Latest / The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell / iAlign #79 - Stop Mistaking Shame For Accountability

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iAlign #79 - Stop Mistaking Shame For Accountability · The iAlign Podcast with Flint Mitchell

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the I Align podcast with Flint Mitchell, where I provide stories, resources, and tools for ambitious builders who are ready to gain control over procrastination, overthinking, and distraction.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: I was on the coast of Chile, and while I was in the water surfing, I was thinking about one of the greatest pains I have consistently suffered throughout my life, which is the pain of feeling like I would not live up to my potential.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes when the water is the right temperature and I'm sitting under a pink-orange sunset and I have the right mixture of adrenaline and serotonin pumping through my veins, things just bubble up for me and can hit me pretty hard.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I'll admit this is gonna be a bit vulnerable, so only listen on if you're up for that.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: The reality is that I was put on this planet with sufficient resources, opportunity, curiosity, and time to pursue anything that I wanted.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I wasn't given a plate that's like, here's your path.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to do anything to win.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: But life was always up for me for the taking.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And there were a lot of periods in my life where I consistently just felt like I was dropping the ball during them.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes these were months or a year or two of time.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that hits home for you too, if you've had one of these before or are currently in them.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And if I really break it down, those periods are all characterized by a very specific theme, which was my choices in life.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are plenty of external factors that affect us, let alone in this crazy world that we live in right now.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: But at the end of the day, I have always understood, at least under the surface, even if I resisted it a bit consciously, that all of my actions were my choices.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was and I am responsible for all of them.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And unfortunately, that means that when I engaged in behaviors that I wasn't necessarily proud of, be that wasting days in front of the TV or my phone or video games late into the morning, or allowing myself to not tell the full truth or to hide the truth or feel guilty about it later.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Telling people about projects I was going to pursue, hyping myself up in front of their eyes and in front of my own, only to not follow through and sweep them under the rug because I was embarrassed about them.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Promising myself I would adventure more because it was so important for me.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And then not being fit enough to genuinely pursue those adventures that I talked about so much.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or not staying consistent with work I was plenty capable of doing because I'll to be honest, sometimes I don't even know how I spent those days, but somehow nothing at all came from them.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I could go on.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: When these things were happening, it was my fault.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I have always liked to think of myself as a strong-willed, hard-working, high achiever.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll give myself some credit.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I have done some pretty rad things in my life.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: But during those moments, that was not true.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was on the surface, but not deep down inside.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Inside, I felt like a fraud because my word didn't mean as much as I wanted it to.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I didn't want my word to mean much, but because it wasn't consistent with the actions that I followed those words with.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, that actually made me a bit of a liar.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that is directly perpendicular to the way I've always viewed myself.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: To be honest, there really aren't many things that I know of that feel as bad as a momentary failure of character.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: For example, I played pretty high-level soccer through university, and I'm incredibly competitive, and I have lost many important games.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: They sucked.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: I hated it.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: I hated even losing intramural games that didn't matter, let alone big championship ones in high school.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the feeling of losing one of those important games isn't even on the same planet as the feeling of looking myself in the mirror and going, Well, how long are you going to continue telling yourself that?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or fuck, I've been talking about that project for years now, literally years now.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe I won't be as successful as I thought I would be when I was younger.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_00: Or I feel like I should be having an impact.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I should be doing something big.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: It just feels like I have potential for something bigger than these things I'm doing right now.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or, wow, I don't ever follow through like I say that I will.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And as I was thinking this, the sky was getting too dark to surf anymore, and the rolling hills of the forest behind the bay, Pichilemu, the wraps around were just kind of silhouettes at this point.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I took another wave, got absolutely pounded by it because I couldn't see shit at that point.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then I rode my board on my stomach.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: And walking to the house I had rented about a half mile away.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: My shoulders were pretty tight in my old wetsuit that was starting to tear.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: The street lights didn't really illuminate the ground well, so I walked carefully while barefoot.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I rinsed off my feet with the water bottle.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: I left outside to warm up during the sunset.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: I shook out my towel, checking for spiders because I was a little paranoid about the Chilean recluse that apparently hides in damp towels.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: I hung it up, I started a hot shower, and it hit me right then about what was so painful about those experiences.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was partially the misaligned action or lack of action itself.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: But more than that, it was the way I treated myself after those moments.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mistook being hard on myself for accountability back then.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Subconsciously, I would tear myself apart for poor action, worse than with outright attacks.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was with shame and with disappointment.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this was a hard habit to kick because on the surface it appears to work sometimes.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you do make partial changes to behaviors because you shamed yourself for them.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's real.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: The issue lies in the long-term efficacy of this practice.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Holding myself accountable with shame led only in the long term, and honestly, usually in the short term too, back to the behaviors I didn't want to engage in.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: For example, I watched YouTube compulsively when I was younger.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: Then I would feel bad about myself for wasting time on YouTube and for not getting my homework done.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then I would, you guessed it, soothe myself with more YouTube.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: That moment where you think, oh, I have the choice right now to not keep doing that thing.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: But then you blink and you're doing the same fucking thing.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of remarkable to me that I went from that conditioning that I had my entire life to the polar opposite so fast, from shaming myself to identifying all those self-shaming statements and turning them into insight and into fuel.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Genuinely, one of the reasons I was sitting there on that couch by myself a month and a half into a surf work adventure in a small town in the middle of nowhere in South America was because of my shame.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: Not in the sense that I shamed myself into positive behavior, but the opposite.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because I learned how to identify those self-shaming statements, the reasons behind them, the moments where they occurred, and the emotions associated with them.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: And believe me, many of those things were pretty gnarly to uncover.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It definitely wasn't always a happy process.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: But I turned every single one of them into moments where I learned about myself and the ways that I was holding myself back and into moments of loving myself instead.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Every action that wasn't aligned with my values became fuel for my growth.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: I learned something far more powerful than hardcore, gritty, self-attacking accountability.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And for the men out there, this one might be a bit confusing for a second, but that was compassionate accountability.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: Each of those misaligned moments or poor results that I wish went better was simply an opportunity for me to learn a bit about myself and to work with myself instead of at myself on how I could personally create my own unique method of doing better next time.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: This was still serious though.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Everything didn't just turn into sunshine and rainbows.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: The reality was that I had a lot of behaviors and patterns that were holding me back from performing in the way that I wanted to in life.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't consistent with things over the long term.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: I overcommitted to too many projects and responsibilities and got spread thin.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: I allowed too much distraction and noise into my life and still scrolled my phone and the web way too much.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't able to communicate my personal wants and desires effectively.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I felt selfish for doing so.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, I wasn't completely honest.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have routines and structures that would support me.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: I refused to ask for help and instead tried to do everything on my own.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I strived for perfection and in doing so was never really happy with my work and took way more time than I needed to do it because I both procrastinated beforehand and spent too much time on details that didn't matter.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't as healthy with how I ate and drank.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: It I'll stop.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot more.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of work to be done on myself.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest, there still is.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: I am a work in progress, and I am not ashamed to admit that sure, I figured some things out and I've made significant headway on a lot of them.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm not perfect.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: A mentor I trusted told me something that I grabbed a hold of a while ago, which is you don't have to be healed to help.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: I resisted this at first.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: How could I help anyone if I wasn't perfectly done with my own work?
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's some easy counter evidence.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: If that statement wasn't true, how many therapists would there be in this world?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Like seven?
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because basically no one is truly healed.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Every life has its ups and downs, just like mine.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that by using this methodology of my values to identify the most important inconsistencies and misalignments, I've been able to move past many of the larger obstacles that were in my way back then, which actually uncovered a pretty insightful lesson.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Only after doing a lot of the foundational work on myself was I able to actually genuinely pursue change in the areas where I can excel.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: That might sound a bit confusing at first.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: What I mean is that you might be a really good soccer player, but if you have absolutely atrocious habits and self-talk and behavioral patterns, unless you have a God-given talent, like Reed, you are Meradana himself, you will probably never be an incredible soccer player.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: You'll probably end up being slightly above average and then blowing up.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And even then, Meradana's horrible lifestyle meant that he got fat fast and didn't play as well or as long as he likely could have.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Making that analogy a bit more relevant though, look at your career or your relationships or your adventures.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you are constantly overcommitting your time, finding yourself distracted all the time by news or social media or content or by comparing yourself to others, not able to separate and make clear time for that which you want to pursue, or all of those other things that I mentioned before, Henry.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the likelihood that you become excellent at any of those things, your career, your relationships, or your adventures, it's pretty slim.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: For example, plenty of the people I work with are engineers or scientists who have either started or have the inkling that they will start a business of some sort.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know what that requires?
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Time.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Not just time though, time spent focused on the new business.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of it.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know what you are losing by continuing to shame yourself and engage in non-productive or consumptive behaviors?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: You guessed it.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: Time.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: The math doesn't math.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's the reason that during these periods of time I was just talking about, I was on the verge of succeeding, but never really succeeding.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't yet have the tools to genuinely create space from all these personal issues that were blocking me.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: More than that, I didn't have a filter for identifying how to effectively spend that time and what to prioritize or allow into my life after I had created that time.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was fucked on both ends of the equation.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: You want to know the reason I was in that house in Chile I talked about earlier to begin with?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because in that moment, I had two priorities consistency and freedom.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to work long days without distraction, and I wanted to be healthy and adventurous and surf and hike and work out.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I put myself in a house with Wi-Fi next to a cool wave and a rad gym nearby and a grocery store that was close enough in a foreign country.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because I was and I still am willing to refine what my ideal life looks like and what is allowed into it and what I am willing to filter out or sacrifice in order to have it.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because I refuse to go back to the pain of the personal attacks and the shame and the disappointment I felt years ago.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: It hurt a lot.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a healthy way to live, even if on the surface I seemed happy and even succeeding in my early career.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it was never going to be the foundation upon which I built my genuine successes, the ones that have yet to come.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: I would never have been able to perform at a high level in my work and handle the genuine risks associated with pursuing my own actual mission in the way that I wanted to, with integrity and consistency and freedom, while I was still in that headspace.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: It just wouldn't be possible.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And what that means is that I traded in the pain that I knew, which was the pain that I gave myself, for the potential pain of genuine failure.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because when I was holding myself back, I could blame non-productive behaviors or self-sabotage or analysis paralysis, et cetera, all these things for my failures.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's the classic, well, I guess we'll never know if I could have won because I didn't give it my all.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: But you know that means that I could have done it, right?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Nope, none of it.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: I want none of that.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: I want the pain that comes with genuine scores on goal and genuine misses.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to take a metric fuck ton of shots on goal.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to take those shots well, even when it hurts, when I miss.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I can only do that if every voice in my head is supporting me to be better, not tearing me down.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll be completely honest, while on this journey, there are still plenty of absolutely anxiety-ridden moments.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Even when I was in Chile, in that rad house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, there were plenty of moments where I thought, shit, that didn't work.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: That stole my time.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: That took way longer than I expected.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, I feel behind.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: The difference now is that those thoughts lead right back to my mind that I've trained that thinks, excellent, what an opportunity.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: You're doing great.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Keep going.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Right back on the field.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Another shot on goal.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm far from perfect and I'm not a robot.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I am a hell of a lot better, more consistent, more free, and happier than I was.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: That mentality is the reason that led me to Chile to live the life that I wanted in that moment.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: It led me to the longest left-hand wave I've ever served under that pink sunset, surrounded by happy smiles and shouts like, uh, Keola, with tired arms and a calm, happy mind.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's why I'm here in front of you, because I want you to feel that way too.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because if I can help you get to that place, if that's what you even want, then I know that a world where more fantastic human beings are taking more value-aligned action with more consistency and more focus and more freedom, well, you know, that's a better world.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed that episode.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've been told your entire life that you're smart and you have potential, but you continue to see yourself not do what you said you would do again and again, and it's made you stop trusting in yourself or that you will ever achieve that potential, I want to help you.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Together, you and I will implement a core value-based system that will help you become decisive and focused.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to feel the relief from the weight on your shoulders because of the decreased noise in your head.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Strength each morning because you trust yourself to turn lost avoidant hours of your life into forward progress.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Peace, when you no longer have to hide how you actually spend your time.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, pride in yourself when you close your eyes every night before you go to sleep.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: If that's of interest to you, click the first link in the show notes, fill out the 30 second application, and grab a time on my calendar.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: Spots are obviously limited because of my time and availability, but if they fill up and you're a good fit, I'll make sure you get on the wait list.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: I look forward to speaking with you.