Don't Put Me in a Box (One Year of Proof the Plan Works)

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In Formula 1 racing, "Box, box, box" is the radio call that means that it's time to come in. You come in for fresh tires and a reset so that you're ready for the next stretch of the race. Going into the box is not the problem. Staying there is. Someone put you in a box today. Today also, and you've probably been sitting in it for a lot longer than a pit stop. Maybe you did it yourself, calling it a marketing problem or a confidence problem or your boss's problem, when the truth is really simpler and much harder to say out loud. Today I'm showing you the two moments that put me in that same box twice and what got me out of it. Why? Because I want you to get back to your own hardcore work. The kind that moves the world forward. Today we're celebrating 1 year on the air. 1 year, 55 episodes, and the plan that worked underneath the whole time. Let's get into it. How come some people are always winning, like they're just running downhill loving life, while others of us are over here thinking, if I take a break, everything will break?

You say, well, Don, you know, you're special, you're different, you wrote a book. What, you know, it takes, it takes risk after risk after risk after Are you delivering results from a similar constant state of urgency?

And are you tired of feeling like you're the only one who actually cares about doing exceptional work? I'm Shelly Rood, business coach and host of Hardcore and At Ease. I knew how big of a competitive advantage it was that I didn't want others to know what I was doing. As a former military intel officer and a broadcast marketing exec, I know firsthand that your ambition Your most powerful asset, but without the right approach, it's also your biggest liability.

I'll be right back. We have indirect fire. I have to go. And I'd go stand in a bunker until it was all clear, and then I'd go back and the class would still be going on.

Sound familiar? Come along each week for candid conversation with people who are obsessed with excellence. We share what to do every day to minimize stress, make smarter decisions, and finally get the people around us to match our energy. Join the thousands of mission-driven leaders who have figured out how to keep their edge without going over the edge. This is Hardcore and At Ease. That was day one. And today, this is day one, one year later. So here's what happened in between. Remember this moment with me. You're in a meeting. You're very excited because you have this new idea that you're about to lay on the table. So you present it and you watch the room react. They're reaching for a word to describe it for themselves, and you're watching them as they try to grab whatever words they can to come close to what you had imagined in your head. Most of them aren't fitting, and you're kind of stuck. You kind of let them flounder around and seek those words themselves, because the truth is that you didn't really have a better name for it either. Now, I called this for myself a marketing problem. It wasn't. It was a category, a category that nobody had named yet. Stick with me here. You see, 55 episodes ago, I didn't know that yet. One year, every week, and today we're not going to do a recap. This is the moment that I finally say this thing plainly, out loud. Instead of just dancing around it in a social media post or a guest interview. So here's where it started. I first noticed this box early, before this year, before this podcast even had a name of its own. I was sitting across from someone in a normal business networking meeting trying to describe what I do, and I watched their eyes look anywhere other than me. I could physically see them shutting down. Executive coach, motivational speaker, some kind of military veteran turned something, whatever. None of it landed cleanly. And the person I was talking to was just picking any of these words, and I let them because I didn't have a better way to describe what I do either. This show became a landing place for the teaching that a box can never hold. This is a landing place. It was always meant to be that. This podcast is my cornerstone, and I built it specifically to hold my thought leadership. You see, I understand that I'm so much bigger than just one tight little group of here's what I teach, but I had to figure that out for myself, and I needed permission to help me do that. Everything else flows from this podcast. Hardcore At Ease is the one thing that every person listening has in common. This isn't a job title. It's not our industry. It's what we call an aspirational identity. This is the person, the being. This is what we're all aspiring to become: hardcore and at ease. The cornerstone that we've created here is now held, but that box that I was feeling constrained in It just moved somewhere else. And where it moved— and it moved to our Women Veterans Support Services— there was a question that sat underneath all of the good work that we've been doing since 2019. And we knew the answer to this question, but nobody wanted to say it out loud. So the question is, why don't we as military veterans enjoy veteran gatherings? I'm speaking specifically to the women here. You see, a veteran gathering is not a military gathering. When you're in uniform, even when the mission goes sideways, you've still got left and right limits. You've got structure and order. You've got shared values that are really holding the room together, no matter how crazy things can get. When you take that uniform off, none of that comes with you. And what's left is like the wild, wild west. We can go to the local bar every other day, twice on Thursdays. And you see, somewhere along the way between being fun in our 20s and hitting middle age and then approaching whatever's past middle age, somewhere in there, our lifestyles stopped being a choice and they became a way of life. And the harsh truth is that this way of life is not one that I choose to live. You see, I've walked into boardrooms as a woman and I've been treated like an equal. It's a wonderful feeling. I've also walked into a veteran event that same week and been talked over, diminished, made to be much smaller than I know who I am. My natural response in that moment is to fight, and I know it is with you too, my woman veteran. So you fight, and around every corner of that fight is— you got it— another fight. It's just round after round of having our fists out, getting pummeled on, and we're so proud that we're still in the fight. You see, this is a loop that doesn't have an exit built into it. Einstein is often credited with the idea that when you state a problem clearly enough, it gets you most of the way to the solution. We decided to simply state what we recognized was happening in the veteran care space. We stop fighting a war that we're never gonna win by fighting harder. What my team in the Woman Veteran Care space is doing is we're turning our fists into flowers. I know that sounds cheesy, but it hurts my heart when I see so many angry women veterans. It doesn't have to be this way. I know it doesn't. And I've established a team that is creating our own category of healthy, fulfilled women veterans, and we're setting that as the standard. So now that you know why we turned the fist into a flower, here's the moment that I finally understood why I kept building this box for myself. If you zoom out from this podcast, and if you zoom out from the women veteran work that we do, this is bigger than both of those. What I'm talking about here is my whole company. It's mission, ambition. It's the mission underneath all of it. It's what I'm here to bring into the world. That's the wall that I keep hitting over and over. Thought leaders run into this all the time. In every part of the business, I kept reading issues with this. I've been told so many times that it's just a marketing problem or a messaging problem, something that I hadn't explained well enough yet, but it's not that. In fall of 2025, a different word arrived into my life. Category. And the phrase that comes with that, category design. I found language for this the first time that I went through a free assessment from Macy Robeson. It's called the Thought Leadership Archetype Quiz, and there's a link to it in the show notes in case you wanna take it yourself. My top 2 results were resonant orator and category designer. Christopher Lockhead and Eddie Yoon. They're the masterminds behind Category Pirates, and they have spent months teaching me how to see my own business as a category, not just a company. This mentorship is why I can say any of this out loud today. And so their work is linked in the show notes as well. Of course, you can pick up their new book, Creator Capitalist, which you see over here on my shoulder. So here's what finally made sense to me through their work. The Category Pirates teach us how to think of things differently. Here's one analogy that really stuck with me. The inventor of the elevator was having a hard time explaining to the world because we didn't have skyscrapers and tall buildings yet. So instead of calling it an elevator, it was described as a vertical railroad. You see, people already understood a railroad, so all they had to do was think about a railroad that moves things from A to B, turn it in the air, A to B now goes upwards. We can also think about Henry Ford, and he's been noted as saying that if he would've asked his customers what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse. You see, Henry Ford didn't want to make a faster horse. He had a different category in mind: the car. Now, the same thing happened with me. Nobody could picture what I was building yet, honestly, including me. And so for years I've been just calling this my own marketing problem, but I knew that deep inside something else was happening. What this really is It's a category that nobody has named yet. Once I understood why I kept rebelling against every box that people tried to put me in, the next question was really obvious. So what's the shape of the box that I am in? People were calling my company a marketing agency. No, that's not it. Even though we do marketing work, people were calling me a lifestyle coach. Yeah, that's not really it either, because we do so much with strategic design. Those boxes aren't just wrong, they're too small, they're not the right shape, they don't encapsulate everything that we do. I'm not there yet. I don't have a clean answer for you, but the closest that I can get right now is that my team and I are strategic advisors. We work with people who can be really hard to deal with because they're very ambitious. And that brings us to the how. How do you deal with ambitious people? You need a framework. So that's what we built, and that's what the first part of our podcast is designed to do— teach the Hardcore and At Ease framework for everyday excellence. We teach it through 3 phases of others over self, and that is deconstructed self over others. We have 2 rings for each of those phases. It starts with the tactical center. That's your bullseye. And then we work through ambition alignment, resourceful action, generate momentum, expecting excellence, and finally, we learn to trust the process. This is the plan that has been working the whole time, regardless of what other people say about us and what we do. The Hardcore Inatties framework for everyday excellence. It never needed a category to be named in order to work. That's the beauty about what we do. What it really needed was for me to stop shrinking myself and to stop shrinking the work to try to fit into a box that it wasn't even built for. Over these episodes this past year, you've heard how this has cracked open for me. So here's what it sounds like when other people find their own version of being hardcore and at ease.

You take care of yourself first, and then you can take care of your family, and you take care of your team, and then the mission gets done.

Carrie Mead, she learned that from her own mentor. And the order matters more than it sounds like it should. You see, self-first isn't selfish, it's structural. If you skip that step, everything after it runs on empty.

You have to hold two things in your hand at the same time: your complete and total insignificance and your extreme importance. And your total insignificance is that your story really doesn't matter. Your importance is that you can actually help other people live a better story themselves.

Donald Miller. He said that to me in our second episode ever, and I didn't fully understand it until I walked through this process myself this year. You can feel invisible to an entire industry and still be the exact right person for the one thing that you're building. Both things can be true at the same time. It's not shameful to say you don't know, or I've never experienced that, or But I'll find out. Vicki Selva said that when I asked her about her own personal wisdom that she could share about being around these really high ego people. That's resourceful action in 11 words. It doesn't matter that you don't know. It does matter if you stop there, just like it matters if you stay in the box.

These are the people that matter the most. And I'm not coming home empty-handed anymore. I'm coming home rebuilt and I have gifts, a lot of gifts to share them. And I honestly feel that that's my future as opposed to being abroad and having no connection, being an expatriate, being a foreign national worker.

My man, Adam Castillo. Adam wasn't talking about a business when he said that. He was talking about coming home from something that nearly took everything. It's the same idea as building something that nobody's named yet. You don't walk away from the hard years empty. You walk away rebuilt.

I could not get a helmet to fit my head. They are made specifically for you, but the shell was never small enough for me, right? So I had— I'm not lying either— I had this much foam on either side of my helmet to keep it on my head. Yet when I'd go out and fly the A-10 and we're doing BFM, which is basic fighter maneuvers, and I'm pulling 4 or 5 G's in the airplane, looking behind me, whatever, my helmet would literally slide down my head, my oxygen mask would slide down to the end of my nose, and I couldn't breathe. And I'm trying not to get killed by the guy behind me, but I'm gonna kill myself because I can't see and I can't breathe. And every time I complained about it, they just put more foam in and more foam in. And I went through that my whole career.

Nancy Dakin, a woman veteran that I am proud to call my friend. She's not talking about a business, obviously. She's talking about flying an A-10. She was handed the same shape box as everyone else. She'd been handed it her whole career. It was built for someone else., but it wasn't fitted for her. Here's one final soundbite to close out everything that we've been talking about today with category design and rejecting boxes.

Also, you can have an identity outside of your military service. I think the healthiest thing that people can do that are veterans is have a social circle that's completely outside of the veteran world and don't talk about their service with those people, which is not to diminish their service. It's just to remind you that you are not what you used to do. Who you are and what you did are very different things.

From last week's episode, there's Andy Stumpf. Who you are and what you did are very different things. That's not just advice for a veteran who's walking into a room of civilians that don't know anything about service time. That's Andy's entire episode. What I'm learning this year is that every box that I've ever been handed has been conflating these two issues: what I did and who I am. You just heard 6 different people, 6 different situations, and none of them used the words that we teach, Tactical Center or Ambition Alignment. They didn't have to. They were already living it. They were already feeling it. But now they have words to be able to describe this to others, and so do you, so that we can break out of our loneliness and our isolation as ambitious people. Now, as I look back over this first year, here's the part that really surprised me the most. My instinct has always been to give away the microphone, to find somebody far more interesting than me, to make room for someone else's story instead of my own. It's very uncomfortable to talk about yourself, but the data doesn't agree with my instinct. You see, my top 2 episodes this year, they weren't my Donald Miller, 11 times New York Times bestseller. They weren't even Andy Stumpf, our Navy SEAL who was on SEAL Team Six. My top 2 episodes were just my stupid voice. They were me solo teaching through those episodes. I'm talking about episode 7, which is on ambition alignment, and episode 26 on the aiming problem. It turns out that you, my listener, are just as interested in what I have to teach as you are in these amazing people that I bring on to prove what we teach. Now let's talk about what a year of showing up adds up to. This number still blows my mind. Top 1% globally. It's even less than that because we're 55 episodes in, one full year without missing a single week. And it doesn't stop at that number. I was invited to be a co-host on Veterans Radio because this show existed. Which means that every guest who sits across from me on this podcast now walks into a room wider than just the one that I was building alone. So that's where things stand, and here's where things are headed for us this next year. Because we're in this together. If you're stuck in this same split, torn between the thing that's yours and the thing everyone else around you needs you to be, I want you to go back to your tactical center. This isn't a detour from serving others. We're not moving away from others over self. We're reverse engineering it because you can't give away to the mission until you've gone back to the center of what makes you, you. First you do that, you establish it, and then it will always be waiting for you there. This podcast helps me feel at home in my tactical center, and I want you to have that for yourself as well, whatever that looks like. So remember the phrase box, box, box from the top of the episode. Going back to your tactical center is that box. It's the at ease portion of what we're talking about, and it is required. If you skip your pit stop, then you can't keep racing. But staying in the box too long or staying in it forever Well, that isn't hardcore either. That's just hiding with probably really good excuses, like you've got kids to take care of and you've got bills to pay and certain things need to happen, so you can't really go after XYZ the way that you feel like you're called to do. But that calling is the hardcore bit. Hardcore is what happens after the reset, when you get out of the box, when you're back out on that track. Both of these things have to happen in our lives. We have to be hardcore on the track and we have to be at ease in the box, upholding our tactical center. And this podcast is mine. When the new year came, I pointed most of our energy at the women veteran services that we provide. I wanted to build that foundation strong enough so that it could carry its weight on its own, and I did this on purpose. You see, when you think of Shelly Rood as a whole, I've never wanted to be known as a woman veteran resource. It felt like a box. I don't mind having that as part of my resume, but when I think of what God has me bringing to the world, I don't think it stops there. So I'm creating a team that works every day fully in that care space. And they're building forward from the solid ground that's already there because I did dedicate the time and the effort to building that foundation. I was in that box this past year, and now I'm getting ready to jump out onto the track. My team is already going hardcore because Shelly's been working in the pit stop. Year 1 is behind us, and the next stop is episode 100. Can you believe that? 100 episodes every week with no gaps. When you do that in the podcast world, it earns a designation called actively established. Only about 1 podcast in 100 ever started even gets there. So I'm on track to hit episode 100, and I want you to come with me. It's not going to be easy. There's going to be things that I can't hand you very cleanly. Like the category that my business has been serving. Our framework is named Hardcore in At Ease. It's established and it's proven. But what I'm still trying to figure out is what to name our category. And so that search is where year 2 begins. And that brings this episode to a close. If you, my friend, have been here since episode 1, thank you so very much from the bottom of my heart. You see, for a long time, I called what I've been building in my business and in my life a marketing problem. It was really a category that nobody has named yet. In the women veteran care space, the category was created of the wilderness and the wildflower. It finally gave me the words. That category is naming the language of women veterans. Thank you truly for staying with me while I figured that out in real time. It feels so amazing to be building this business out loud so that others can witness what the American dream can truly look like. Let's keep building together. You can come find the rest of our discussion at join.othersoverself.com. That's our online community, and you can find that link in the show notes as well. In Formula 1, box, box, box. It means it's time to come in for a reset. So you're ready for what's next. So do it for yourself. Call Box Box Box. Maybe you need to come in for a reset. It's not a bad thing. With that, this episode is done. I will be back with you next Tuesday with episode 57 and the start of season 2. Until then, stay hardcore, be at ease, and trust the process.

You're listening to Hardcore and at Ease. Keep the conversation going at join.othersoverself.com.