Brian Johnson addresses a coach's self-doubt about being under-qualified, reframing it as part of growth. He cites Seneca on dignity, the Navy SEAL motto to earn your trident every day, and James Clear's idea that trajectory matters more than current results.
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The content you're about to hear was captured during a live coaching session in the Optimize Coach program multiple times every month. Coaches Connect live with Brian, Michael, Alexandra and members of our world class luminary guest faculty for wisdom, guidance and encouragement. For more head to Optimize Me Coach. When you first started teaching and coaching, did you have times when you, you felt like under qualified because you weren't on all the time or you weren't able to regain your equanimity as quickly as you thought you should be able to?
Of course, dude, that's the definition. Like when you're, when you're setting big goals and you're going for it, you better have a voice in your head that's, that's questioning whether you're working hard enough and whether you're doing it, you know, the way that you could be doing it. Now again, we want to, we want to frame that and, and we want that to come through our daimon, which is going to have a beautiful balance of what I just described of appreciating how hard we've been working in that playful I'm watching Star wars with Emerson Yoda. Like, that dude's intense. You know, does he finish what he starts? You know, like, he's like, am I going to really train Luke here? I'm not so sure. So there's a certain heroic rigor that we need to bring and it's not supposed to be easy and you should feel that you're not doing enough at times. Now again, we do not need to lash ourselves, ourselves with shame in those moments. But Seneca, you know, be harsh with yourself at times, right? Like there's a self compassion with a proper level of pushing this, that's important. And for me, the word that arose after my playful will, of course, was dignity. So the number one thing I'm committed to, I wrote it down this morning, was to be worthy of being in a position where I can hopefully offer you some wise counsel. I can lead heroic, et cetera. To me, that's a. I don't have my wallet in here. If I did, I would pull out my dear friends, Mike Magarichi Navy SEAL heroes, Navy SEAL card. Right after you graduate SEAL training, they give you your little trident and then they give you a card that says, earn your trident every day. You're never done. You're never going to be exonerated. So your story that you should already be there is the thing that's the biggest obstacle to you enjoying right now. And if we can embrace the fact that you're never going to be there. There is no there there. Thank God for the master. The destination gets further away with every step we take. Celebrate how far you've come. And then your only focus from my vantage point should be this moment. Can you show up with that? Can you give your best? This moment. This moment. This moment. I'm working on the self mastery section for the book and for heroic right now. And James Clear talks about this in a beautiful way in Atomic Habits. He says you should be less concerned about your current results than you are about your current trajectory. So the thing that you should be thinking about is, what's my trajectory? Is my trajectory going like this? Do you response to that say that, or is it going like that? Your trajectory is going like that. There's no question about it now. You may still want it to go like that with no zigs and zags that happen and you're not willing to fall back a little bit, you know, and we got to work on that always. It's an ongoing thing, but we want it. We want to see that it's those little micro gains that, that give us the opportunity to grow. Then when your voice comes in and it goes beyond a. You know, I've got on my hero walls, right? I've actually got two of me staring at me. And he's intense, right? And yet that version of me, which is the physical embodiment for me in a. In a photo representation, whatever you want to call it, is that Yuda mom. It is that heroic version of me and he simultaneously, both things, unbelievably intense and pushing myself, my me, to my next stuff. And unbelievably celebratory of how far we've come.
We hope you enjoyed that. Part of a live coaching session from the Optimize Coach program. For more info, head to Optimize Me Coach.
