In this excerpt from the You Winning Life podcast, the host and guest (Matt Dawson, an extreme athlete) explore how to confront fear and hardship by breaking challenges into tiny, visual steps. Using surfing and mountain‑climbing metaphors, they illustrate that progress comes from repeatedly deciding to move a few feet forward, even when the body and mind protest. They identify a core “sin” as believing one lacks potential or is not worth the effort. The conversation shifts to a deeper insight: moving from trying to earn love and validation to performing extreme feats as an act of self‑love and proof of personal worth. The dialogue emphasizes that true resilience is a series of conscious, incremental decisions that keep us moving toward our potential.
You can't run away from it. Yeah. And you can't run away from it. But so how do you choose to get out a surfboard and throw it on the wave? And you're going to be knocked off the wave and get back on. And sometimes it's going to be a glorious, glorious Beach Boys-style song written, catch a wave and you're sitting on the top of the world.
Yeah. And sometimes your leg's in the shark's mouth. And sometimes, yeah. Just quickly to close the point is, you know, I think when I think about this is I'm a very visual person. So I imagine climbing a mountain, is you don't climb a mountain 1,000 feet at a time. And this, I'm telling you, this is not to sound cliché, but it's literally one step, one step, one step. And I can't tell you how many times I've been in a position where I'm like, I can't go, I don't think I can go another 100 meters. And I'll find, you know, a piece of snow or a rock or, you know, whatever it is, that's 10 feet in front of me. And I'm like, just make it, make it to that 10 feet, then I'll figure it out. Then I'll decide if I'm going to quit or if I'm going to crap my pants or if I'm going to pass out or whatever it is, or throw up. I'll make the decision. I'll make that decision when I get to that point. Yeah, you get there and I'm like, okay, there's 5 more feet. I might get to that point, then I'll make another decision. And it can be very tiring, but that's how you climb a lot of these things. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to perform. Like, that's the greatest, one of the greatest sins that we can commit is to waste our potential and not give ourselves the opportunity to perform.
I'm gonna add on to that. I would add to the sin is believing that you don't have potential.
Yeah. Or, I'm sorry, not to—
Yeah, no, go, knock it up another one.
Is not to believe that we're worth the effort. And then, because a lot of times when I started out this stuff was I did a lot of things in my life and I tried to achieve a lot of things to prove that I was worthy of fill in the blank. And primarily it was worthy of being loved. And then once I made that shift of I'm doing these things because I am worthy of love and I'm showing myself that I'm worthy of it. And I'm like, why? It's like, 'Why the hell am I out here in the middle of this desert? This is 100 degrees and it sucks.' And I'm saying, 'Well, you're out here because I'm trying to show you that you're worth the effort.' And so it's demonstrating love rather than trying to receive and earn love.
Yeah.
And I think if people looked at it in that capacity, it would really help as well.
