Colby Sharma Recap: Embracing the Underdog

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In our last episode, we had the one and only Colby Sharma. He's a leading resiliency expert focused on helping organizations unlock greater resiliency in their teams to produce great work and and master deep change. I want to give you some of the key takeaways. And as you know, if you don't get a chance to listen to the full episode, I always try to bring out those really powerful lessons and distinctions that our special guests share in the hopes that one might land at the right time for you in your life, personally or professionally. Colby is a best selling author of the Curveball. It's a book all about grit, adversity, and winning the game of life. And he's also just released his second book, the Underdog. The Underdog is a story about how to take your past challenges and use them to your advantage. So just to get started, here's the first takeaway. And it's quite interesting. And I think for me initially when I thought about this, like, oh, I've not done that in the past. And it's sit with your self doubt. Self doubt is a friend. And a lot of my focused on self doubt has been how can I turn my self doubt into self belief. But perhaps there's something in that, that it's okay to sit with your self doubt for a while. Now my take on that is we don't need to live there. We don't want to partner with self doubt. But understanding self doubt, where it's coming from, is there a belief or a limiting belief that's driving that self doubt? And to me, self doubt is, is a product of fear. There's beneath some doubt lays some fear. So to me, it's a really interesting approach is to think of really embracing it. Sit with your self doubt and self doubt is a friend, in Colby's words. So a couple other takeaways.

Keep looking at the bigger picture, right? And I think that this one's really interesting. You know, building your awareness allows you to make much better decisions, and better decisions generally lead to way better outcomes. Right. So that bigger picture is essential if you're a leader in life, a leader as a family member, leader of an organization or a team, or you want to be a leader, you need to have the ability to think big and to look at the bigger picture, be more lateral in your thinking. And to me, that process is a practiced skill. It's a decision to go, oh, I'm busy being busy. Okay, I need to get the head up and look around. And sometimes if I'm working with professional athletes, it'll be simple as, hey, eyes up. You're in the heat of action. You've got the head down, you're driving with the ball. Get your eyes up and see what's going on around you around the field. It's no different for us in life. Get your eyes up two, three, four times a day, get your eyes up and ask, where am I headed today? Where am I headed this week? What's this month about? So few take the time to think about where they're headed over that longer term.

Another big takeaway was this. Try to become aware of your ego, how you're showing up with it every day and how it might be maybe playing a role in your life. We've all got ego. And just to expand on that, I look at ego as two things. One, it's everyone's greatest obstacle where it shows up and stops us, and we say things we shouldn't say and we're not proud of it. But then on the other side, I see it as everyone's greatest opportunity, ego. And to make the ego an opportunity, it's about just becoming aware of it, deciding how you want to work with it, deciding where you want to embrace it, and also deciding where you want to say, shift it to impact it. And a really bad day for the ego is a great day for the soul. I've go back in my life. I can think of some really bad, awful, egoic moments, but man, oh man, I learned a lot about myself. And sometimes in those ugly moments, I've learned, hey, that's who I don't want to be. And from a soul perspective, isn't that great. It felt terrible at the time, certainly. I remember my early 20s, just how I was carrying myself and thinking and acting, and it was very all about myself. But some of those moments where I was unproud give me the opportunity to go. That's not who I am. It's not who I want to be. It's not how I want to treat others. And so, you know, I think really embracing your ego and just looking at how you can shape it and ego should be shaped. And just to finish up before we share the last takeaway, that if you love lead on purpose, if you're all about leading on purpose, and you want to continue to connect with the show, with the amazing guests that we've got coming up. In fact, this weekend with got the one and only Richard Stengel. Yes, Richard was the former editor for Time magazine for seven years. He was Barack Obama's former under Secretary of State and he also co authored Nelson Mandela's book, Long Walk to Freedom. He's a pretty special character, so please come and check that out this Saturday. But if you want to continue listening to these great interviews with these amazing people, please do me a favor. Go and subscribe. If you're on Apple Podcasts or you're on Spotify, please hit the subscribe button so that you get a notification when a new episode is released. And next level, if you're really kind and you really want to go next level and help me out, then please leave me a rating and a review that really helps to promote the podcast and get in front of more people like you. People like you who are actually prideful in their growth, who are intentional with where they're headed in their lives. So honestly, I would really appreciate it. Just taking that bit of time to do it would be amazing. So one last share from Colby Sharma. He believes that people with learning disabilities are here to shift the way things are done and show up with a new way of doing things and shape the world in their way. And Colby shares this from a place of experience. He went to a school that helped him in his younger years with some of his learning difficulties and he sees the world in a different way. So I really believe that we could embrace that mentality of people with learning difficulties or as Colby says, learning disabilities, they can shift our planet, shift our perspective, shift the way human nature evolves. So I challenge you to really open your mind this week. I want you to step in to that open mindedness and challenge your beliefs and really look at where the ego is showing up. Look at where self doubt creeps in. Embrace it, challenge it, reshape it. Look, I hope you enjoy today's takeaways and I'm really looking forward to this weekend's interview with the one and only Richard Stengel. But for now, please get out there and lead your life on purpose.