Latest / Step Wise / Season Three Recap: Foster Mobley on Being Seen, Learning to Fail, and Why You’re Already Enough

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Season Three Recap: Foster Mobley on Being Seen, Learning to Fail, and Why You’re Already Enough · Step Wise

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: What repetitions give us is not only practice and skill building, but they also give us practice at failure.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_04: And I'll speak for myself, going, you know, as a recovering MBA and working my way through college and grad school, and you don't fail.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_04: And if you do fail, you don't admit you fail.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_04: And failure is one of our best teachers.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not advocating people go out and fail.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_04: What I am advocating is, though, if you're not failing, it's like skiing, trying some things that are a little bit outside your comfort zone.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: Athletes have to do that all the time.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_04: And I would contend that the best corporate citizens that we have need to have a different relationship with failure.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: Foster, we are wrapping up season three, and I love to ask you questions about the season, especially at a time when you know, for season three, you've talked to Olympians, a mountaineer, a conductor.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: You've also talked to CEOs and healthcare leaders, and even someone who got diagnosed with ALS and then learned how to code and build an app for other people living with that.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, really fascinating people this season just across the board.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious, if you strip away the job titles, do you see any connecting dot between all of these guests and one thing that they all bring to the table?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_04: What a wonderful question.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_04: Boy, this has been a fun season.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_04: And I will say, I enjoy talking to people, and especially those in my milieu, like the executives I've worked with forever, which were predominant in seasons one and two.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_04: But this one was particularly fun.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_04: And the connecting dot for me is humanity.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_04: I'm always struck by the Ram Das quote: we are all just walking each other home.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, from the from the wonderful story of Luis Benitez as he guided the first unsighted climber to the top of Everest, to David Betts, my friend and and colleague, who was an incredible athlete and you know recently diagnosed with ALS, and he turns his life into service for others through this app.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_04: Just fabulous, fabulous stories of our humanity.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_04: And boy, that just has fired me up, it's lit me up, it's filled me up.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_02: How?
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_04: You know, when we strip away the job titles and we strip away the accomplishments and stuff, and we talk at a very human level.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_04: At the end of the day, we all have struggles, we all have joys, we all have passions.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_04: And when you can connect with somebody at that level, that's what fills me up.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_04: It's the BS is gone.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_04: Um the truth begins.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_04: Um, I don't want to talk to someone's image.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_04: I want to truly talk to that person kind of at their essence.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_04: And these this this year got more of that in it.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_04: And that's what made it so exciting for me.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: That's such a fascinating thing to say right now in a world where like everything is image.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_02: I've recently had a friend um at a lunch saying like she even feels like her kids feel like they have to perform all the time because they're constantly being filmed for social media or trying to, you know, be cool in high school or whatever it is, and there is this idea of like image first always.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so, how do you see that in people when the ego kind of drops and you're not talking to the image of someone?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: And for those of us who are maybe trapped in wanting to present a specific way, like what is your advice for us?
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's one of the sub-themes of the book honoring that I'm working on now.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_04: It is how do we create enough space and enough grace between us that allows you to drop that ego and allows me to drop the ego, move from performative to real, move from performative to what really matters to us.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_04: And again, at the end of the day, are we all that different?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think we are.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_04: It's taken me many years on the planet to kind of get to that point where the striving and achieving can take a backseat to the existing and the being.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_04: And I wrote about that in my first book, the notion of the difference between being and doing, and have built a coaching career around that concept.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_04: It's not just what we do, but it's how we show up.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_04: So that's the way I think about this.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_04: It is how we show up in our lives when the cameras aren't rolling and social media is turned off and we're out taking a walk.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_04: We don't have to perform for anybody.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_04: We can leave our cell phones aside.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_04: But for me, this notion, the word is space.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_04: At my not a men's group, men's group last night, I got some feedback.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_04: Uh, very deep sharing.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_04: It was wonderful.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_04: The feedback I got was thank you for creating the space for us to just be ourselves.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_04: And that's common.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't you were brilliant in asking or facilitating.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_04: It wasn't you had the perfect share.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_04: It was the space for us to step into and allow ourselves to be ourselves and genuine.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_04: That that to me is what it's about.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_02: You started not a men's group, men's group during this season.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I remember speaking with you, I think, the the day after your first one when we spoke about either loneliness or AI.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I'm curious, what have you learned from that?
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Has that evolved into something you weren't expecting?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you just kind of said, hey, I had people over for a fire and I'm gonna keep doing it.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Like what has come from that?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_04: Oh boy, so much.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_04: The power in really truly seeing another person.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: You and I had this conversation a little bit ago.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_04: I recently read the book Theo of Golden, which I found just such a beautiful, warm, touching book.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_04: Highly recommended, by the way.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_04: And in this book, the lead character, Theo, has a way of seeing people, seeing them for their goodness, not seeing them for their current circumstance, seeing seeing them for their physical appearance, but seeing them for their real goodness in a way that the individuals themselves may not see themselves.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_04: And the power that creates to be seen that fully and that powerfully is amazing.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_04: And I do believe in that.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_04: I think if there's one thing that a good coach can do for someone else, it's that they can see them for their best.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_04: And it's not problem solving necessarily that leaves a mark on people.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_04: It is, wow, she really saw me.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_04: She really helped me believe in myself in really important ways.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_04: And that's the Theo of Golden character, and I'm gonna remember that character for a long, long time.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_04: That's how I try and live.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_04: I don't always make it, but I try and see the other person fully, um, unhurriedly, patiently, generously, and those marks stay for a long time.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_04: By marks I mean just positive impact stay for a long time, and it affects the seer as well.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_04: Because if you deal with people in their best of humanity, it's like, what a great world to live in.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_04: What a great world to live in.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_04: One that, you know, we often hear is occupied by all of the negative and stuff.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_04: I believe in the goodness of people, and I believe we all have it.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: You bring up seeing people for who they are and your, you know, your career as a coach.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: I find that career so fascinating because people have fully trusted you and you know leaned on you to help guide them through their journeys as leaders, and we can see that in the most recent interview with Miss Val, where she talks about a time where she was presented with the option to become an executive coach and and the feedback you gave her, which was maybe not for you, and and how and how you framed that into you know needing to kind of lean into the asking side of things more.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: How can the everyday person learn to see people like that more?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is clearly something that not all of us can do, and I'm just curious, how do you get into a room with someone like Miss Val or like any of the other leaders you've coached and actually see them?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: Where does that start?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_04: We all can do it.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_04: We don't all do it, but we all can do it.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_04: And back to the notion of honoring and what led me to write this book of such a weird title for leaders and and everybody else on the planet.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_04: We begin that by if we want to truly see the other person, truly see them, we've got to do it through clear eyes.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_04: We've got to sometimes remove some of the filters over our eyes, filters of judgment, filters of bias, filters of our fear, filters of the way things we think should be.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_04: And so to honor you and see you fully and give that space, I've got to start by honoring myself, which is doing the work to strip away those filters.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_04: And that's that's a never-ending lifelong journey.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_04: But we I believe we all have that in us, we don't all practice it.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_04: But again, it starts by you know, clearing the clouds or the filters off my eyes so that I can see you for your goodness, not see you for what I think you should be.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, this notion of honoring, too.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_04: I'll make a plug here.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_04: This is not just a business leadership book.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_04: This is every person in relationship, and hopefully we have many, and hopefully they are good, can follow the same kind of rubric.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_04: Honor self, do your work, honor the other, see them fully, honor the we, what it is that we create and how we exist together.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_04: That works in every relationship.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_04: Am I doing my work?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_04: Am I seeing you fully without bias, without prejudice, without a lot of shoulds?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_04: And then what who are we together and what could we be doing or creating?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_04: It's very powerful.
• 11:09
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• 11:13
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• 11:31
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• 11:35
  SPEAKER_04: Most high performers don't need more ambition or vision.
• 11:38
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• 11:43
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• 11:51
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• 11:58
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• 12:06
  SPEAKER_02: I know in your first book, Leadership, you really talk a lot about work on self.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_02: There are seven different access points, and the stream is one of them.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: You spoke about that a few times this season, one time in particular during the round table, speaking with Benjamin about beliefs drive behavior, and behavior drives performance.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: Walk us through the chain from belief to behavior to performance.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_02: Most performance starts at behavior.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, how how do we get through that chain?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_04: It was in the Miss Val era.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_04: And every year she'd give me a couple of athletes to work with.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_04: Now I'm not a psychologist and I'm not a sports psychologist, certainly.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_04: So I was not able to dig into their pathologies that led to performance issues.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_04: But what I was able to do is to have is to create a safe kind of dialogue with these student athletes who are, I think they're 18, 19 years old.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_04: Create a safe space for them to have an honest conversation in the moment of performance, what's going through your mind?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_04: And I would dig into what you really believe about yourself in that moment.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_04: Because they were incredibly trained.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_04: These are, if I can use a mechanical analogy, these are Ferraris, finely tuned Ferraris who could go 200 miles an hour.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_04: These were incredibly skilled and trained athletes.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_04: And yet they wouldn't all perform at their top.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_04: And so I was always interested in what are their thoughts that are driving subpar behaviors.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_04: So one of the athletes was struggling on the vault.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_04: The vault is you run down a mat, and I think it's probably 40, 30 yards long.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know exactly.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_04: All my gymnastics friends are going to correct me on this one.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_04: But let's say it's 50 feet, I don't know what it is, and then you spring onto a horse, and then you flip and you land.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_04: And it's incredibly hard to do because you're going full speed.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_04: And she developed a glitch, if you will.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_04: She would run down the vault and panic.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_04: And instead of flipping, she would run straight into that horse.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_04: Bang! Like this.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_04: And did she have the ability to do the routine?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_04: Did she have the physical capability and strength to do it?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_04: Something in her thinking was holding her back.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_04: And so this notion about really trying to uncover the known and unknown thoughts that a person has is one of the important pieces that a coach does.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_04: I hope that a good sports psychologist would do.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_04: But I'm not concerned about, okay, and you were potty trained at age three, and that means something.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_04: I have no idea.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_04: No idea, and I don't pretend to have.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_04: But I can engage them in dialogue to reset that thinking.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_04: I had one athlete come up to me one time because I was talking with a group.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_04: We're talking about the power of your thoughts to your performance.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_04: And I said, Is anybody struggling with their performance?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_04: And they several people raised their hand.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_04: I said, How long does it take to change that?
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_04: And they went, Oh God, you know, the season, uh, several months.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_04: I went, that's how long it takes to change it.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_04: And one of them came up to me afterwards, she was a freshman, came up and said, You said this, and like, what do you mean?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_04: I said, It's your thinking that's holding your back, not your physical capability or your practice or your routines.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_04: What would be possible if you held a different belief about yourself in that moment?
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_04: And what would it take to get a different belief about that?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_04: And we worked on that, and sure enough, changed like that.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_04: So it's not all magic, but a lot of it is the relationship between beliefs, behaviors, and performance for me is super foundational and was really reinforced in those moments.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think the first conversation I had with you before we even worked together, you told me that your goal is to get people to perform at their best and fullest.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember it was powerful to me because you talked about this notion that it is usually ourselves in our own way or our thoughts.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_02: And for me, a hundred percent, I can always see where I'm putting, like I am picking up a boulder and placing it in my way, almost to protect myself, maybe, or something.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: And you spoke a little bit about how your boulder or the thing that you come up against a lot is fear, and how you've worked through that.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: What's a question that anyone listening to this can ask themselves to kind of start to chip away and find out what their boulder is?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: And you can also buy the book leadership, just so that would help.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_04: But also, well done, Jaina.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_04: Well done.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_04: I love this.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_04: I do have one correction.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_04: You said I've worked my way through fear.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's something that comes up every day.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_04: It's part of it, we're all of our journeys.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_04: For me, it is fear.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_04: It's fear of not looking good, fear of fear of not being worthy enough because uh, you know, I've got to continually prove myself.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_04: And is that true?
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think it's true.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_04: And I've done a lot of work on that, but it continues to pop itself up.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_04: Um, the teacher who's had a huge impact on me, a woman named Byron Cady, who wrote a book, landmark book, called Loving What Is, for me it was that.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_04: And it was, you know, is it true?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_04: Can you absolutely know with 100% certainty it's true?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_04: Who are you when you think that thought?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not worthy, and what would happen if you flipped it?
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_04: I am worthy.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_04: And like for me, that rubric was helpful, but there are a million of them out there.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_02: You just spoke briefly about, you know, the difference between working with athletes and working with CEOs, and and you're not an a psychologist or anything for these athletes, but you have worked with Olympians and you know people who have really gone on to truly like be the top of the top of their athletic career.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so what is the difference when you're coaching an athlete versus an executive?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: And is there something that we can learn from either?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Can the executive learn from the athlete?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_02: And can the athlete learn from the executive?
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_02: Where is that kind of connection there?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_04: One interesting difference is the number of repetitions that an athlete gets is well beyond the repetitions that an executive gets.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_04: Um, an executive is paid to, in essence, make things happen, solve problems when they're not happening, build a team around them to make things happen, all of that stuff.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_04: But they're dealing so many times with unique circumstances that their agility and facility in the uniqueness is a thing.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_04: That's generally not the case with an athlete.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_04: They're gonna go practice that vault a thousand times.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_04: Here's my run.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_04: If I start on this place, I'm gonna run down the ramp this way.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_04: They practice it a thousand times and it's repetition, repetition, repetition.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_04: And to that end, that's how they get perfection.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_04: That's how they get their nine-nine fives.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's through repetition, it's not through individual genius.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_04: I wish we could do more practicing on the corporate side.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_04: There is a there was a movement in the 90s, I think it came out of Royal Dutch Shell organization, and a brilliant uh practitioner there, and I'll remember Ari de Guys, I think, who would take executive teams through a lot of scenario planning.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, here's what happens.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_04: The cost of Brent Cr in the North Atlantic is$100 a barrel.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_04: Now what do we do?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_04: How do we deal with that?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_04: And they take them through as if it was real.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_04: Okay, now the cost of Brent Crude is$50 a barrel, but we've got these geopolitical influences in the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_04: Now what do we do?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_04: And it was that process of getting more repetitions that I think is so valuable to leaders that athletes get that leaders don't typically get.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of times these great organizations are looking for athletes to come in and work with them.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: And it seems like there is this specific something that athletes have that the executive teams or whoever on the team wants.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm curious what that is.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_04: What repetitions give us is not only practice and skill building, but they also give us practice at failure.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I'll speak for myself, going, you know, as a recovering MBA and you know, working my way through college and grad school and doing all that stuff, you don't fail.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_04: And if you do fail, you don't admit you fail.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_04: And you just put your nose down and work harder, but you don't fail.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_04: And failure is one of our best teachers.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_04: I'm not advocating people go out and fail.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_04: What I am advocating is, though, if you're not failing, it's like skiing.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_04: If you're going down every run perfectly and you never fall, you're never going to learn to the extent you could by trying getting out on your edges a little bit more, trying some things that are a little bit outside.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: Your comfort zone.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_04: Athletes have to do that all the time.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_04: And I would contend that the best corporate citizens that we have need to have a different relationship with failure.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_04: There's a wonderful story in the first book where it was at the College World Series, and this athlete that I've been working with over the course of the season, final game for the national championship.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_04: And she went up against this really tough pitcher and struck out three straight times.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_04: And she would admit, I looked bad, wasn't even close.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_04: And she came back in the dugout and used a technique that we had worked on during the year, where she wrote down all of the thoughts that she was having in her brain.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_04: Oh God, my boyfriend's in the stands, and he's really never seen me play, and I'm looking, and I'm on national television, and I look stupid, and wrote all these, literally wrote them down.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_04: And then took that, looked at it, balled it up, threw it in the trash, came up the next time at bat, runner on second base, hits a double, scores the run, they win the national championship.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_04: Wow.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_04: Against the same pitcher that she had struck out three times before and wasn't close to hitting the ball.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_04: So the this notion of failure is such a powerful catalyst for learning if we treat it like that.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_04: Now, for somebody, I'm the business school route, and um, you know, failure is an uncomfortable thing for me.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_04: I could get caught up in my feelings of, oh, gee, I'm not good enough.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_04: All of those things that this athlete wrote down, I wouldn't know what to do with them.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know how to perform the next time under pressure.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_04: So I think that's one thing that um business leaders can learn a lot from athletes.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_04: Repetitions, try practice things, learn a different relationship to failure doesn't have to be catastrophic.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_04: It could be, you know, I didn't make the mark this time.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_04: What do I need to do differently?
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_04: And we say we do that in business, we don't really do that in business.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you just completely reframed something for me.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: I've always known that failure is a great teacher, and when I have failed, I try my best to look at the failure and see what I can take from it.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Write down notes, you know, those sort of things.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_02: But what I've never thought until you just framed it this way was failing teaches you how to fail.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_02: Not that you can go and okay, you can try it again and try to do better.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's how I've always thought of it as like I fail, I'm gonna go back and try to do that better.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: But more the athlete point of view was more like they're failing and then they're handling it in a in a certain way.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_02: Does that is that correct what I'm kind of getting from that?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_04: It is, it is.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's interesting too.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_04: After about 10 years in this business, maybe 15, I realized that there were not enough repetitions for me in trying new things.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_04: Like every time I got up in front of a paying client, I had to be perfect.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_04: Whether I was teaching a class, I was coaching, I was solving a problem, I had to be perfect because after all, they're paying for it, and I want to provide the greatest service.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_04: And I thought, where's my practice field?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_04: How do I go out on a Tuesday afternoon and learn something new?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_04: And so I started to, and this is where athletics has been such a gift for me.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_04: I started to try new tools and I would give them away to these teams that I was working with.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_04: And say, okay, there's the Enneagram tool.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_04: That how do I learn that?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I'm going to put myself in a situation of lower risk.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_04: These student athletes were very receptive and weren't going to be hypercritical if I said something wrong or I stumbled on something, and I gave it away and gave it away and gave it away and repeated, repeated, repeated, and repeated, and then I went, okay, I think I have this, and now I can perform it at a much higher level than I would have been otherwise.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_02: You've been doing this since the 80s, and I'm curious what has kept you interested in this?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: Have you ever felt like I'm done, I've been learning about this for 10 years, I'm over it, I'm done, close up shop, let's move on.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: I can feel that you enjoy talking about it and giving people this insight.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: So can you just, you know, for this last little bit, kind of talk through how you've been able to do that and what that's been like?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_04: For me, it's about the joy that comes from learning, which is a core value of mine that I've discovered over time.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_04: And the backstory and the truth is that in my practice, which started in uh 1980, about every 10 years I would get bored to tears.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_04: Bored because making a l living was taking uh precedence over making a difference.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_04: And so I found ways to create models and tools and stuff and sell them in the marketplace that I thought would help people, but it was a commercial enterprise.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_04: I'm selling classes or I'm selling workbooks or coaching engagements or whatever.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_04: And I consider myself an instructional designer, which means I'm taking concepts, putting them together in a curriculum, and teaching those to get the desired impact and behavior change that the client wants.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_04: And I think I'm pretty good at that.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_04: And but I'm the kind of person that would design it, deliver it once, and be done with it.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_04: So here I would give it to somebody else.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_04: Here, you deliver all the rest of these.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_04: I want to go on and do the creative part.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_04: And so about every 10 years I go, oh God, I've had enough.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_04: What should I do now?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_04: And it was this boredom, this restlessness of same old, same old.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_04: And about 10 years ago, coinciding with my, you know, kind of life change, moving to Montana, um, stepping back from the CEO role of my company, being much more selective about the clients that I worked with, um, I realized that for me it's about learning.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_04: When I keyed into that, the next thing that happened was the same thing I'm advocating in the book honoring, I had to learn to honor myself and do my work.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_04: And I'd been doing, you know, stuff, classes and therapy and all that stuff for many years.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_04: But until I really understood the relationship between learning and my life's vitality, I didn't quite get it.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_04: And now every conversation is something that just fires me up.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_04: There's no boredom in learning for me.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_04: I often say, and I said in the first book, that the the largest distance we have in our lives to travel is 16 inches from here to here.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_04: And at that point in my life, I was much less worried about the fears I've been working on, the fears that held me back from my full performance and my full effectiveness.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_04: And I was way way more able to go here and live and learn and lead and communicate from that place, and that to me made has made all the difference.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_02: So a final question here to wrap up, but if you could go back to 1980 and tap on Foster's shoulder and tell him one thing, what what would you let yourself know?
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_04: You're enough.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_04: Nothing to prove.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_04: Work hard, learn a lot, be a difference maker, but you're enough.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_02: That's a lesson for everyone.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_04: And that's what we have friends for, too.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_04: You know?
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_04: That's what we have friends for.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, thank you so much.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, great season.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_02: I can't wait to see what we have ahead of us.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: And um, yeah, here's to here's to season three.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_04: I'm uh I'm excited to wrap up season three for all the learning.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_04: I hope uh people took some great um um insights and joys and um and challenges out of it as I did.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_04: And um season four, I'm looking for deepening this notion of honoring self, honoring the other, and honoring the we and uh what that what that can make.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_04: Do one thing for me before you close the app.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_04: Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_04: It's how people like you help people like me find this show.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_04: And if what we talked about today sparks something in you, there's a book called Leadership Rethinking the True Path to Great Leading.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_04: Yes, that's the real title that goes deeper into this territory.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_04: It's on my website at fostermobley.com.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_04: And then sign up for our email list to be notified when my next book, Honoring, goes into pre-sale in 2027.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_04: And if there's one person in your life who needed to hear this episode, send it to them.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_04: Not because we need the numbers, because they need the conversation.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_04: Set the table, invite cool people, magic happens.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_04: I'm Foster Mobley.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_04: As always, friends, stepwise.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_04: Our music for season three is composed and performed by Montana musical legend Philip Auberg.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_04: Courtesy of Sweetgrass Music.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_04: Phil's recent passing was felt by many, including those of us associated with this podcast.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_04: We thank Patty Auberg and Sweetgrass Music for access to this beautiful piece.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to Stepwise.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: Stepwise is produced, edited, and promoted by Zedist with support from Amber Gillard Consulting.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Find more episodes and resources at fostermobli.com and follow Foster on social media at FosterMobley.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time.