Latest / To Your Success! Podcast / Episode 49: Your Children Are Watching What Success is Costing You
Transcript
- To Your Success by Christer Johnsen: I remember I was in New York with my family, kids, and I was checking emails. We were walking Manhattan and my wife at that time on it, she said, Do you have to check emails all the time? But your daily life is constant pressure, constant availability, constant responsibility. You're physically present but mentally somewhere else. And the truth with the kids is that they do what you do, not what you tell them. So growing up in an environment like that, what do you think children actually learn? Welcome to your success. You've built a life others admire. You've achieved, delivered, and become someone people rely on. But somewhere along the way, it stopped feeling like yours. Mentor Christer Johnson and Ellen Solheim know that feeling. After following successful paths of their own, they chose something different: more clarity, more freedom, more presence. Today, they help high achievers design lives that feel true. Not just impressive. This podcast is for those ready for their next chapter. Not more pressure, not more performance, but a life that feels like yours with clarity and direction. Welcome to your success. Warm welcome everyone to a new episode of the To Your Success podcast. I am Krista Johnson and with me today is Ellen Son Len, as always. And I'm with you today, yes. Again. ⁓ Again. Again. It's almost like we live together. Yeah. We actually do. Well. Yeah. Okay. It's like we do almost everything together. Mm-hmm. Except today when you are leaving the house and ⁓ driving to Corfu. Yes. So we and that feels kind of strange but that's interesting. Okay. So today we have once again a special topic for you ⁓ because most high achiever have spent years building a successful life but very few high achiever, very few people at all s stop to ask what life is teaching the people closest to them, especially the children. And today we talk about the questions most successful people never ask themselves. And many of the people we work with have really impressive careers and Christer, what do you think what is actually going on inside that life? I know it. Because I've been there. Yeah. That is why the title of this episode is Your Child Your Children Are Watch Are Watching What Success Is Costing You. I remember. I was in New York with my family, kids, and I was checking emails. Right? We were walking in Manhattan and my wife at that time on that she said, Do you have to check emails all the time? I said, I do. And when the kids were smaller and I was working all the time, they sometimes they asked their mum if they could go up to the office where I was sit where I was working. To just to ask me something. It's a bit sad, isn't it? It is sad, right? But externally everything was in place, right? I'm sure it is for you as well as a as a listener or a viewer here, your title, your income, your respect, the full picture. Nice cars, nice house, you have all the friends, you have the parties, you have everything. But your daily life is constant pressure, constant availability, constant responsibility. Right? You're physically present but mentally somewhere else. I'm still like that, Alien. You say, Are you with me? and I say, Mm-hmm. And then you know I'm not. Yeah. And then I can tell you something and then I can ask you to repeat it one hour later and you have you asked have you told me that? No. Well that is how my brain is, right? I'm hyper focused. So that is my brain. That's a paradigm. That's a paradigm. And then that that means that you have to like poke me and Chrissy, this is important, right? I know. So that's why I ask you if you are with me or not. So Yeah. But I get better and better on that, right? But I mean physically present but mentally somewhere else, meaning that you mentally are always on work. Right? The people around you actually they feel it. I know that can be hurtful. I mean that can be painful to hear. But they actually feel it, right? Mhm. Even when you don't know. And the truth with the kids is that they do what you do, not what you tell them. So growing up in an environment like that, what do you think children actually learn? Well it depends on the environment, right? But in today's corporate world I feel that it's more and more and more that people have to be available. There is a demand that you shall work all the time. It's quite common to be in a senior position and have to work every Sunday night so you're prepared for Monday. It's quite common that you don't control your calendar, meaning that people can put meetings into your calendar so you get back to back meetings. Mm-hmm. And you're just running from meeting to meeting. And the true question, the the the truth is, is that a kind of life that you actually want your kids to have? I have some lawyer friends, like, and they don't have vacation, they call it lawyer vacation. Mm-hmm. That's terrible. And honestly, I excuse my French, I said that's just bullshit. You have to rest. You know, you get better when you rest. It's like working out, you know, people who train a lot athletes they know that they train really hard and then they have to rest, recover. The same thing. Don't you think a lot of people that work this hard and just stay connected to work all the time and stay a bit disconnected from the family and the children and everything, it doesn't feel good inside for the person that's actually doing this either. I think they know that something is wrong but they they they are just scared to To acknowledge that this is also hurting their clo those who are closest to them. Yeah, and then they excuse themselves. ⁓ I just have to check it. It's only five minutes. But you know, children don't inherit your words, they inherit your patterns, right? And I have a v I have a from my life a true life experience on that. Both my kids, they they Maria and Andreas. ⁓ Maria lives in Norway, she has a young son, a beautiful Ludwig. With ⁓ our grandson. I'm very proud of of her and very proud of them and what they do. She combines that with a career. Andreas, my son, lives in Miami. And I told him once he's in consulting, maritime consulting, and I and he's doing really good. Great, right? And and but that one day I told him I think you work too much. And then he said and then he said But dad, you did the same thing. You know it's an investment. Yeah I said, I mean I said, yeah, I know, but I was wrong. Right? I don't want you to have that kind of life because you can do it in a different way. Right? You can have success. If you work like we do now, you can have success without working your ass off. Right, without putting in eighty hours or sixty hours or eighty hours a week. So for me that was an emotional impact. Right? Because then I understood that he's actually copying how I did what I did. Right? And then he said it's an investment, yes, and I also said it's not worth it. Right? You don't have to. It's a habit. It's an expectation you have. The environment puts an expectation on you. Right? You have to work like these so many hours. Right? And then people say I they are proud of it. And then I say, You no you're not. That's just an excuse. You like the money? Of course. But I can teach you, I can help you making the same money working less. So so where do you think that this definition of success that you have to work so much that you have to be connected to work all the time? Where do you think this definition actually comes from? I I I think. Well in the corporate world I think there is one severe problem in the corporate world. Well there are two severe problems. One is that companies get bigger and bigger and bigger, right? And they get so big that people disconnect to them. That is one problem. That is a result of the financial system we've had since beginning of 2000, where you can do all the leverage buyouts and you can easily borrow money and put it on top and create a financial structure. You well, if you worked with PE, you know how that is, right? So you don't need so much equity, you can just borrow the money and you borrow the money to buy a company and then you use the cash flow from the company. To pay down the loan. And then you grow, grow, grow, grow, grow as long as it's so cheap to borrow money. It's not that anymore. That is one problem. The other problem is that it's too much management, too little leadership. Too much leadership is clear, right? Leadership is this is the direction we do, we make fast decisions, we move on, we move on, we move on, we move on. Management that is to have big stuff. big staff departments, right? A big ⁓ financial department, a big HR department. Right? As staffs, not in line, not in organization aligned. And then it becomes management because you need to coordinate. And then you get matrix organizations combined with the line organization. I don't understand that. I had eight hundred people when I was in charge of Alpha. We didn't have an HR department. I can say that again. We had eight hundred people We didn't have an HR department. We had one HR coordinator and she took care of all the all the contracts and all that, right? But I said to my management team and my leader team, I said, It is your job to make your team work. Right? If you need help, ask me. Right, then I can solve the problem. But if you have a problem in your team, you have to fix it. Right? That is leadership. That is leadership. Not talking around, not back to back meetings, right? But all these back to back meetings, all this administration, all these complex structures where p creates actually a life where people are more afraid of doing mistakes than to do something right. And that is. And and that that is when your identity becomes that you're an administrator. You are a meter. You sit in meetings, right? And that is not good. And then when your kids, when they grow up and they say, Well, I want to have the same career as you, mom, or same career as you, dad. And I want to make the same money because they are used to that. They are used to nice cars, they are used to travel. we took our family to to to the Caribbean, right? Yeah, we rented a house at Mystique. Which is a private island. Yeah. And then they realized the cost of doing that and then they understood the price, right? They didn't understand that until they had to pay it b for themselves. No, but it's it's not that long ago that they actually n found out how much it costs. No. I know. A trip like that today would cost like four hundred thousand crona for a week. And we rented a house next to what's his name again? Tommy Hillfigure. Right. And next to there was Mick Jagger. And just around on the other side of of the beach was this Canadian rock star. What's his name again? ⁓ what's his name? Heaven. I don't know, I wasn't there. ⁓ summer of sixty-nine. ⁓ what's his name? Well it comes to me. It comes to me. Type in the comment if you if you don't know. If you remember the name. We have seen him on concert, you bought tickets for me. Right? Yeah. Okay. It gone. But it's like and then they realized, wow. Actually it it's a lot of money, right? And then they wonder is it worth it? Brian Adams. Brian Adams. Brian Adams. That's true. Yeah. But it's a fun place to be. Actually it was a little bit boring. We had been more fun places, but it was very nice. I took my deep diver license there. No, not my deep my advanced diver license there. Mm-hmm. So but to go back to to the subject then. If your identity is built entirely around performance, they learn that we're that Your worthiness equals achievement, right? Not who you are, it is what you do that matters, right? And that's not true. It is not what you do, it is who you are, right? And you didn't choose to teach them that, right? But your life automatically teaches them that. And yeah, I want you to be aware of that because that is a big pain point, right? And I understood that when ⁓ when my son said, But Dad, you did the same thing. Yeah. So your relationship with work time, stress and money becomes their reference point for what a successful adult life looks like. And do you want that? Do you truly want that? That they shall work like sixty to eighty hours eighty hours that they don't have time for the kids? That they almost check emails while you eat breakfast? That they don't have time for your grandchildren. Yeah, that is true. And since we sail around the world we just have to fly them into us. Right? Yeah. Okay. So that's actually why I asked you earlier here where where does that di the ⁓ where does that definition of success actually come from? Because you talked about a lot of things from there, but most people inherit their definition of success without even examining it. Yeah, it's it's you let the external world affect you, right? You live the life you think others expect from you. Right? And it's so easy to fit into a culture. A culture is a very, very strong thing, a corporate culture. This is how we do it here, right? Yeah. But I mean when when a company has a bigger budget for pizza or for overtime pizza than for marketing, then there is something wrong. Yeah. I haven't thought about that. Is that a possibility? It is. Can we have a budget for a pizza? Yeah, of course we can. Of course we can. But we don't. No, we don't. We don't need it. Okay. And we cannot eat pizza every day because you are such a good cook, right? So you make so great Asian food and ⁓ a lot of things, right? But it is really important, right? Because most people inherited the definition of success without even examining it. This is how it is. Society handed you the blueprint and you just followed it because it worked. Of course it worked, but it worked for the society and for the organization and for the company. Does it work for you? The problem is that success was defined by someone else, not how you truly want to live. And then you think this is how it has to be. No it doesn't. I tell all the CEOs and directors I work with that the first hour of the day when you if you are in the office at eight Eight to nine is your time, block it. Don't let anyone take that time from you so you can prepare the day, so you can work on yourself, so you can work on the business. Not only work in the business, but work on the business. And that is leadership, not management. But external success can quietly erode everything that matters internally to you. And that is a big trap. That is what I call the golden-plated hamster wheel. Right and that erosion becomes a part of your legacy. So when you sit with people in the mentoring work, what do they say they actually want? It has changed since I started. When I started, most people wanted to create something on their own to have financial freedom. Now people want control over time. They want to control their calendars. I guess that's because a lot of our clients already have the financial freedom. But it has changed because the world spins faster and faster and faster and you get more and more demand and then you shall just reorganise. I have a client high up in the oil industry. And he said we are re reorganizing again. He's not the CEO, so he's at a level below. And I said, Yeah, and what does that and what what's the implication of that? That you have to work one hour more every day and every Sunday including He said, Yes, that is what it is. I said, It's not worth it. Right? It is squeezing a lemon until it's dry, and that is not good leadership. Good leadership is that it's fun to work for you. Good leadership is that you set direction. Good leadership is that you is that you take care of your people. Not that you squeeze them, but that you take care of them so they grow. That is leadership. And I say it's a lack of that in the corporate world now. But you said you say that that It has changed since you started mentoring. I I actually see that when because I I watch a lot of so social media ⁓ to study it and and I can see that as well because a lot of the content now is about getting freedom. This is this is a good life, this is I want to have to control my own time. It's not as much as I want to make a lot of money and be successful in the business, it's more like this is what you can do when they have a lot of time. Yeah, but this is also because we work with high achievers that are high up on the musclow hierarchy. So they have the basic security, they have the financial freedom, they have they have everything. They just want to realize it, right? But the biggest leverage, the biggest leverage there is now is AI. Right? It I I use AI actively. I I I said it's one year ago I decided I want to be really good at AI. Right? Now it takes me I save ninety percent of the time making a PowerPoint presentation. Right? It saves so much time. But you have to understand that AI always looks backward. It's only a language model, right? So based on hit history, it creates the future, right? So it is a mechanical creativity. What AI gives you is to raise you up to an industry standard so that the knowledge becomes really available for you. Yeah. But you have to be good at it. You cannot AI AI doesn't have a goal. So it's not in the future. It's heavy now. That's true. Right? So it's pure mechanical, looking backwards, trying to then rewrite Or write the future based on that. So you have to add your spirituality, you have to add your goals as well. But when you use it in a good way, right? We use AI to script reels, to script podcasts and all that for us, but we are always talk we only want talking points. So that we can be into the spirit and use our experiences, right? The example from my life was not a part of of the script, we just had the idea, right? But it's important, it's the biggest leverage you have. It is actually right now, right? The other biggest leverage you have is to set a goal. Because when you set the goal, that is the most important thing you can you can do for your kids. Teach them how to set the goal. I did that for Andreas. He had two goals, right? He wanted to be the best MBA out of out of the university in America and he wanted his dream job. And I said, Sure, I can show you that, but then you have to do exactly what I tell you. And he did, and he reached both, right? And then he said, Dad, this shit works. I said, I know. We live it every day, we teach it every day. But it starts with you setting a goal because and it write it down. Because what changes then is that you get out of the hamster wheel. Right? It will take some time, it can take time, you don't have to break loose. I just want you to mentally start thinking about how you what you truly want, right? Not more achievement, more presence, but get real control over time. Not just flexibility. On paper. I talked to a prospect yesterday and she said I said why do you work so late? And she said, Well I take one hour off in the middle to go to the gym. I said that that's not even a good excuse. I said, Why do you work so much? But I have to. I said, why do you have to? Because I have to check the email all the time. I said it's just you're just stuck. Right? So and then you get a stressed out nervous system, always on alert. No wonder why people get burnt out, right? You have to calm down. You have to create relationships where you actually where you actually are present. And that is real wealth, right? It is. Wealth is not about the money. Wealth is about feeling good. It is about control of time. It is about doing what you want. It is about working with people you like. It is about living a life that feels like you. Mm-hmm. Not performing like a top athlete. There's a reason why they why they stop when they are in the thirties. They're not supposed to So after listening to this podcast, what is the question ⁓ w w what what is the takeaway that someone should have after this podcast episode? What do you think? Well many successful professionals they reach this point, right? Life works but then it doesn't feel right and then you start to excuse yourself. It were it's worth the money. I can buy a third house. Yeah. You can. You can have a summer house, you can have a winter house up in the mountains, and you can have all the things, right? Does it make you more happy? Maybe not. And then you say you do it for the kids. No, you don't. Right? So the first step is getting clear on what you actually want. And what the next chapter that you truly want look like. Right? That is. That is what matters and that is how you become the greatest parent in the world for your kids. Is when you say no This is not for me, right? I want to create something else. So getting clear on what you truly want, then create the next chapter. If it resonates with you, if you want our help, go to my website christajohnson.com, click on the let's talk button and see if you qualify for a clarity call with us. Absolutely no pressure. We will only give you clarity and tell you how we can help you. Yeah. It's great, right? It's one of the gifts we have from working. with what we do is that actually we can help people, right? So I want to thank everybody for joining this To Your Success podcast episode. ⁓ and if you like it and this is ⁓ what you want to listen to in the future, subscribe please. Yeah we come out with a new episode every second week. Right? And for us this is heartfelt, right? It is. We love what we do. I hope that comes through, that we are really engaged so that we share our lives. our successes and our failures, right? And we never fail, we only learn, right? I don't regret my old life. When Andreas told me that this is what you did dad and it's a it's an investment. I didn't regret my old life. I'm proud of my old life. And now I'm able to teach him and others That you can live in a different way and still have success. Yeah, and I think it's it important to think that your children are always watching you and one day they may build a life that looks exactly like yours. And the question is would you want that for them? And if you say no, then the only remaining question is when do you decide to change it? Yeah. That's true. That's a good wrap. Yeah. Everything we do is to your success. Yeah. And success It's not about the money, it's about living the life you truly want to live. That is success and that is what we do. Right? And well Yeah, okay. We wish you a wonderful day. Bye bye for now. If something in this episode spoke to you, it may be a sign that you are ready for a different kind of life. Krister and Ellen work with a small number of high achievers who feel it is time for their next chapter. If that feels like you, you can apply for a private clarity call through the link in the show notes. Until next time, to your success.