthy and awesome one filled with great accomplishments. But I'd still be at work on myself. I'd be a work in progress until the story's over. And anyway, that's very liberating to me. I hope it makes a difference for you. I wish you all the best. Keep scaling up. We'll talk to you again next time.
