January 10, 2025 • 54 mins
In this episode, John Miles discusses how to unlock your potential and strategies for intentional living. He shares his journey of personal growth and resilience, drawing upon pivotal moments that shaped his path. John delves into the profound impact of intrinsic motivation and the pursuit of finding true significance that leads to a deeper understanding of our own purpose.
Struggling to stick to your goals? In the upcoming 6 Saboteurs of Self-Control Workshop, we’ll uncover the six hidden obstacles that sabotage your progress and teach you how to overcome them. From breaking free of autopilot habits to tackling self-doubt and emotional escapism, this live session offers practical tools and strategies to help you make better choices and stay aligned with your values. Join us on Sunday, January 12 at 12pm ET and take the first step toward lasting change.
Key Takeaways:
- Embracing change and finding personal growth in challenging environments
- Learning from experiences in confronting authority and navigating power dynamics
- Adapting to change and cultivating personal growth in the face of uncertainty
- Finding purpose through meaningful service and the impact of making a difference
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
We're not only disconnected on social media and other things
from others, we're most importantly disconnected from ourself. And so
how do you take yourself back and gain that sense
of belonging and mission and ignition to do something with
your life.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(00:46):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(01:06):
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Our guest on this episode is John Miles, best selling author,
(01:26):
keynote speaker, CEO of Passion Struck, and host of the
podcast Passion Struck with John R.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Miles.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Today, John and Eric discuss his new book Passion Struck
Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock your purpose and ignite your
most intentional life.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Hi John, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Eric. It's early a profound honor to be on your show.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I'm really happy to have you on. We're going to
be discussing your book, which is called Passion Struck Twelve
Powerful Principles to Unlock your purpose and ignite your most
intentional life. But before we get to that, we'll start
in the way that we always do, with the parable.
And in the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with
their grandchild. They say, in life, there are two wolves
(02:10):
inside of us that are always at battle. There's a
bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear,
and a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
bravery and love. And grandchild stops. They think about it
for a second. They look up at their grandparent and
they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
(02:32):
by asking you what that parable means to you in
your life and in the work that you do here.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Eric, Thank you, and I have always found when I
listen to your episodes it's such a profound opening. I
like to use a question that I gave few about
defining moments, but both of them elicit a tremendous response.
So when I think about that and I look back
at my own life, I guess I come to this
(02:58):
vision of what I thought a man of courage was
when I was younger compared to what I think a
man of courage is today. And I grew up very
similar to you, where much of my inner self was suppressed.
I was kind of aimed at becoming the best I
(03:20):
could be, with parents who really drove me to perfection,
and that perfection was something that I battled for years,
and it ended up leading me to chasing all the
wrong things in life. I was chasing alcohol, I was
chasing fame, I was chasing accolades, I was chasing money,
(03:42):
and I found myself living in what Henry David Thureau
termed quiet desperation and profoundly stuck. And when I think
about it now, I think the path that I'm down now,
which is focused on intrinsic motivation, it makes me think
of what men of courage really should be. They should
(04:05):
be strong willed, independent thinkers who have the compassion and
courage to take on societal issues and to try to
make change. And that is what I am trying to
do with my book and my own personal movement that
I'm on, is to try to show to many of
(04:29):
the listeners out there what it really means to be
a man of courage, because I think it's different from
what's getting portrayed on social media.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
You mentioned your childhood, your father was fairly angry. You
went on then to be in the military. How many
years were you in the military.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
I was in for a total of about eleven years.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Okay, talk to me about what sort of things you
learned there about courage and which of those things you
carry forward and which of those things you've left behind.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Eric, my life has been fine by many defining moments,
and one of the most defining happened when I was
a senior, or what we call a firsty at the
Naval Academy and I had been selected for this prestigious
role of becoming one of the brigade honor officers. Now
(05:20):
each company and at the battalion level you have honor officers,
but I was part of the overall committee and typically
this is kind of a cake job because how many
people in any given year are committing honor offenses and
having to go in front of this board. But when
I was there, it was a pretty much black or
(05:41):
white type of thing. If you committed an honor offense
and you were found guilty, you were expelled. So there
was a high threshold of pain that people would feel.
And so my year, first half of it started out
really well. We didn't have many honor boards. But coming
back from Christmas break, I walk into this situation where
(06:05):
two midshipmen had come forward to their electrical engineering professor,
and these were students who were at the top of
their class, saying that their personal values couldn't allow them
not to speak up, but that they had gotten the
exact version of the tests before the test. And what
I came back to was the largest cheating scandal in
(06:27):
the Naval Academy's history. So I went from having a
sleepy type of role to now having one of the
most arduous tasks in front of me. And something that
we came upon very early on was that this wasn't
just a handful of shipman implicated. There were hundreds upon hundreds,
(06:51):
and the daunting idea that we were going to have
to bring all of these people in front of this tribunal,
where how do you even do it when half the
tribunal is filled with people from their class? Was really
becoming a daunting challenge, And so NCIS was brought in, etcetera, etcetera.
(07:12):
And I could write a whole book on this. The
petty officer who gave the test away to the midshipman,
who then ended up spreading it throughout the academy. His
car blows up just before these trials began to happen.
But the superintendent at the time, who was a big
football player from the Roger Staubach era, made the decision
that he was only going to try twenty five with shipmen,
(07:35):
and about half of them were football players. And long
story short is we argued with him over the validity
of that. We tried to stand up to him saying
that this really needed to go through the Uniform Code
Military Justice because it was too big for us to handle, etc.
And he really threatened us that if you don't do this,
(07:57):
you're not going to graduate, and I'm going to take
away your privileges everything else. And it ended with us
finding the vast majority of these twenty five guilty and
then him making the decision to then basically reject every
single one of those convictions if they were a football player.
(08:19):
So this whole thing ends up going beyond us because
at the time, somehow the Baltimore Sun was getting information
about this incident and it was on the front page.
So the superintendent is getting more and more mad and
blaming us and taking away our privileges, and everyone who
was on the board is saying we had nothing to
(08:39):
do with it. So I end up graduating. The now
Navy Investigator General has been brought in to look at this,
and he has come to the conclusion, like we did
at the beginning, that there are hundreds and hundreds of
people involved, this is a huge deal, and that there
was a cover up. And I'm about ready to go
to my first duty station after I went through master's training,
(09:02):
and I'm called up to my Admiral's office, who runs
my whole I guess you could say the whole group
of officers that I was part of the community, and
he goes, I don't know why you're supposed to go
to the Naval Academy, but the Secretary of Defense has
requested your presence on Monday morning, and you're supposed to
show up in summer white uniforms. So I get there,
I'm met by two JAG officers who are there representing me,
(09:26):
and they tell me that I am being accused of
undermining the boards and allowing the football players to get
off and an other things. So I go in and
the superintendent started to try to cover his own tracks
by putting the blame on me because he thought it
was me who had been giving the information away to
(09:49):
the Baltimore Sun. And so now I walk into this
session where the table is filled with admirals and attorneys,
and I am basically fighting my survival. I didn't even
know walking out of that if I would lose my commission,
if I would have a future in the military, anything else.
So for me, I learned a ton of tremendous lessons
(10:12):
from that. I learned about the abuse of power. I
learned about what it took to stand up for things
that you believe in, even if that meant that it
could cost you everything, but standing up was better than
just taking it on the chin. I learned during the
process that you sometimes have to challenge authority when you
(10:32):
see things not going in the way that you think
they should and believe that they should. So that was
a real tremendous learning for me. And then I think
the other thing that really hit me was when I
went out to the fleet. You're given a bunch of
ideals of what that's going to look like, and I
(10:53):
think that this segment with this cheating scandal really prepared
me well for the idea that to getting out in
the real world wasn't like the ideal situation that we
were taught we were walking into. There was a lot
more gray areas once you got out there, and I
kind of went into it now with more open eyes.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Did you always have that sort of courage to stand
up to authority? Where did that come from or how
do you think you were able to find it in
that situation?
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Well? I think I always had this feeling of being
taught right and wrong, and I had a really deep
Catholic upbringing. I went to parochial schools my entire childhood
and was taught very clear between what is good and
what is bad. But I think a defining moment before
I went to the Naval Academy is we had a
(11:47):
cross country state championships earlier in the stay, and I
ended up going to this big party where I had
been drinking, and the friend who was driving on our
way back his car out of control and we ended
up almost going over a cliff where we would have
all died. And at that scene, and I'm not proud
(12:08):
of it, I walked away because I had a very
demanding father who I was afraid of. He's a prayer
marine and he would physically put you to the test,
and so I did not want him to find out
about this. And I got home and I lied about
the whole situation, and unbeknownst to me, the police officer
(12:31):
had already called them and told them everything. And so
not only did I let my parents down, but I
let myself down from not speaking the truth and having
the courage to come forward in that moment. And I
think from that learning moment, I just kind of made
this promise to myself. I wasn't going to let that
happen again, you know, I wasn't going to let people
(12:52):
down like I did in that situation, and especially I
let myself down. So I think that is where a
lot of it stems from.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Thanks for sharing all of that your book and your podcast,
your platform is called passion Struck. What does that word
mean to you?
Speaker 1 (13:08):
It's so interesting. You know, the podcast has been around
now for coming on four years. I came up with
this concept maybe a little under five years ago, and
I knew this emotion that I was trying to convey, meaning,
you see something that's a challenge in the world, a
(13:29):
problem so big that you will invest every bit of
you to solve it for the benefit of others, to
serve others. And this means sacrificing your reputational risk, sacrificing
your financial situation, sacrificing at times your relationships to go
(13:50):
after it. And I happen to be talking to a
friend of mine. I mentioned kind of this concept to him,
and he said, you know, it sounds to me like
you're going from being stuck to becoming passion struck. And
it kind of just hit me at that moment that
this is it. That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's
this ignition inside that comes when you have clarity over
(14:15):
an issue that you're bound to solve and will do
anything it takes to do so.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
And what was that issue for you?
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I think we're best positioned to serve the person we
once were. And so for me, it was really I
had been getting these messages for a long time that
I was not on the right path with where my
career was heading. And my career was going fabulously well.
I had become a CIO of a fortune fifty company.
By the time I was thirty nine years old, things
(14:44):
were going well. And at the height of all of this,
I felt the emptiest I ever did in my life,
and other aspects of my life were falling apart. My
relationships were falling apart. I wasn't exercising as much, I
had high stress levels, and I really just found this
(15:07):
emptiness where I felt extremely apathetic and broken inside and
just craving for meaning. And so what it really showed
me was that we have this innate needing to belong
and when we don't, we face a crisis of unmattering.
(15:30):
And so to me, that's what the whole thing that
I'm trying to do with Passion Structure is all about.
It's how do you start addressing the disease of disconnection
that is plaguing so many people today because we're not
only disconnected on social media and other things from others,
were most importantly disconnected from ourself, and so how do
(15:52):
you take yourself back and gain that sense of belonging
and mission and ignition to do something with your life?
Thank God, what you're here to do?
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Use the word mattering there, what does that mean to you?
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So, Eric, this whole question of mattering is something that
I have been diving deeply into for the past four years.
It's interesting because I went out and I started to
look for the science around mattering. When you start looking
at behavior science, there's a ton of information on choice
bracketing and nudges and self determination theory, which is really
(16:31):
all about our intrinsic motivation. There's positive psychology, there's neuroscience.
But when I really started asking the experts, and I'm
talking experts like Max Bezerman and Bob Sutton and Angela
Duckworth and Ethan Cross and the list goes on and on,
no one could tell me any work that was being
done on mattering. And I did more and more research
(16:55):
and found one gentleman, Gordon Flett, who's at the University
of York up in Canada, who's really been the only
one who's been studying this. And I just had this epiphany.
How can something so essential not be further understood in science?
And so I have been trying to spend as much
(17:16):
time as I can interviewing people, researching and writing about
what does mattering really mean? And I am now working
on a book about this, so you'll be the first
person I'm talking to about it. But as I describe this,
I think that mattering has four fundamental components. There's self mattering,
(17:39):
the belief that we matter. There's mattering to others, there's
making others feel like they matter. And ultimately they're spreading
mattering beyond ourselves and our community to the world. So
if you think about this, and people have asked me, well,
(17:59):
how how do you apply this to a sales team? Well,
I mean it's very easy when you start thinking about it.
I'll tell you a story about it. I was a
young buck out of the military. I had been at
Booz Allen as a consultant for maybe nine months, and
I wouldn't have considered myself great at sales and any means.
(18:22):
And I happened to be at this conference and I
saw a gentleman across the room who was wearing a
Corvette jacket, had no idea who this person was. But
I ended up approaching him simply because I was on
a break and I wanted to talk about corvettes because
I was bored about what we were talking about at
this conference. And I started talking to him and he
was driving a Sting Ray and we both started to
(18:45):
talk about our passion for corvettes. Well, the more I
got into this and made him feel like what he
had to tell me mattered, it opened up aside of
him that leaned in on me, and suddenly he said, well, well,
after we exchange names, he said, what do you do?
I worked for booz Allen. I said, well, what do
you do? He goes, I'm the top civilian instructor for
(19:07):
top Gun And he then said, you guys have any
distance learning capabilities? And I said, well, a matter of fact,
we just delivered the most comprehensive one to the Army
National Guard and he goes, that's fundamental to everything I
want to do. I want to create this program called
Strike Fighter Online. Well, eighteen months later, after nurturing this relationship,
(19:28):
we get awarded the contract and it became one hundred
and fifty million dollars a year contract for Booze Allen.
My whole point of that is by making him feel
that he mattered, he reciprocated. And so in order to
do that, though, you have to feel that you matter yourself.
So really that's the first step is if you don't
(19:49):
matter to yourself, if you don't hold self compassion for yourself,
coming back to that compassion word and really believe in
you're in hate innate capabilities, you're never going to be
able to spread mattering onto someone else. So that's kind
of the framework that I'm exploring.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
So mattering is a pretty ambiguous term, you know, mattering.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Do I matter?
Speaker 3 (20:35):
How do we go about answering that question? Because I
think a lot of the ways that we think about
whether we matter is in comparison to outside things. Right,
some of it is do I matter because I matter
to other people? But what's the base element of mattering
that goes deeper than because I did this, or I
(20:58):
do that, or I'm respectible for this or a help
with that? Like, what's the base layer for people of
mattering for everyone?
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Well, I think people are approaching this the wrong way.
There's been a lot of research that's come out about
employee disengagement, meaning when you look at what Gallups produced.
What it's really showing is that they're nine hundred million
people in over one hundred and forty countries who are
unfulfilled in what they do in life. And when you
think about that, I mean, that's a huge thing. And
(21:32):
when you look at people like Thomas Spray, who's predicting
that two billion jobs are going to be displaced by
automation and AI, it's creating an existential crisis that people
have that for most people who work, their work drives
a lot of how they self identify, of the meaning
(21:53):
that they have, and when that feels threatened, suddenly you
have this pervasive disconnect that's permeating modern life. Were ensnarred
in this relentless cycle of chasing, chasing, chase, and chasing
all the time. And yet in this pursuit, more and
more people are encountering a profound emptiness that I described
(22:16):
earlier as quiet desperation. So if you have this deficit
feeling inside of you, how are you going to be
able to show up to others in a meaningful way
when you feel so disconnected from yourself and your own identity.
And to me, that's what it really comes down to.
(22:39):
And I know you love zen practices. There's this Buddhist
philosopher to Saku a Kaida, who has this quote, what
is defeat in life? It's not merely making a mistake.
Defeat means giving up on yourself in the midst of difficulty.
What is true success in life? True success means winning
your battle with yourself. And to me, that's what mattering is.
(23:01):
It's winning that battle with yourself of overcoming stuff that
I talk about in the Book of Self Doubt, imposter syndrome,
everything else, and really seeing that you can become a
winner in life. And the winners in life are those
who went over their weaknesses and learn that they matter
and that they're able to make other people matter, and
(23:24):
they're able to conduct change in the world.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
So is mattering connected to achievement?
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I want to really change that whole model. I think
that's the easiest way we think about mattering is achievement.
I think of mattering more of service. I feel that
we are most alive and we feel like we matter
the most when we perform acts on behalf of other
(23:53):
people or we witness them. And some of this is
really backed up by research that dak Or Keltner has
done on a term that I love he created called
moral beauty. You found more people experience awe not in
seeing majestic arts or pieces of beauty, but in seeing
(24:13):
the moral beauty in others. So to me, mattering equates
to service. It's serving yourself in some ways, but more importantly,
it's serving others. And I just had this recent conversation
with Alison wood Brooks, who's a professor at Harvard Business School,
and she's got this book coming out called Talk. Her
focus is on the science and art of communication, and
(24:37):
when you think about communicating, communicating with another person is
really a form of mattering because the way that we listen,
the way that we immerse ourselves in another person's story,
shows not only that they matter, but it reverberates on
(24:58):
ourself because we self reflect and see ourselves through them.
And this is something that you must have seen when
you were going through your own recovery from addiction, that
the more you started to storytell your story, other people
would lean in on it and support you more because
of it, because they understood they had been there, you
(25:19):
were being vulnerable with them. And to me, mattering isn't
just this small thing. It permeates every aspect of our lives,
and when it's out of sync, I believe it's at
the core of why so many people feel helpless, lonely, bored, battered, broken,
whatever you want to call.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
It, because they don't feel that they matter. In that
disconnect is fundamentally one of by helping others, you see
that you have a place in things that is important.
Am I saying that more or less the way you
would say it?
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, I mean by helping others, by serving others, by
having that I call it my book creative amplifier. I
mean you're trying to amplify the fruits in people's lives.
It brings you an inherent sense in turn that you
matter and that you matter to others. And the more
(26:14):
you feel that, the more you're going to make other
people matter. And there's work that Emil Bruneau did, but
he was really working on dehumanization. And the way that
he was trying to address conflicts was he saw most
of the time, when people had deep rooted conflicts like
(26:35):
we're seeing in Israel right now, it all comes down
to each side's mattering if you think about it, and
the other side not feeling that they matter, and so
he was trying to use compassion and empathy and helping
to see the other side, see the person as they
(26:57):
are as a means to close the gap and try
to create a path forward. So that's another way that
you can think of mattering.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Yeah, it makes me think of it's a Buddhist practice,
but it doesn't really matter. I think it's called commonalities practice,
but it's the practice of seeing in what ways are
others like me? And it fights dehumanization because if you do,
and you and I've talked about this separately, about how
(27:26):
to each individual their interior world matters, and their family matters,
and their kids matter. Those things matter to them every
bit as much as those things matter to me. And
when I can see that, I think it helps avoid
that dehumanization because we see that at its base, we
all are very very similar at the base level. Now,
(27:50):
the further you go up the stack, that more different
we get. But at a base level, we all want,
in essence what you're saying. We all want to matter.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, and we all want safety. We all want to
feel that we can be who we are without being
told we have to be something different. I mean it really.
I mean it gets into body dysmorphia, it gets into
overcoming trauma, it gets into how we're showing up for
our kids. It permeates everything. And I didn't realize how
(28:19):
much it was like water until I really started to
think about how much it applies exubstantially in our lives.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Let's go back to you working in a job. You're
very successful in your career. You're managing lots of people,
so in a sense, you matter to a lot of
people because you're helping direct and guide what they're doing.
So you mattered then, But I get the sense you
didn't feel it. So how do we connect those dots? Right?
(28:49):
Because if we look at any of our lives, we
can see in what ways we matter. Let's say I've
got a job and I go to work, and if
I have six other coworkers, I'm mad because the person
I am among those six people has a lot to
do with the quality of their day to day life. Right.
I can make being at work an enjoyable thing or
(29:10):
an unenjoyable thing, depending on what I bring. So I matter.
If we're parents of children, right, we deeply matter because
we have children that we're raising, and yet there still
seems to be a disconnect where people do matter that
don't feel like they matter. How do you connect these
dots up in your mind?
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yeah, And I don't want people when I go into
this to feel sorry for me or to say, you know,
this guy had it all and what's he talking about
when I go into this. But when you think about
senior executives of anyone who's listening, a lot of the
employees below them think that they're completely out of the
(29:51):
loop on what's going on below them. And for much
of my career I didn't feel that way. I felt
like I had an extra impulse on what was going
on within my teams. I have a concept in my
book that I talk about speaking with your feet, because
I believe that the best leaders are very present in
(30:12):
showing up and talking and being present and explaining things
to employees. But I was finding that the more senior
I was getting, inherently the things that I felt mattered
most to leading people were slowly and progressively evaporating from
(30:33):
what I was able to do on a day to
day basis. And I was reaching a point where I
had so many fires that I was trying to fight,
and the vast majorities of these fires were employee issues,
because I had employees now in fifteen countries on four
(30:56):
or five continents, and they were in the politics of
the day. There was so much infighting going on between
the different presidents at Dell and who was partnered with who,
and what was happening and who was trying to do
this and that that my entire life was starting to
be focused on putting out fires and not doing what
(31:19):
I thought was the most meaningful thing in my job,
which was learning all this acumen that I had had
from the military and growing up on how do you
properly lead people? And so I found myself becoming more
and more out of tune what was happening on the
front line. I used to be able to know when
I was the head of software development at Low's what
(31:41):
a developer was working on and how it pertained to
that solution, and was able to strategize and put myself
into their position. And I found myself further and further
from that. And then on top of that, I was
traveling overseas two weeks out of the month, so here
I'm absent half the time from a lot of the people.
(32:01):
I'm absent from my family, and I'm seeing those relationships
have impact. I'm absent from myself because when you're traveling
like that, you're not keeping a healthy regiment in place,
and your schedule is constantly changing, and then I'm doing
a whole bunch of things that I don't enjoy doing.
And I just felt empty, and I can't even describe it.
(32:24):
I just felt so freaking numb inside that I'm not
even sure if you stuck up pin in me, I
would have felt it because I was seeing myself just
wasting away and I was completely stuck, and I felt
like there was no hope to get myself out of
it because look at all the stuff I had built up.
(32:45):
I was going to be let down to my parents.
I was going to let my family down. I now
had this house and the possessions and everything else. I
couldn't even comprehend what it was like to close that gap.
I describe it when I think of stuck, stagnant. I
lacked the confidence. I was timid, I was uncertain of
where to go. I was conflicted, torn between what I
(33:06):
felt I should be doing and what I really want
to do. And I was knotted inside because I was
entangled in habits and beliefs that were preventing progress. So
I hope I'm making that vision clearer because it's important
for me to do so, because I think there are
a lot of people who feel how I felt.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Hey, friends, it's Eric. Let's talk about something hard. How
many times have you made a promise to yourself and
broken it. You said you'd go to bed earlier, start exercising,
or stop reaching for that late night snack, but when
the moment of choice came, something pulled you in the
wrong direction. Those moments, those choice points, are where everything happens,
(34:09):
and when we keep failing at them, it doesn't just
derail our goals. It chips away at something deeper, our
trust and ourselves. But it doesn't have to stay that way.
In my upcoming free workshop, the Six Saboteurs of Self Control,
we'll explore what happens at these choice points, why they're
so hard to navigate, and most importantly, how to approach
(34:31):
them differently. This isn't about willpower or trying harder. It's
about understanding the hidden forces that lead to making the
wrong choices and learning the tools to rebuild your confidence
one choice at a time. Imagine trusting yourself again, knowing
that when you say you'll do something, you actually follow through.
(34:51):
That's what this workshop is about. Join me and let's
turn your choice points into moments of strength. Go to
good Wolf dot me slash self control. That's good Wolf
dot me slash self control to register for this free workshop.
I think a lot of people do feel how you felt.
Something I think about a lot is when do we
(35:15):
need to outright make a dramatic change and when can
we change our approach, our attitude, our beliefs and work
within a place we are. And I think a lot
of people have this with their work life because they
feel a lot of what you're describing. And the question
(35:35):
is is there a way within their existing role for
them to start to reconnect to what matters, to find
a way to look at their situation differently. Can we
make it good enough by staying or do we really
need to blow it all up and try something different?
And you and I talked about this a little bit
(35:58):
before when I was talking with you about how there's
something to be said for people who hit rock bottom,
right because you know, in my case, like I burnt
all of my life to the ground, there was no
decision about what parts that I keep and what parts
I don't keep. Most of the time for people though,
the choices aren't that clear. So how did you get
(36:18):
to a point where it became clear to you that
this isn't a matter of me realigning how I think
or feel or orient but like, fundamentally, I need to
have the courage to make a change. Was there a
defining moment that you knew it.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
You're going to have to let me explain this, and
it may take a couple of minutes to give the
full impact, because I want listeners to really understand that
I'm not just here pontificating. I have lived this and
it is myself pulling myself out of the deaths of doom.
(36:52):
And what I thought was the bottom that kept getting
even deeper that is taken me to where I'm at now.
So I had this calling for a long time. I
remember when I was living in Mooresville and I was
working at Loew's. I started to get very deeply involved
(37:15):
in our local church, which was a Methodist church. So
it was one of the first times I wasn't attending
Catholic church, and they had this program called Discipleship which
if anyone's been through it, it's not a trivial thing.
You study the Bible for thirty six weeks and you
go through Discipleship one is the Old and New Testament.
Discipleship two is the New Testament. Discipleship three is the
(37:37):
Old Testament. But it was the closest I had ever
felt to our Maker, and it was the first time
I had really read the Bible and had a teacher
who was really trying to showcase because he had a
PhD in history in addition to theology, of how these
things that were happening, these metaphors that Joseph Campbell talks
(37:58):
about were playing in our lives. And during this time
I started to pray and reflect more and more about
my life and what I inherently should be doing. And
I started to get these visions that I wasn't doing
what I was called to do, and inherently I knew this.
When I left the military. I had left because I
got an appointment to go to the FBI, and it
(38:21):
was kind of my childhood dream to do this. And
then my class got canceled and I was forced into
another path. And I was well down this path and
doing well in it, but it wasn't lighting me up inside.
But instead of using this as a queue that at
that point I needed to change and the change would
have been easier, I doubled down and instead I led
(38:45):
my family out of Charlotte. I went for money. I
took this job at Dell for the title and everything else,
and things started going worse. So behind the scenes, as
my job is becoming less and less meaningful, I am
in this temporary apartment. I go home for the first
(39:05):
time in a few weeks. I get back apartments flooded, water,
main brakes, everything is lost. They move me to the
souther apartment and eric like three weeks later, I keep
hearing these visions, keep ignoring them, and I'm in the
shower and all of a sudden, I feel the stinging
on me and I look up and they're scorpions dropping
from the ceiling on me.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
I was about to wonder whether frogs started dropping from
the sky or locusts, But scorpions will do. Scorpions will do.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
And I go to this company who's running the apartment complex,
and they say, we don't have scorpions, and one's reported it.
They can't find them. Then my family comes to visit
the kids' beds end up both being infested with bedbubs.
Then we get bit by scorpions more, and this time
actually had video to show them of all the scorpions
(39:55):
that were coming out at night. Oh, we end up
buying a house, So even though my wife is begging
me not to move, I pushed forward with very good reason.
I might add with very good reason. We buy this
house and we find out after we buy it that
it had termite damage that extended around the whole back
(40:16):
half of the house and up into throughout our kitchen
and upstairs. So now because it wasn't picked up on
the inspection, I got a quarter million dollar issue. I
end up leaving Dell. We moved to Florida. We buy
this house because we don't want to have to fix it.
So we get a relatively new house and we're only
in it for about three months when a storm comes
(40:38):
and it turns out our roof had a hole in it,
and we end up having mold and other damage and
having to spend another two hundred thousand to rip it apart.
It led me to getting divorced et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera, and still I am not listening, and it
finally took me going to I dropped my daughter off
(40:59):
from school. Well at the time, I was going to
Orange Theory four or five times a week, and this
day there's a fire at Orange Theory in the electrical room.
I ended up going to my house early, and I
walk in on an in home robbery where the person
who's robbing the ends up pointing my own gun at me.
I end up evading from that, starting to have this
(41:20):
existential crisis on top of everything else that's going on.
And four days later, my best friend jumped off the
Skyway bridge and committed suicide. And coming out of this,
I just went into the deepest and darkest despair and
I looked back at all these opportunities along the way
(41:41):
I had to change, and I started to realize that
it went from me being pushed to being kicked, to
being batted over the head, to losing pretty much everything,
including my physical and psychological safety, and are unearthing tons
of PTSD and past trauma that I finally made the
(42:04):
decision that I'm going to break away from this. I
am going to dedicate as long as it takes to
relearning myself relearning what's most important to me, getting my
life back into order, and using this as an opportunity
to help other people get out of this shithole that
I found myself in.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Wow, that is quite a story. Thank you for sharing
all of that.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Well, it's hard for me to even believe now looking
back that it even happened. I'm right, I mean, it's
something that you think you can't even make up. It
also reminds me of the stories you read about in
the Bible, of these things that happened to people that
weren't following their inherent path until they woke up and
(42:47):
started to do it. And it also brought me to
this really fundamental belief that I think we're all put
here for a very specific reason, and we have inherent
talents inside make us so unique and back to this
mattering that make us matter in the world, and when
we're not using them in the right way that we
(43:09):
were put on earth to do it, I think our
life ends up going off the path. Gabby Bernstein has
talked about this, and mel Robbins has talked about this,
But I saw that show up in my own life,
and the more I started to go down the path
of what I inside knew I should be doing. My
life started to turn around immensely.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
What are those things that you knew you should be doing?
What are the big changes?
Speaker 1 (43:36):
This is like the million dollar question to me when
we look at this, and when you and I spoke earlier,
I mentioned Bob Sutton, who's an amazing organizational psychologist. But
Bob is well known for a book he wrote about
closing the knowledge versus doing gap, and that's what this
is really about. You know you need to change, Like
(43:59):
if you have a drinking issue, you know you need
to stop, but you keep going along with it and
make excuses to yourself instead of dealing with it. Well,
kind of the same thing here. I knew I had
to figure out what was the biggest block that was
keeping me stuck. And I think that's why in cognitive
(44:20):
behavioral therapy they refer to it as stuck points. So
I immersed myself in taking steps to get over the
past trauma and that most recent trauma that I had had,
and it was extremely painful because it had been something
that I had been suppressing for years and years and years,
and it all started all the way back to when
(44:42):
I was five years old. And got pushed through a
basement window playing tag. And I had a traumatic brain
injury and went all the way back to that. I
had sexual trauma, I had physical assault trauma, I had
combat trauma, and I had to deal with it. And
so I went through cognitive processing therapy and that helped somewhat.
(45:03):
I went through prolonged exposure therapy, I went through EMDR,
and it was this work on myself and really battling
through those stuck points that were causing me to not
get over these fundamental psychological hurdles that by doing so,
they started to release confidence in me that I could
(45:25):
tackle other areas of my life. It opened the door
that I could get myself into better shape. It opened
the door that some of these issues that I had
had from traumatic brain injuries, I didn't need to be
a victim to them and I could tackle these. And
the thing I like to tell people is the journey
of a thousand miles, and Robin Charmus says, this too,
(45:46):
starts with a single act, and that act then opens
up tons of doors that you don't even expect, where
all of a sudden, you're working on one thing, but
it starts propagating into a myriad of things and then compounds,
which really gets into the core concept that I like
to talk about is the micro choices or micro decisions
(46:07):
that we make are the things that lead to either
a waterfall of happiness and fulfillment or to a value
of despair.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
Yeah. It's interesting because we talked earlier a little bit
about defining moments. You and I talked about defining moments
at a different time, and there are moments that are defining,
but as you say, it's the thousands of micro moments
that actually allow those defining moments to mean anything.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
And So a couple of questions that I'd like to
just kind of dive into your book here a little bit,
and one of them is talking about in your passion
Strut framework, you've got these different mindset and behavioral shifts
and one of them is called brand reinventor. But there's
a line in there that you talk about where you
(46:56):
say comfort is the enemy of adaptability. So first, what
is adaptability? Why is it important? And talk to me
about how comfort gets in the way.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
Yeah. I remember as a senior executive, one of the
things that was so top of mind and it is
today is emotional intelligence or EQ, and I think that
that is extremely important in our lives, and it's extremely
important the more senior you get in anything you do,
because so much more of your responsibility is in dealing
(47:28):
with others. But I think we're missing a bigger opportunity
in how much a role adaptability plays, both professionally and personally.
And professionally it's something that I think people have to
get used to. I mean, the amount of change that
(47:49):
is coming upon us has gone from a trickle I
remember when I started my career to now a waterfall
and I can't even predict what it's going to be
like ten to fifteen years from now. But if you
are not able to adapt to the tsunami of change,
you are going to be in a very hurtful place.
(48:09):
So that's one way to look at adaptability. But I
think another way to look at it is throughout life.
I think we go through different phases, through the transition
points that make up our life, and it's having that
inner fortitude to understand that at times we have to
adjust and adapt to our surroundings, adapt to how we
(48:32):
treat people, adapt to how we show up in the world,
adapt to changing times, as our kids get older and
our role as a parent adapts to the different stages
of their life. The same thing we have to adapt
as our parents get older. So that's kind of two
different lenses of what I meant about the ability to adapt.
Speaker 3 (48:55):
I agree, I think it's a Darwin quote. I won't
get it right. But it's not like the strongest survive,
it's like the most adaptable survive. Right, that's the key thing.
You know, can you adapt to your environment? And I
think you're right that things keep changing on us. There's
the external pace of change which is accelerating as you're saying,
but our lives change, right, Like you mentioned kids kids
(49:17):
are two, you've got a different set of challenges and
when your kids are eight versus when they're fifteen, And
we have a different set of challenges in our own
physicality from the age of say, I'm not the same
as I was at twenty five physically, right, So how
do I adapt? How do I change? And if we
keep dragging what worked before and trying to force it
(49:38):
into different situations, we end up in trouble. So what
role does comfort play in us not being adaptable?
Speaker 1 (49:47):
Well, for me, the easiest way to explain it would
be through Carol Dwe's work and the difference between mindsets
and having a growth mindset or not having one, because
that's where comfort it really comes into place when you
become complacent. A way I describe this later on in
the book is people all the time say you live
(50:08):
your life on autopilot, and I think it's an okay
way to talk about this opposite of having a growth mindset,
because you're kind of just going through the motions and
things seem to be going well, but you're kind of
just bopping down the street. I think the analogy is wrong, though.
I think so many of us today are living more
what I call a pinball life. We are acting as
(50:30):
if we are the ball in the game of pinball,
instead of the player learning how to play the game
and the underlying subgames that make up pinball, which is
kind of like life. And so from the lens of this,
when you're comfortable being a pinball, you just allow yourself
to bounce off of things. You are a complete victim
of the circumstances around you. Whereas when you start really
(50:54):
adapting and forcing yourself to take a deeper look at
your core values at the most important things of your life.
You start being more intentional about how you want that
ball to start navigating its surroundings. And to me, that's
(51:15):
a good metaphor to describe it.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
I like that analogy a lot. And I think, you know,
autopilot's an interesting thing because autopilot can be really good
if you're heading in the right direction. A self driving
car is kind of a lovely thing if it's going
where you want it to go, because then you can
be like, all right, well that's working. I can now
pay attention to this, or I can pay attention to that.
(51:37):
The problem is that either we don't know where we're going,
or the road conditions are changing rapidly enough that we
can't leave it on autopilot. And I think that's where
we get stuck. The human ability to habituate and do
certain things without thinking about them is actually an evolutionary
advantage for us. It's just that life is changing to
(52:00):
quickly to remain on autopilot, and if you try, you
end up being, as you're saying, the pinball it is.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
And Angela Duckworth is really known for her work on grit,
but what I think her more profound work has been
on is self regulation, and to me, what you're talking
about is a lot of self regulation. Self regulation means
self reinvention. It's a reminder that when you're old ways
set in, you can either choose to accept it or
(52:29):
you can reinvent yourself and push your own boundaries further,
which to me, is all about what intentionality, self control
or self regulation is all about. It's recognizing that you
have to adapt to your surroundings and it's kind of
where the threat mechanism comes in, because if you don't,
(52:49):
there are going to be consequences.
Speaker 3 (52:51):
Well, I think that is a great place for us
to wrap up, John, Thank you so much for coming on.
I've enjoyed this conversation. We'll have links in the show
notes to your book and where can people find you?
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Yeah, you can find the podcast passion Struck wherever you
listen to shows just like yours. And I have two websites.
If you want to learn more about the Passionstruck movement,
go to passionstruck dot com. You can sign up for
my Live Intentionally newsletter. If you want to learn more
about me or hire me to speak, go to John
Rmiles dot com. Wonderful, Thanks so much, John, Thank you
such an honor to be on your show.
Speaker 2 (53:39):
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(54:00):
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the show.
We're not only disconnected on social media and other things
from others, we're most importantly disconnected from ourself. And so
how do you take yourself back and gain that sense
of belonging and mission and ignition to do something with
your life.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers
have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have, quotes
like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think,
ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts
don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy,
(00:46):
or fear. We see what we don't have instead of
what we do. We think things that hold us back
and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.
Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort
to make a life worth living. This podcast is about
how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction,
(01:06):
how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.
Our guest on this episode is John Miles, best selling author,
(01:26):
keynote speaker, CEO of Passion Struck, and host of the
podcast Passion Struck with John R.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Miles.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Today, John and Eric discuss his new book Passion Struck
Twelve Powerful Principles to Unlock your purpose and ignite your
most intentional life.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Hi John, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Eric. It's early a profound honor to be on your show.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I'm really happy to have you on. We're going to
be discussing your book, which is called Passion Struck Twelve
Powerful Principles to Unlock your purpose and ignite your most
intentional life. But before we get to that, we'll start
in the way that we always do, with the parable.
And in the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with
their grandchild. They say, in life, there are two wolves
(02:10):
inside of us that are always at battle. There's a
bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear,
and a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and
bravery and love. And grandchild stops. They think about it
for a second. They look up at their grandparent and
they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says,
the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
(02:32):
by asking you what that parable means to you in
your life and in the work that you do here.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
Eric, Thank you, and I have always found when I
listen to your episodes it's such a profound opening. I
like to use a question that I gave few about
defining moments, but both of them elicit a tremendous response.
So when I think about that and I look back
at my own life, I guess I come to this
(02:58):
vision of what I thought a man of courage was
when I was younger compared to what I think a
man of courage is today. And I grew up very
similar to you, where much of my inner self was suppressed.
I was kind of aimed at becoming the best I
(03:20):
could be, with parents who really drove me to perfection,
and that perfection was something that I battled for years,
and it ended up leading me to chasing all the
wrong things in life. I was chasing alcohol, I was
chasing fame, I was chasing accolades, I was chasing money,
(03:42):
and I found myself living in what Henry David Thureau
termed quiet desperation and profoundly stuck. And when I think
about it now, I think the path that I'm down now,
which is focused on intrinsic motivation, it makes me think
of what men of courage really should be. They should
(04:05):
be strong willed, independent thinkers who have the compassion and
courage to take on societal issues and to try to
make change. And that is what I am trying to
do with my book and my own personal movement that
I'm on, is to try to show to many of
(04:29):
the listeners out there what it really means to be
a man of courage, because I think it's different from
what's getting portrayed on social media.
Speaker 3 (04:37):
You mentioned your childhood, your father was fairly angry. You
went on then to be in the military. How many
years were you in the military.
Speaker 1 (04:46):
I was in for a total of about eleven years.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Okay, talk to me about what sort of things you
learned there about courage and which of those things you
carry forward and which of those things you've left behind.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
Eric, my life has been fine by many defining moments,
and one of the most defining happened when I was
a senior, or what we call a firsty at the
Naval Academy and I had been selected for this prestigious
role of becoming one of the brigade honor officers. Now
(05:20):
each company and at the battalion level you have honor officers,
but I was part of the overall committee and typically
this is kind of a cake job because how many
people in any given year are committing honor offenses and
having to go in front of this board. But when
I was there, it was a pretty much black or
(05:41):
white type of thing. If you committed an honor offense
and you were found guilty, you were expelled. So there
was a high threshold of pain that people would feel.
And so my year, first half of it started out
really well. We didn't have many honor boards. But coming
back from Christmas break, I walk into this situation where
(06:05):
two midshipmen had come forward to their electrical engineering professor,
and these were students who were at the top of
their class, saying that their personal values couldn't allow them
not to speak up, but that they had gotten the
exact version of the tests before the test. And what
I came back to was the largest cheating scandal in
(06:27):
the Naval Academy's history. So I went from having a
sleepy type of role to now having one of the
most arduous tasks in front of me. And something that
we came upon very early on was that this wasn't
just a handful of shipman implicated. There were hundreds upon hundreds,
(06:51):
and the daunting idea that we were going to have
to bring all of these people in front of this tribunal,
where how do you even do it when half the
tribunal is filled with people from their class? Was really
becoming a daunting challenge, And so NCIS was brought in, etcetera, etcetera.
(07:12):
And I could write a whole book on this. The
petty officer who gave the test away to the midshipman,
who then ended up spreading it throughout the academy. His
car blows up just before these trials began to happen.
But the superintendent at the time, who was a big
football player from the Roger Staubach era, made the decision
that he was only going to try twenty five with shipmen,
(07:35):
and about half of them were football players. And long
story short is we argued with him over the validity
of that. We tried to stand up to him saying
that this really needed to go through the Uniform Code
Military Justice because it was too big for us to handle, etc.
And he really threatened us that if you don't do this,
(07:57):
you're not going to graduate, and I'm going to take
away your privileges everything else. And it ended with us
finding the vast majority of these twenty five guilty and
then him making the decision to then basically reject every
single one of those convictions if they were a football player.
(08:19):
So this whole thing ends up going beyond us because
at the time, somehow the Baltimore Sun was getting information
about this incident and it was on the front page.
So the superintendent is getting more and more mad and
blaming us and taking away our privileges, and everyone who
was on the board is saying we had nothing to
(08:39):
do with it. So I end up graduating. The now
Navy Investigator General has been brought in to look at this,
and he has come to the conclusion, like we did
at the beginning, that there are hundreds and hundreds of
people involved, this is a huge deal, and that there
was a cover up. And I'm about ready to go
to my first duty station after I went through master's training,
(09:02):
and I'm called up to my Admiral's office, who runs
my whole I guess you could say the whole group
of officers that I was part of the community, and
he goes, I don't know why you're supposed to go
to the Naval Academy, but the Secretary of Defense has
requested your presence on Monday morning, and you're supposed to
show up in summer white uniforms. So I get there,
I'm met by two JAG officers who are there representing me,
(09:26):
and they tell me that I am being accused of
undermining the boards and allowing the football players to get
off and an other things. So I go in and
the superintendent started to try to cover his own tracks
by putting the blame on me because he thought it
was me who had been giving the information away to
(09:49):
the Baltimore Sun. And so now I walk into this
session where the table is filled with admirals and attorneys,
and I am basically fighting my survival. I didn't even
know walking out of that if I would lose my commission,
if I would have a future in the military, anything else.
So for me, I learned a ton of tremendous lessons
(10:12):
from that. I learned about the abuse of power. I
learned about what it took to stand up for things
that you believe in, even if that meant that it
could cost you everything, but standing up was better than
just taking it on the chin. I learned during the
process that you sometimes have to challenge authority when you
(10:32):
see things not going in the way that you think
they should and believe that they should. So that was
a real tremendous learning for me. And then I think
the other thing that really hit me was when I
went out to the fleet. You're given a bunch of
ideals of what that's going to look like, and I
(10:53):
think that this segment with this cheating scandal really prepared
me well for the idea that to getting out in
the real world wasn't like the ideal situation that we
were taught we were walking into. There was a lot
more gray areas once you got out there, and I
kind of went into it now with more open eyes.
Speaker 3 (11:16):
Did you always have that sort of courage to stand
up to authority? Where did that come from or how
do you think you were able to find it in
that situation?
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Well? I think I always had this feeling of being
taught right and wrong, and I had a really deep
Catholic upbringing. I went to parochial schools my entire childhood
and was taught very clear between what is good and
what is bad. But I think a defining moment before
I went to the Naval Academy is we had a
(11:47):
cross country state championships earlier in the stay, and I
ended up going to this big party where I had
been drinking, and the friend who was driving on our
way back his car out of control and we ended
up almost going over a cliff where we would have
all died. And at that scene, and I'm not proud
(12:08):
of it, I walked away because I had a very
demanding father who I was afraid of. He's a prayer
marine and he would physically put you to the test,
and so I did not want him to find out
about this. And I got home and I lied about
the whole situation, and unbeknownst to me, the police officer
(12:31):
had already called them and told them everything. And so
not only did I let my parents down, but I
let myself down from not speaking the truth and having
the courage to come forward in that moment. And I
think from that learning moment, I just kind of made
this promise to myself. I wasn't going to let that
happen again, you know, I wasn't going to let people
(12:52):
down like I did in that situation, and especially I
let myself down. So I think that is where a
lot of it stems from.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Thanks for sharing all of that your book and your podcast,
your platform is called passion Struck. What does that word
mean to you?
Speaker 1 (13:08):
It's so interesting. You know, the podcast has been around
now for coming on four years. I came up with
this concept maybe a little under five years ago, and
I knew this emotion that I was trying to convey, meaning,
you see something that's a challenge in the world, a
(13:29):
problem so big that you will invest every bit of
you to solve it for the benefit of others, to
serve others. And this means sacrificing your reputational risk, sacrificing
your financial situation, sacrificing at times your relationships to go
(13:50):
after it. And I happen to be talking to a
friend of mine. I mentioned kind of this concept to him,
and he said, you know, it sounds to me like
you're going from being stuck to becoming passion struck. And
it kind of just hit me at that moment that
this is it. That's exactly what I'm talking about. It's
this ignition inside that comes when you have clarity over
(14:15):
an issue that you're bound to solve and will do
anything it takes to do so.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
And what was that issue for you?
Speaker 1 (14:23):
I think we're best positioned to serve the person we
once were. And so for me, it was really I
had been getting these messages for a long time that
I was not on the right path with where my
career was heading. And my career was going fabulously well.
I had become a CIO of a fortune fifty company.
By the time I was thirty nine years old, things
(14:44):
were going well. And at the height of all of this,
I felt the emptiest I ever did in my life,
and other aspects of my life were falling apart. My
relationships were falling apart. I wasn't exercising as much, I
had high stress levels, and I really just found this
(15:07):
emptiness where I felt extremely apathetic and broken inside and
just craving for meaning. And so what it really showed
me was that we have this innate needing to belong
and when we don't, we face a crisis of unmattering.
(15:30):
And so to me, that's what the whole thing that
I'm trying to do with Passion Structure is all about.
It's how do you start addressing the disease of disconnection
that is plaguing so many people today because we're not
only disconnected on social media and other things from others,
were most importantly disconnected from ourself, and so how do
(15:52):
you take yourself back and gain that sense of belonging
and mission and ignition to do something with your life?
Thank God, what you're here to do?
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Use the word mattering there, what does that mean to you?
Speaker 1 (16:07):
So, Eric, this whole question of mattering is something that
I have been diving deeply into for the past four years.
It's interesting because I went out and I started to
look for the science around mattering. When you start looking
at behavior science, there's a ton of information on choice
bracketing and nudges and self determination theory, which is really
(16:31):
all about our intrinsic motivation. There's positive psychology, there's neuroscience.
But when I really started asking the experts, and I'm
talking experts like Max Bezerman and Bob Sutton and Angela
Duckworth and Ethan Cross and the list goes on and on,
no one could tell me any work that was being
done on mattering. And I did more and more research
(16:55):
and found one gentleman, Gordon Flett, who's at the University
of York up in Canada, who's really been the only
one who's been studying this. And I just had this epiphany.
How can something so essential not be further understood in science?
And so I have been trying to spend as much
(17:16):
time as I can interviewing people, researching and writing about
what does mattering really mean? And I am now working
on a book about this, so you'll be the first
person I'm talking to about it. But as I describe this,
I think that mattering has four fundamental components. There's self mattering,
(17:39):
the belief that we matter. There's mattering to others, there's
making others feel like they matter. And ultimately they're spreading
mattering beyond ourselves and our community to the world. So
if you think about this, and people have asked me, well,
(17:59):
how how do you apply this to a sales team? Well,
I mean it's very easy when you start thinking about it.
I'll tell you a story about it. I was a
young buck out of the military. I had been at
Booz Allen as a consultant for maybe nine months, and
I wouldn't have considered myself great at sales and any means.
(18:22):
And I happened to be at this conference and I
saw a gentleman across the room who was wearing a
Corvette jacket, had no idea who this person was. But
I ended up approaching him simply because I was on
a break and I wanted to talk about corvettes because
I was bored about what we were talking about at
this conference. And I started talking to him and he
was driving a Sting Ray and we both started to
(18:45):
talk about our passion for corvettes. Well, the more I
got into this and made him feel like what he
had to tell me mattered, it opened up aside of
him that leaned in on me, and suddenly he said, well, well,
after we exchange names, he said, what do you do?
I worked for booz Allen. I said, well, what do
you do? He goes, I'm the top civilian instructor for
(19:07):
top Gun And he then said, you guys have any
distance learning capabilities? And I said, well, a matter of fact,
we just delivered the most comprehensive one to the Army
National Guard and he goes, that's fundamental to everything I
want to do. I want to create this program called
Strike Fighter Online. Well, eighteen months later, after nurturing this relationship,
(19:28):
we get awarded the contract and it became one hundred
and fifty million dollars a year contract for Booze Allen.
My whole point of that is by making him feel
that he mattered, he reciprocated. And so in order to
do that, though, you have to feel that you matter yourself.
So really that's the first step is if you don't
(19:49):
matter to yourself, if you don't hold self compassion for yourself,
coming back to that compassion word and really believe in
you're in hate innate capabilities, you're never going to be
able to spread mattering onto someone else. So that's kind
of the framework that I'm exploring.
Speaker 3 (20:28):
So mattering is a pretty ambiguous term, you know, mattering.
Speaker 2 (20:33):
Do I matter?
Speaker 3 (20:35):
How do we go about answering that question? Because I
think a lot of the ways that we think about
whether we matter is in comparison to outside things. Right,
some of it is do I matter because I matter
to other people? But what's the base element of mattering
that goes deeper than because I did this, or I
(20:58):
do that, or I'm respectible for this or a help
with that? Like, what's the base layer for people of
mattering for everyone?
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Well, I think people are approaching this the wrong way.
There's been a lot of research that's come out about
employee disengagement, meaning when you look at what Gallups produced.
What it's really showing is that they're nine hundred million
people in over one hundred and forty countries who are
unfulfilled in what they do in life. And when you
think about that, I mean, that's a huge thing. And
(21:32):
when you look at people like Thomas Spray, who's predicting
that two billion jobs are going to be displaced by
automation and AI, it's creating an existential crisis that people
have that for most people who work, their work drives
a lot of how they self identify, of the meaning
(21:53):
that they have, and when that feels threatened, suddenly you
have this pervasive disconnect that's permeating modern life. Were ensnarred
in this relentless cycle of chasing, chasing, chase, and chasing
all the time. And yet in this pursuit, more and
more people are encountering a profound emptiness that I described
(22:16):
earlier as quiet desperation. So if you have this deficit
feeling inside of you, how are you going to be
able to show up to others in a meaningful way
when you feel so disconnected from yourself and your own identity.
And to me, that's what it really comes down to.
(22:39):
And I know you love zen practices. There's this Buddhist
philosopher to Saku a Kaida, who has this quote, what
is defeat in life? It's not merely making a mistake.
Defeat means giving up on yourself in the midst of difficulty.
What is true success in life? True success means winning
your battle with yourself. And to me, that's what mattering is.
(23:01):
It's winning that battle with yourself of overcoming stuff that
I talk about in the Book of Self Doubt, imposter syndrome,
everything else, and really seeing that you can become a
winner in life. And the winners in life are those
who went over their weaknesses and learn that they matter
and that they're able to make other people matter, and
(23:24):
they're able to conduct change in the world.
Speaker 3 (23:27):
So is mattering connected to achievement?
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I want to really change that whole model. I think
that's the easiest way we think about mattering is achievement.
I think of mattering more of service. I feel that
we are most alive and we feel like we matter
the most when we perform acts on behalf of other
(23:53):
people or we witness them. And some of this is
really backed up by research that dak Or Keltner has
done on a term that I love he created called
moral beauty. You found more people experience awe not in
seeing majestic arts or pieces of beauty, but in seeing
(24:13):
the moral beauty in others. So to me, mattering equates
to service. It's serving yourself in some ways, but more importantly,
it's serving others. And I just had this recent conversation
with Alison wood Brooks, who's a professor at Harvard Business School,
and she's got this book coming out called Talk. Her
focus is on the science and art of communication, and
(24:37):
when you think about communicating, communicating with another person is
really a form of mattering because the way that we listen,
the way that we immerse ourselves in another person's story,
shows not only that they matter, but it reverberates on
(24:58):
ourself because we self reflect and see ourselves through them.
And this is something that you must have seen when
you were going through your own recovery from addiction, that
the more you started to storytell your story, other people
would lean in on it and support you more because
of it, because they understood they had been there, you
(25:19):
were being vulnerable with them. And to me, mattering isn't
just this small thing. It permeates every aspect of our lives,
and when it's out of sync, I believe it's at
the core of why so many people feel helpless, lonely, bored, battered, broken,
whatever you want to call.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
It, because they don't feel that they matter. In that
disconnect is fundamentally one of by helping others, you see
that you have a place in things that is important.
Am I saying that more or less the way you
would say it?
Speaker 1 (25:53):
Yeah, I mean by helping others, by serving others, by
having that I call it my book creative amplifier. I
mean you're trying to amplify the fruits in people's lives.
It brings you an inherent sense in turn that you
matter and that you matter to others. And the more
(26:14):
you feel that, the more you're going to make other
people matter. And there's work that Emil Bruneau did, but
he was really working on dehumanization. And the way that
he was trying to address conflicts was he saw most
of the time, when people had deep rooted conflicts like
(26:35):
we're seeing in Israel right now, it all comes down
to each side's mattering if you think about it, and
the other side not feeling that they matter, and so
he was trying to use compassion and empathy and helping
to see the other side, see the person as they
(26:57):
are as a means to close the gap and try
to create a path forward. So that's another way that
you can think of mattering.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
Yeah, it makes me think of it's a Buddhist practice,
but it doesn't really matter. I think it's called commonalities practice,
but it's the practice of seeing in what ways are
others like me? And it fights dehumanization because if you do,
and you and I've talked about this separately, about how
(27:26):
to each individual their interior world matters, and their family matters,
and their kids matter. Those things matter to them every
bit as much as those things matter to me. And
when I can see that, I think it helps avoid
that dehumanization because we see that at its base, we
all are very very similar at the base level. Now,
(27:50):
the further you go up the stack, that more different
we get. But at a base level, we all want,
in essence what you're saying. We all want to matter.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
Yeah, and we all want safety. We all want to
feel that we can be who we are without being
told we have to be something different. I mean it really.
I mean it gets into body dysmorphia, it gets into
overcoming trauma, it gets into how we're showing up for
our kids. It permeates everything. And I didn't realize how
(28:19):
much it was like water until I really started to
think about how much it applies exubstantially in our lives.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
Let's go back to you working in a job. You're
very successful in your career. You're managing lots of people,
so in a sense, you matter to a lot of
people because you're helping direct and guide what they're doing.
So you mattered then, But I get the sense you
didn't feel it. So how do we connect those dots? Right?
(28:49):
Because if we look at any of our lives, we
can see in what ways we matter. Let's say I've
got a job and I go to work, and if
I have six other coworkers, I'm mad because the person
I am among those six people has a lot to
do with the quality of their day to day life. Right.
I can make being at work an enjoyable thing or
(29:10):
an unenjoyable thing, depending on what I bring. So I matter.
If we're parents of children, right, we deeply matter because
we have children that we're raising, and yet there still
seems to be a disconnect where people do matter that
don't feel like they matter. How do you connect these
dots up in your mind?
Speaker 1 (29:31):
Yeah, And I don't want people when I go into
this to feel sorry for me or to say, you know,
this guy had it all and what's he talking about
when I go into this. But when you think about
senior executives of anyone who's listening, a lot of the
employees below them think that they're completely out of the
(29:51):
loop on what's going on below them. And for much
of my career I didn't feel that way. I felt
like I had an extra impulse on what was going
on within my teams. I have a concept in my
book that I talk about speaking with your feet, because
I believe that the best leaders are very present in
(30:12):
showing up and talking and being present and explaining things
to employees. But I was finding that the more senior
I was getting, inherently the things that I felt mattered
most to leading people were slowly and progressively evaporating from
(30:33):
what I was able to do on a day to
day basis. And I was reaching a point where I
had so many fires that I was trying to fight,
and the vast majorities of these fires were employee issues,
because I had employees now in fifteen countries on four
(30:56):
or five continents, and they were in the politics of
the day. There was so much infighting going on between
the different presidents at Dell and who was partnered with who,
and what was happening and who was trying to do
this and that that my entire life was starting to
be focused on putting out fires and not doing what
(31:19):
I thought was the most meaningful thing in my job,
which was learning all this acumen that I had had
from the military and growing up on how do you
properly lead people? And so I found myself becoming more
and more out of tune what was happening on the
front line. I used to be able to know when
I was the head of software development at Low's what
(31:41):
a developer was working on and how it pertained to
that solution, and was able to strategize and put myself
into their position. And I found myself further and further
from that. And then on top of that, I was
traveling overseas two weeks out of the month, so here
I'm absent half the time from a lot of the people.
(32:01):
I'm absent from my family, and I'm seeing those relationships
have impact. I'm absent from myself because when you're traveling
like that, you're not keeping a healthy regiment in place,
and your schedule is constantly changing, and then I'm doing
a whole bunch of things that I don't enjoy doing.
And I just felt empty, and I can't even describe it.
(32:24):
I just felt so freaking numb inside that I'm not
even sure if you stuck up pin in me, I
would have felt it because I was seeing myself just
wasting away and I was completely stuck, and I felt
like there was no hope to get myself out of
it because look at all the stuff I had built up.
(32:45):
I was going to be let down to my parents.
I was going to let my family down. I now
had this house and the possessions and everything else. I
couldn't even comprehend what it was like to close that gap.
I describe it when I think of stuck, stagnant. I
lacked the confidence. I was timid, I was uncertain of
where to go. I was conflicted, torn between what I
(33:06):
felt I should be doing and what I really want
to do. And I was knotted inside because I was
entangled in habits and beliefs that were preventing progress. So
I hope I'm making that vision clearer because it's important
for me to do so, because I think there are
a lot of people who feel how I felt.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Hey, friends, it's Eric. Let's talk about something hard. How
many times have you made a promise to yourself and
broken it. You said you'd go to bed earlier, start exercising,
or stop reaching for that late night snack, but when
the moment of choice came, something pulled you in the
wrong direction. Those moments, those choice points, are where everything happens,
(34:09):
and when we keep failing at them, it doesn't just
derail our goals. It chips away at something deeper, our
trust and ourselves. But it doesn't have to stay that way.
In my upcoming free workshop, the Six Saboteurs of Self Control,
we'll explore what happens at these choice points, why they're
so hard to navigate, and most importantly, how to approach
(34:31):
them differently. This isn't about willpower or trying harder. It's
about understanding the hidden forces that lead to making the
wrong choices and learning the tools to rebuild your confidence
one choice at a time. Imagine trusting yourself again, knowing
that when you say you'll do something, you actually follow through.
(34:51):
That's what this workshop is about. Join me and let's
turn your choice points into moments of strength. Go to
good Wolf dot me slash self control. That's good Wolf
dot me slash self control to register for this free workshop.
I think a lot of people do feel how you felt.
Something I think about a lot is when do we
(35:15):
need to outright make a dramatic change and when can
we change our approach, our attitude, our beliefs and work
within a place we are. And I think a lot
of people have this with their work life because they
feel a lot of what you're describing. And the question
(35:35):
is is there a way within their existing role for
them to start to reconnect to what matters, to find
a way to look at their situation differently. Can we
make it good enough by staying or do we really
need to blow it all up and try something different?
And you and I talked about this a little bit
(35:58):
before when I was talking with you about how there's
something to be said for people who hit rock bottom,
right because you know, in my case, like I burnt
all of my life to the ground, there was no
decision about what parts that I keep and what parts
I don't keep. Most of the time for people though,
the choices aren't that clear. So how did you get
(36:18):
to a point where it became clear to you that
this isn't a matter of me realigning how I think
or feel or orient but like, fundamentally, I need to
have the courage to make a change. Was there a
defining moment that you knew it.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
You're going to have to let me explain this, and
it may take a couple of minutes to give the
full impact, because I want listeners to really understand that
I'm not just here pontificating. I have lived this and
it is myself pulling myself out of the deaths of doom.
(36:52):
And what I thought was the bottom that kept getting
even deeper that is taken me to where I'm at now.
So I had this calling for a long time. I
remember when I was living in Mooresville and I was
working at Loew's. I started to get very deeply involved
(37:15):
in our local church, which was a Methodist church. So
it was one of the first times I wasn't attending
Catholic church, and they had this program called Discipleship which
if anyone's been through it, it's not a trivial thing.
You study the Bible for thirty six weeks and you
go through Discipleship one is the Old and New Testament.
Discipleship two is the New Testament. Discipleship three is the
(37:37):
Old Testament. But it was the closest I had ever
felt to our Maker, and it was the first time
I had really read the Bible and had a teacher
who was really trying to showcase because he had a
PhD in history in addition to theology, of how these
things that were happening, these metaphors that Joseph Campbell talks
(37:58):
about were playing in our lives. And during this time
I started to pray and reflect more and more about
my life and what I inherently should be doing. And
I started to get these visions that I wasn't doing
what I was called to do, and inherently I knew this.
When I left the military. I had left because I
got an appointment to go to the FBI, and it
(38:21):
was kind of my childhood dream to do this. And
then my class got canceled and I was forced into
another path. And I was well down this path and
doing well in it, but it wasn't lighting me up inside.
But instead of using this as a queue that at
that point I needed to change and the change would
have been easier, I doubled down and instead I led
(38:45):
my family out of Charlotte. I went for money. I
took this job at Dell for the title and everything else,
and things started going worse. So behind the scenes, as
my job is becoming less and less meaningful, I am
in this temporary apartment. I go home for the first
(39:05):
time in a few weeks. I get back apartments flooded, water,
main brakes, everything is lost. They move me to the
souther apartment and eric like three weeks later, I keep
hearing these visions, keep ignoring them, and I'm in the
shower and all of a sudden, I feel the stinging
on me and I look up and they're scorpions dropping
from the ceiling on me.
Speaker 3 (39:26):
I was about to wonder whether frogs started dropping from
the sky or locusts, But scorpions will do. Scorpions will do.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
And I go to this company who's running the apartment complex,
and they say, we don't have scorpions, and one's reported it.
They can't find them. Then my family comes to visit
the kids' beds end up both being infested with bedbubs.
Then we get bit by scorpions more, and this time
actually had video to show them of all the scorpions
(39:55):
that were coming out at night. Oh, we end up
buying a house, So even though my wife is begging
me not to move, I pushed forward with very good reason.
I might add with very good reason. We buy this
house and we find out after we buy it that
it had termite damage that extended around the whole back
(40:16):
half of the house and up into throughout our kitchen
and upstairs. So now because it wasn't picked up on
the inspection, I got a quarter million dollar issue. I
end up leaving Dell. We moved to Florida. We buy
this house because we don't want to have to fix it.
So we get a relatively new house and we're only
in it for about three months when a storm comes
(40:38):
and it turns out our roof had a hole in it,
and we end up having mold and other damage and
having to spend another two hundred thousand to rip it apart.
It led me to getting divorced et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera, and still I am not listening, and it
finally took me going to I dropped my daughter off
(40:59):
from school. Well at the time, I was going to
Orange Theory four or five times a week, and this
day there's a fire at Orange Theory in the electrical room.
I ended up going to my house early, and I
walk in on an in home robbery where the person
who's robbing the ends up pointing my own gun at me.
I end up evading from that, starting to have this
(41:20):
existential crisis on top of everything else that's going on.
And four days later, my best friend jumped off the
Skyway bridge and committed suicide. And coming out of this,
I just went into the deepest and darkest despair and
I looked back at all these opportunities along the way
(41:41):
I had to change, and I started to realize that
it went from me being pushed to being kicked, to
being batted over the head, to losing pretty much everything,
including my physical and psychological safety, and are unearthing tons
of PTSD and past trauma that I finally made the
(42:04):
decision that I'm going to break away from this. I
am going to dedicate as long as it takes to
relearning myself relearning what's most important to me, getting my
life back into order, and using this as an opportunity
to help other people get out of this shithole that
I found myself in.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Wow, that is quite a story. Thank you for sharing
all of that.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
Well, it's hard for me to even believe now looking
back that it even happened. I'm right, I mean, it's
something that you think you can't even make up. It
also reminds me of the stories you read about in
the Bible, of these things that happened to people that
weren't following their inherent path until they woke up and
(42:47):
started to do it. And it also brought me to
this really fundamental belief that I think we're all put
here for a very specific reason, and we have inherent
talents inside make us so unique and back to this
mattering that make us matter in the world, and when
we're not using them in the right way that we
(43:09):
were put on earth to do it, I think our
life ends up going off the path. Gabby Bernstein has
talked about this, and mel Robbins has talked about this,
But I saw that show up in my own life,
and the more I started to go down the path
of what I inside knew I should be doing. My
life started to turn around immensely.
Speaker 3 (43:31):
What are those things that you knew you should be doing?
What are the big changes?
Speaker 1 (43:36):
This is like the million dollar question to me when
we look at this, and when you and I spoke earlier,
I mentioned Bob Sutton, who's an amazing organizational psychologist. But
Bob is well known for a book he wrote about
closing the knowledge versus doing gap, and that's what this
is really about. You know you need to change, Like
(43:59):
if you have a drinking issue, you know you need
to stop, but you keep going along with it and
make excuses to yourself instead of dealing with it. Well,
kind of the same thing here. I knew I had
to figure out what was the biggest block that was
keeping me stuck. And I think that's why in cognitive
(44:20):
behavioral therapy they refer to it as stuck points. So
I immersed myself in taking steps to get over the
past trauma and that most recent trauma that I had had,
and it was extremely painful because it had been something
that I had been suppressing for years and years and years,
and it all started all the way back to when
(44:42):
I was five years old. And got pushed through a
basement window playing tag. And I had a traumatic brain
injury and went all the way back to that. I
had sexual trauma, I had physical assault trauma, I had
combat trauma, and I had to deal with it. And
so I went through cognitive processing therapy and that helped somewhat.
(45:03):
I went through prolonged exposure therapy, I went through EMDR,
and it was this work on myself and really battling
through those stuck points that were causing me to not
get over these fundamental psychological hurdles that by doing so,
they started to release confidence in me that I could
(45:25):
tackle other areas of my life. It opened the door
that I could get myself into better shape. It opened
the door that some of these issues that I had
had from traumatic brain injuries, I didn't need to be
a victim to them and I could tackle these. And
the thing I like to tell people is the journey
of a thousand miles, and Robin Charmus says, this too,
(45:46):
starts with a single act, and that act then opens
up tons of doors that you don't even expect, where
all of a sudden, you're working on one thing, but
it starts propagating into a myriad of things and then compounds,
which really gets into the core concept that I like
to talk about is the micro choices or micro decisions
(46:07):
that we make are the things that lead to either
a waterfall of happiness and fulfillment or to a value
of despair.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
Yeah. It's interesting because we talked earlier a little bit
about defining moments. You and I talked about defining moments
at a different time, and there are moments that are defining,
but as you say, it's the thousands of micro moments
that actually allow those defining moments to mean anything.
Speaker 1 (46:35):
Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 3 (46:36):
And So a couple of questions that I'd like to
just kind of dive into your book here a little bit,
and one of them is talking about in your passion
Strut framework, you've got these different mindset and behavioral shifts
and one of them is called brand reinventor. But there's
a line in there that you talk about where you
(46:56):
say comfort is the enemy of adaptability. So first, what
is adaptability? Why is it important? And talk to me
about how comfort gets in the way.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
Yeah. I remember as a senior executive, one of the
things that was so top of mind and it is
today is emotional intelligence or EQ, and I think that
that is extremely important in our lives, and it's extremely
important the more senior you get in anything you do,
because so much more of your responsibility is in dealing
(47:28):
with others. But I think we're missing a bigger opportunity
in how much a role adaptability plays, both professionally and personally.
And professionally it's something that I think people have to
get used to. I mean, the amount of change that
(47:49):
is coming upon us has gone from a trickle I
remember when I started my career to now a waterfall
and I can't even predict what it's going to be
like ten to fifteen years from now. But if you
are not able to adapt to the tsunami of change,
you are going to be in a very hurtful place.
(48:09):
So that's one way to look at adaptability. But I
think another way to look at it is throughout life.
I think we go through different phases, through the transition
points that make up our life, and it's having that
inner fortitude to understand that at times we have to
adjust and adapt to our surroundings, adapt to how we
(48:32):
treat people, adapt to how we show up in the world,
adapt to changing times, as our kids get older and
our role as a parent adapts to the different stages
of their life. The same thing we have to adapt
as our parents get older. So that's kind of two
different lenses of what I meant about the ability to adapt.
Speaker 3 (48:55):
I agree, I think it's a Darwin quote. I won't
get it right. But it's not like the strongest survive,
it's like the most adaptable survive. Right, that's the key thing.
You know, can you adapt to your environment? And I
think you're right that things keep changing on us. There's
the external pace of change which is accelerating as you're saying,
but our lives change, right, Like you mentioned kids kids
(49:17):
are two, you've got a different set of challenges and
when your kids are eight versus when they're fifteen, And
we have a different set of challenges in our own
physicality from the age of say, I'm not the same
as I was at twenty five physically, right, So how
do I adapt? How do I change? And if we
keep dragging what worked before and trying to force it
(49:38):
into different situations, we end up in trouble. So what
role does comfort play in us not being adaptable?
Speaker 1 (49:47):
Well, for me, the easiest way to explain it would
be through Carol Dwe's work and the difference between mindsets
and having a growth mindset or not having one, because
that's where comfort it really comes into place when you
become complacent. A way I describe this later on in
the book is people all the time say you live
(50:08):
your life on autopilot, and I think it's an okay
way to talk about this opposite of having a growth mindset,
because you're kind of just going through the motions and
things seem to be going well, but you're kind of
just bopping down the street. I think the analogy is wrong, though.
I think so many of us today are living more
what I call a pinball life. We are acting as
(50:30):
if we are the ball in the game of pinball,
instead of the player learning how to play the game
and the underlying subgames that make up pinball, which is
kind of like life. And so from the lens of this,
when you're comfortable being a pinball, you just allow yourself
to bounce off of things. You are a complete victim
of the circumstances around you. Whereas when you start really
(50:54):
adapting and forcing yourself to take a deeper look at
your core values at the most important things of your life.
You start being more intentional about how you want that
ball to start navigating its surroundings. And to me, that's
(51:15):
a good metaphor to describe it.
Speaker 3 (51:17):
I like that analogy a lot. And I think, you know,
autopilot's an interesting thing because autopilot can be really good
if you're heading in the right direction. A self driving
car is kind of a lovely thing if it's going
where you want it to go, because then you can
be like, all right, well that's working. I can now
pay attention to this, or I can pay attention to that.
(51:37):
The problem is that either we don't know where we're going,
or the road conditions are changing rapidly enough that we
can't leave it on autopilot. And I think that's where
we get stuck. The human ability to habituate and do
certain things without thinking about them is actually an evolutionary
advantage for us. It's just that life is changing to
(52:00):
quickly to remain on autopilot, and if you try, you
end up being, as you're saying, the pinball it is.
Speaker 1 (52:06):
And Angela Duckworth is really known for her work on grit,
but what I think her more profound work has been
on is self regulation, and to me, what you're talking
about is a lot of self regulation. Self regulation means
self reinvention. It's a reminder that when you're old ways
set in, you can either choose to accept it or
(52:29):
you can reinvent yourself and push your own boundaries further,
which to me, is all about what intentionality, self control
or self regulation is all about. It's recognizing that you
have to adapt to your surroundings and it's kind of
where the threat mechanism comes in, because if you don't,
(52:49):
there are going to be consequences.
Speaker 3 (52:51):
Well, I think that is a great place for us
to wrap up, John, Thank you so much for coming on.
I've enjoyed this conversation. We'll have links in the show
notes to your book and where can people find you?
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Yeah, you can find the podcast passion Struck wherever you
listen to shows just like yours. And I have two websites.
If you want to learn more about the Passionstruck movement,
go to passionstruck dot com. You can sign up for
my Live Intentionally newsletter. If you want to learn more
about me or hire me to speak, go to John
Rmiles dot com. Wonderful, Thanks so much, John, Thank you
such an honor to be on your show.
Speaker 2 (53:39):
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(54:00):
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Host
Eric Zimmer
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