From Roadblock to Launchpad: Transforming Failure And Guiding Others to Success With Steve McCready
Failure is the inevitable roadblock on the path to success. But what if you can transform your relationship with failure? In this episode, Tom Dardick and Steve McCready discuss their roles as guides in their professional fields, emphasizing the importance of assisting others in navigating challenges and achieving their goals. The conversation shifts to their different approaches toward learning and knowledge acquisition and the importance of selecting meaningful metrics in evaluating success. Finally, they talk about the importance of flexibility, adaptability, and authenticity in personal and professional lives. Buckle up as they share their insights on leading others to success and the best ways to fuel your growth engine.
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From Roadblock to Launchpad: Transforming Failure And Guiding Others to Success With Steve McCready
In this episode, it's my pleasure to welcome Steve McCready to the show. Steve is a psychotherapist by trade and became a coach. That's one of the things we start off talking about that, intersection between coaching and therapy. This gets a little murky. There's supposed to be a dividing line. Sometimes that dividing line can be a little difficult to see. Somebody like himself has a unique view as to what that is. Steve and I talk about that. We get into a whole bunch of topics regarding coaching as a profession, how people make moves and improvements in their lives, and all things related to the Eye of Power model. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Steve McCready to the show.
Steve, we're birds of a feather in that sense. I'll tell you, one of the things I've never called myself is a coach. I've been a consultant. The reason I don't think of a coach is I always thought of coaching as a bad word. The coaches that I saw in the orbit around me, it seems too easy. You can come up and roll into somebody's life or business and give them the bullet points of things that they should do differently. You get to go on with your life and they get to stew in it. I didn't like that dynamic at all. I don't see a way to do away with that. It's something that I try to fight against.
Part of it is going to what's real. It seems to me like there's this gray area between a coaching relationship and then as you get into actual psychology and a deeper dive into what's going on with people, there's this mushy area that separates the two professions. I saw on your profile, Steve, that you are trained as a psychoanalyst and then working as a coach. That area is probably not so murky for you and your practice. That's the area that grabbed my attention and I'd like to explore it first if we could.
Yes, it's very murky. I agree with you. I'm not a big fan of the term coach either. I use it because it's what people understand. From a simple marketing standpoint, I could come up with some word that maybe does it better but it's going to make people go, “Huh?” That's not good. I use it even though it's not the best label. It has a lot of associations. There are some people who use the term coach when they're meaning consultant.
Even within coaching, there's this big realm from the people who will never give advice whatsoever to more of a hybrid. At the end of the day, what it comes down to is I'm trying to help people get from where they are to where they want to be and to navigate what is, as we all know, a difficult, challenging journey that has a lot of obstacles. We're not always equipped to either navigate around or through those, or we don't even necessarily see them.
In a lot of ways, I would liken it to the role of a Sherpa and mountain climbing. They know the path, they've walked it, they've been there, and they can help how to travel it successfully. That would be it. With my background being psychotherapy, there's a very bitch of a psychological and mental component to my work and where I focus on it. It is murky and messy. The label piece is less important than the thing of, “What am I doing? What's my role in my client's life or for any coach?” I know a lot of coaches and therapists. It varies widely about how we work with people and where we engage. There's no one word that could capture all of us.
At heart, what we're doing is we're two human beings, if it's a one-on-one scenario, with an intent to get to where we want to go together. There are certain requirements. In the Eye of Power model, we have a guide system. I don't call them coaches or anything like that. A guide is simply a person who wants the best outcome for you and is honest, courageous enough to share what they think, and willing to go there and get real. The other things are variables.
Guide is a term that could be used and could characterize it pretty well.
A Sherpa is a guide.
It is a form of a guide but at the end of the day, it comes down to this. It's like somebody who is supporting you on the journey. All of us, no matter how much we've learned, known, and done, have blind spots and areas where we weren't maybe given what we needed or what we ideally would have had. That can be so limiting.
The thing for me is I know that from my experience. I've seen it with other people who have these wonderful things. They can contribute to the world but also obstacles that prevent that. My whole goal is to help get that out of the way for people so they can be and do what they're here to do and do their part to help us all as a society figure this life thing out, which is challenging.
If it wasn't challenging, it wouldn't be worth doing.
It would also be probably boring. That's the catch. If it's too challenging, it gets overwhelming. We've got to find this sweet spot in the middle.
That's why it's beautiful that there's such a spectrum of experience and a wide range of possibilities for people. We decide and set the thermometer of what we think is acceptable and not. There are some level-one sorts of things. If you don't show up and you have a character that makes it so people can't trust you in any way, you're walling off a whole range of possibilities for yourself. There are some table stakes. Once you can get to that level, then it's a wide range. We can write our story. As many people as there are, that's how many stories can be. I find it wonderful and one of the best things about life that's worth looking at and investing our attention.
I would agree. I'm increasingly of the mind that probably we are capable of doing a wide range of things like my career. I've worked in radio, worked as an IT guy, and done the psychotherapy thing. I'm doing the coaching. In a lot of ways, there are a lot of different elements to them and some aspects that overlap but they all in their way have been enjoyable and special work and challenging. It's so easy for us to limit ourselves or feel limited. That's such an awful place to be. I know that pain and I don't want anyone else to experience it. That's been always a fundamental piece of what drives me to do this work, help free people in a lot of ways so they can do the big things that they want to do.
You've got a great broadcasting voice. I'm not surprised to hear about a radio background for you.
It was a long time ago. Unfortunately, it shows up. If I'm ever talking to anything that's getting recorded, I'll leave friends voicemails and they'll be like, “Why are you using your DJ voice?” I'm like, “It just happens. I'm sorry.”
Let's get into a little bit of the nuts and bolts about how you encounter people and some of the things that I've noticed. We can compare notes a little bit. Maybe we'll shine the light in some areas for people they haven't previously considered. When of that intersection between psychotherapy and coaching, some of the coaching methodologies that I've witnessed in the world are what I'll call the Hammer and Nail approach. “You just do this. Keep doing this. If you do this, eventually, you'll succeed. Write down the number of dollars you're going to earn in this month.” It’s a very course cognitive visionary, let's say. I find that maybe it works for some people. That does not work for everybody.
This is the whole Just Do It methodology. It works for some people. You're right. t not only fails miserably for some people but it can be shaming for them because they're like, “Why can't I just do it?”
“What’s wrong with me?”
It’s like, “There's nothing wrong with you.” It's not that simple for everyone. I agree. That is one of the areas where I focus. If you can't follow and do the thing, and it's not about the structure and the accountability, those things are important but often, there are obstacles, things in the way, and stuff in our heads that we need to take out and deal with. I had an old coach who used to always refer to it as head trash, which I thought was a fun way to reference it. If we don't do that, it does not matter how many goals we set or how much accountability we have. That's not enough by itself for a lot of people.
That crap you pointed to, Steve, where you turn the blame back on yourself and ask disempowering questions rather than ones that are going to fill you and take inventory of what's there, not what's not there.
Start With A Dot
The audience won't see this but Tom can. In my room here, I've got a thing on the wall that doesn't say, “Just do it,” but, “Just start.” I want to credit Peter Reynolds because that's his. He's a children's author and illustrator. He wrote this book called The Dot. The whole core idea of it is to start with a dot and see where it takes you. I like that because that's the key. You've got to find what's a thing you can do. Start where you are, work from there, and build up. Start with a dot and see where it takes you. That feels a lot more manageable. It's not just do it. Get moving and figure out how you get moving. We figure out how you move faster. How do you go further? How do you get more focused? That's all stuff that gets built up over time and iteration.
It's what we can do and sustain. We start where we can move. It might be a real baby step. I often talk about this when I'm working with people for positive change. I don't care if you're making giant strides or baby steps. All you need is motion. If you've got motion, we're in good shape. If we don't have motion or we're going the other way, then that's where we got issues.
The part of getting from not being in motion to being in motion is such a big part of the challenge and figuring out how we shrink that down so that we can get in motion in some form. Staying in motion, it's that whole thing about what's the best form of exercise. The answer is the one you'll do regularly. There's a total lesson there. That's true for almost anything because there's always more than one way to navigate.
That's what's so good about the pickleball craze. People are having a blast and they're moving. I don't care if it's a better or worse exercise than something else. You're out there doing something, moving, using your body, getting some cardio, or whatever it is. That's way better than sitting at the computer, watching TV, or lounging around.
It's huge. We've got to be able to utilize that drive. How do we tune into ourselves and what we will do? This is true even with things like exercise. For me, it's cycling instead of running because I can't stand running but I'll ride on my bike for hours. It's true when we get into things like business and what we do in business or life. That's where bringing some of the emotional pieces comes in because then we have to start to get into value or things that matter to us. That's another place where there's a lot of power available if we're willing to tap into it.
That steers us a little bit into some of the things that you help people focus on the traps of, let's say, perfectionism, overthinking things, or maybe anxiety management. What do you notice that may be stereotypical? What might be a broad brushstroke of somebody reading who let's say would consider themselves to be a perfectionist and that they overthink and underact? What would be some of the things you might share with them, Steve, that might be a little nugget that can move them forward?
Learning to change your relationship with “failure” is everything. We get caught up in this idea of, “I have to perform. I have to be perfect. I can't make mistakes.” All of these things are very inaccurate. They are unfortunately reinforced by so much of what's in the world. We see everyone's highlight reels. We don't see their outtakes necessarily or if we do, we see it in these fail videos that are people making fun of people for their mistakes. What we don't get is an accurate picture.
I talked about this. I have become the unofficial photographer for my daughter's soccer team. I'm not a great photographer by any means. I'm okay but people see the stuff that I post and they're like, “You're such a good photographer.” That's because they're only seeing the things I post. They're not seeing the thousands of garbage photos that I'm like, “What the heck was that?” That's it. We've got to change our relationship with failure and see failure as, 1) Not such a big deal, and 2) A tremendous opportunity.
To do that, we have to get more comfortable with it. When it's a monster under the bed or this imaginary thing that we believe is there, we're told it's there, we're talking about it in our heads, and we build it up, we can make it into something gigantic and awful but when we start to experience it and pay attention to go, “I did this thing. I did it badly. I put this out there and no one care,” or whatever it is, we go, “Nothing happened.”
The monster is not a monster. It's that stuffed animal that got put under the bed months ago. We have the opportunity to go, “What can I learn from this? What can I take here? What's here?” There's always something. It may be something small. It may not be the thing we were looking for. We go, “How do I build on that? How do I go again and get some feedback? How do I build on that?” It's a do, iterate, and repeat cycle. That builds over time. It spirals, I like to say. Our performance, skill, and refinement improve if we look at it that way. That is the path to doing great things with anything.
I'm thinking about the classic Edison quote, “I didn't fail 10,000. I found 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb.” We were talking about being musicians and performing. You know what you meant to do and what you thought it should sound like in your head so then when you do something that doesn't sound like that to you, you think it's a mistake. If we pull the audience or even the people in the band with you, how many of them noticed that it was different than what you thought and therefore, a mistake or failure? I'm going to say it's less than 1% and maybe way less than 1% of the time that anybody would even know the difference.
You're probably exactly right. They've seen that with other areas, too. One of the things that's been studied in the realm of psychotherapy is the difference between how therapists experience therapy and how clients do it. All these times, therapists think, “I offered this great intervention and observation.” You ask clients the stuff that stuck out to them and it's different.
I've seen that when I've informally talked with both coaches and therapy clients. “What are you taking away from this? What's the part that's valuable to you?” It's something that I hadn't even thought about or even noticed. I was worried about, “That was lame.” It didn't even register on the radar. We think that we see everything accurately. The unfortunate and uncomfortable truth is we see everything in this pretty severely distorted way. Don't believe everything you think because it's not accurate.
That's a good one. I'm writing that one down.
I saw that on a bumper sticker somewhere. It was the first place I ever encountered it. I can't take credit for creating a whole lot of anything. I'm good at synthesizing it into useful bits and figuring out where to apply it. I love it. I keep looking. I want to find a bumper sticker and put that on my car. We all could stand and have that as a reminder.
There are two things that you highlighted there, Steve, that resonate with me. One thing is in terms of what people take away. My experience is it's always more fundamental than what I would have thought. In other words, it's easy if you get into a field. We are experts at what we do because we've been doing it for a while, have studied it, and put our energy toward that. It's super easy.
It doesn't matter what the field is or whatever their area of expertise or focus is. It's easy to lose sight of all those things that you learn that are second nature, muscle memory, and lose connection to the people who are novices or coming into that world for the first time. One of the classic examples to me is when you go into an organization or a field where they've got their jargon.
They assume you know what an NTSA is. I went to a military conference once. It was unbelievable. In two days, I'm writing down all the acronyms. I'm catching up but it was impossible and insane. That's probably the worst example. We all do that to some degree. I have to put my effort towards staying in the beginner mindset more.
The beginner mind is such a powerful concept or approach to the idea. I tend to focus on clients focusing on being curious and trying to bring this open curiosity. We wonder and sit with it like, “What's going on?” We have these conclusions. Sometimes, they're right. It's not that they're not but they're often incomplete. Sometimes, they're wrong and often distorted in some form. When we hang out with it and wonder, it starts to look different.
It is your point about how it looks from the expert perspective versus how it looks from the non-expert perspective. Those things are so radically different. It's easy to lose sight of it, although there are things that always remind us. When you try to teach your kid how to tie their shoes, you don't even think about it. Thinking about it makes it worse because you've been doing it for decades. Your kid's like, “I can't do this.” You're like, “Why is it so hard?”
I have a funny story about that while you mentioned that one, Steve. When I was maybe in my late 30s or early 40s, there was a massage therapist. She saw my shoe was untied. She said, “How do you tie your shoes?” I went and tied my shoes the way I'd been doing my entire life. She said, “Take this loop one more time like that and your shoe will never come untied.” I've been doing it ever since. We can still learn basic things.
That falls back into what you pointed to with the utility or the saving grace of curiosity. It's a humility. It's staying in the wonder, the sense of exploration, play, and openness, “I already have learned that,” which is a limiting factor, not an opening one. We have to respect what the world is. It's way more complicated than our little powers of perception can grasp.
The Brain Filters Information
Our brains are trying to protect us by filtering out a bunch of information so we don't get overwhelmed. We live in a world that's so wildly information-saturated that our filters get overwhelmed anyway but in a different way. If we try to take all this in, our brains wouldn't explode but they would effectively explode. It's too much data to process.
We don't have the bandwidth.
That's one of the things the brain does to try and cope. “I'm filtering on what I think is important and relevant.” Sometimes, it gets it right. Sometimes, it gets it wrong.
These are some of the problems for people who are on a spectrum. The brain isn't working as the typical blueprint would. If they can't filter these things out, they have problems in the modern world, especially.
It is because there's too much. For all of us, this is one of the areas that becomes important. Trying to navigate any path, there is so much stuff out there. If you pay too much attention, you will be pulled in a million different directions and you're not going to go anywhere except in some ragged circle. Learning not only what to keep out or block out but also how to build your set of fairly comprehensive filters is even more important than it ever has been. It's crucial because otherwise, you're going to be hopelessly lost in a sea of noise.
The way that at least I've learned to deal with that is by using things that help us. The maps are never the territory but they help to orient and get us so that we're not missing something, going in the wrong direction, or thinking this one thing when this other thing matters more. To help in that way, what other ways would you coach somebody to build those filters or get oriented towards what they would say matters most for them?
Part of it is that question of what matters to you. What do you stand for? What do you stand against? What doesn't matter to you? Those are all things that start to build a filter that you can use. Start to also look at things like, “What are the ways in which you take in information, knowledge, and learning that work well?” To give you an example, audiobooks. I used to be a huge fan of listening to nonfiction audiobooks. What I would do is listen to it on my bike ride. I'm like, “I'm learning why I'm riding. It's great.” It is and it isn't.
What happens is because I'm riding, I can't be taking notes while I'm doing it. The information didn't get very well absorbed for me. Other people hold that well. It works great for them. I'm not trying to say that that's not an effective tool. I'm saying it's not for me. Learning that about myself has been important. When I'm trying to learn a thing, I can't follow a strict recipe. It's too rigid. What happens is, 1) I get caught up in the recipe and not understanding the concepts, and 2) I tend to push back against it.
It gives me a framework. “Here's this general path. Here's room to play.” A lot of it is for us to understand how we learn and improve. Where have we been able to do that? Keeping that in mind with the things we choose to either bring in or choose not to bring in. To come back to what I started with, I still listen to audiobooks but they're either fiction audiobooks or nonfiction ones that are things that are not so much like learning and growing more like biographies, history, or things like that.
It’s the stuff you're not taking notes about but you’re enjoying.
It's more of an enjoyment over entertainment. We're pulling the rough sketch there because there are places where having the audio is a great fit. I can't exactly read a book in the shower. I can’t listen to something. Also, learning how to process the information. For me, a video with certain things is helpful but with a lot of things, I find it distracting and another data stream to try to manage. Give me a book, some experiments, or things to try. Give me some space to play. That's me.
I'm always with people exploring. Where have you had success? Where have you struggled? What works? What doesn't? Working on building systems, structures, constraints, and filters to drive yourself where you're using those things. It looks radically different for everyone. This is why things like coaching, therapy, and any support can be valuable. We're all different. What works for you and me is not the same. A book is probably not going to be able to help you fully sort that out because books tend to be more prescriptive by nature of how they are. That means that they don't necessarily work for every person, which is also why there can be 200 books on a subject and they all can have some value.
They don't help us with the blind spots. We need another soul. We all have the blind spot and there's nothing we can do. We can bemoan our fate because of that but I think it's a beautiful thing. We need other people. That's part of where we get our meaning in life. If we can get in more of the habit and embrace that reality, it's not a character flaw to need somebody else or a weakness.
It's a strength to be able to gain the benefit of the perspective of another person because you've built the ability to try their perspective on for size and try it on. It's another form of openness. It's that acknowledgment that you don't know everything. The way to learn and grow is by being open to the fact of being wrong. I'm reading Adam Grant's book Think Again. That's a fundamental idea of that book. It's a good read. I'm enjoying it. I like his books.
It's that thing of we've got to be open to the fact that we don't know everything. That's okay. That's one of the things that is a place we get tripped up. It's like the perfectionism. It’s this idea that our worthiness is somehow predicated on being right. Not really because all people who've done great things, if you look, you're going to see if you dig in enough, a learning process and openness. In a lot of cases, actively seeking contrary ideas or other thoughts. It's the people who get these stubborn things and get stuck that eventually they might shine for a while but they inevitably will crash and burn.
Everything is dynamic, including themselves. To think in terms of that, “Get the thing and hold on,” is not going to get to the highest level that way. We have to be thinking in terms of processes, dynamics, and systems. It comes up in thinking to realize we think of ourselves as this singular being. Even that is an incomplete definition of what we are. We are a collection of beings that are cooperating. There are nine times the amount of cells in our body that don't have human DNA. Without them, we don't have anything.
It's a way more complicated picture than the simple shorthand of me and this particular idea or desired outcome. We have to filter, get down, and understand. I like how you laid out the values, Steve. The question I have coming out of that, which you've pointed out in some of your work, is the effective metrics, making sure we're measuring things that matter the most. I'd like to steer us into that realm a little bit as to what are some of the things that you noticed when it comes to either changing or expanding somebody's view of how they're measuring success.
Using Effective Metrics
I love this topic. It's what I've been thinking about a lot because it is an area where we get screwed up and there's a lot of potential there. The example I'll use to start with, which is only going to work for baseball fans but that's okay, is for years, everyone used to think of Runs Batted In or RBI as this meaningful stat. People with a lot of RBI are big power hitters.
When the real statisticians started digging into baseball and studying it, they realized that it was a statistic of opportunity. It doesn't necessarily indicate a whole lot of anything. It's not seen in the same way. Part of that is because it's a stat of opportunity. There are pieces of it you don't control. That's the part I want to highlight. When we start measuring based on things we do not have control over, we're setting up a problem. We are going to be in a situation where we're trying to evaluate ourselves based on something we don't have control over. That leads to things like dishonesty, manipulation, control, and all kinds of stuff.
Also, resentment towards people not delivering.
My take is what we want to do is look for metrics. 1) Ideally, they are easy to track because if they're a pain in the butt to track, no one's going to bother. 2) They are process metrics that you control that have alignment with desired outcomes. As an example, if you make more sales calls, you are probably going to close more deals. It's a simplistic example but that's it. Instead of, “How do I close more deals?” It’s, “We'll work backward from there.”
One of them is to make more calls and refine who you are reaching out to. “What are the things that I can track that are within my control and relate to the outcome?” That's always a place that I try to start. Keep it simple. If you have to track 5 or 6 different things, it's not going to happen. Usually, there are a couple of key things you can monitor.
It’s the same thing with exercising. How many times do you exercise a week? We can talk about music. How many times do you practice a week? I did that at one point with guitar where it was the metric wasn't about how good I was or how many songs I learned. It was how many days a week did I practice. The goal was to do seven for fifteen minutes minimum. Those were the two things that I tracked. I did that. I gave myself permission if I wanted to do more, fine. That's what worked because it was very doable. The other stuff came from that.
It's reminding me a lot about one of the things I do in my consulting practice, which is job benchmarking. You're trying to get the key accountabilities. You described them perfectly, Steve, where it has to be something that is in their control that leads towards success in the role. That can be defined differently, depending on who's viewing that role. The benefit of the benchmarking processes is you get concordance about what success looks like. We're all using that same metric. One department is measuring in this one way and the other one is measuring another way. You have this siloing going on. It doesn't lead towards a trust-based cooperative and shared mission culture.
You also have to be careful about what you measure because it can cause things to get driven in a weird direction. This is a place where outcome stuff can get problematic. I was talking to an educator who was talking about how the district that they worked in was they wanted to lower suspensions. They were tracking how many kids had been suspended. That's not a great metric because there are any number of variables that can affect that, including choosing not to spend people for certain behaviors, which is not getting at the actual goal. We want improved student behavior. It's a problematic metric. We've got to keep an eye on that.
“Be careful about what you measure because it can cause things to get driven in weird directions.”
This is true with any system. We have to periodically check and be like, “Are these things aligning?” That's where other refinement or things might come in. To build on my guitar thing, it's all well and good to sit down and practice for fifteen minutes a day but at a certain point, you might need to engage in a certain type of practice and have lessons. I have at least one lesson a month. You can build on that and add new metrics that help you dial it in, refine it, and build it up. All of these things are dynamic systems that need to be reviewed and refined over time to truly serve you.
Harmonic Theory
If you're just sitting there doing pentatonic scales for fifteen minutes a day, I'm not sure that expands your harmonic theory. Everything's more complicated than first meets the eye. The note I took from your comment there, Steve, was writing pencil.
That's very true with anything. Depending on how you look at it, good or bad, you understand that all of this stuff is temporary. The bad part about that is we all want safety, uncertainty, and security because it's comforting to us. We think, “It's safe. I know what it's going to be.” When we start looking at this idea of, “This is all temporary,” that's scary. That's a little bit uncomfortable.
Our focus is on danger. I was talking with a client about this. What we're not focused on and often lose sight of is our ability to navigate things and deal with challenges. At the end of the day, that is a bigger deal because if you are able to skillfully take on things that show up, it doesn't matter what shows up. Whether or not we like it or believe it, life has a huge element of improv in it. I've recommended that to clients. I've told a lot of clients, “You need to go take an improv class.” They're like, “What does that have to do with business?” I'm like, “You'll see.”
That's funny. It's been on my list of things to do. One of my clients did that and her husband was into it. They have a good time. She's a sales manager. She's trying to get her old sales team into it. You're fueling that creative and spontaneous listening, reacting, and putting yourself in the moment as opposed to running the script that's already in your head.
It teaches you to be attuned to what's happening and use what's within you to work with that. That is where we start to get to a real sweet spot. Use your strengths, knowledge, and perspective but apply it to what's happening. You're only going to get that if you're tuned in. Improv is challenging, uncomfortable, and goofy but is also super fun. Practice it enough and it will give you a much different perspective on dealing with the unknown and uncertainty.
I would argue that if we went through most people’s lives and were like, “What are all the unexpected challenges in your life that you have successfully faced and navigated,” they'd be shocked at how many they came up with. We lose sight of that because our brains are all focused on the threats and dangers, which are good and bad. Much of this is a double-edged thing.
The thing you were pointing to there that our brains want to focus on is to set for a world that has physical danger in it. In our modern world, unless you're in a war-torn area or very dangerous area, most people are not subject to immediate physical threats, yet those are the patterns that are at play in the lower part of our brains. If we elevate those, we are giving a little bit of our agency away. We've got to pay attention to the things that you're pointing to there. That present-moment piece is so powerful. It's where the fun is.
That's the thing. We get caught up in this idea that we wanted to go a certain way and it has to go that way or it's not okay. This is that perfectionism thing again and what we lose sight of. If you dig through your life, you'll find this. Some of the best things that have ever happened to you are not things you even thought to ask for or pursue. You've only got to enjoy it. When it showed up, you were able to embrace it. If you're not present and not willing to work with the present moment to connect to it, you're going to have a hard time with that.
This is not to say forget about intentionality and goals. No. By all means, have flexibility about it. The key here is this idea of being flexible enough to have a place you want to go but be flexible about the path that you end up following to get there because that's how we won. The journey will be better as far as being more effective and successful. It's also where you'll get some pretty cool surprises, a few that might not be so cool. Humans are tougher and more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. We've lost sight of that at times. It's not my favorite thing to do but getting practice in our toughness is a useful skill for us I'll say.
“We are tougher and more resilient than we give ourselves credit for.”
In the Eye of Power model, the one quadrant is called the Pain Quadrant because of our relationship to pain. If we're pain-averse, we're going to be limiting our power. That's as simple as that. We have to have a healthy relationship to that. You laid out an example of why. The attitude I was thinking about pointing back to improv, one of the basic tenets is yes and. If somebody does something, yes, you accept whatever that is, whether it fits your idea or not and then you go from there.
That's uncomfortable for people though because sometimes what is, is not what we want. It doesn't fit our idea of how it is.
We need to cultivate that sense of play and ability to risk and let go of whatever it is that we're trying to hold on to for whatever reason.
The hard part is we seek that stability, predictability, and familiarity because our brains associate that with safety. There are elements of that that are true. It's also easier. It takes us less energy to do the things we always do. Part of this is the brain being an energy-conserving device but in a world that is changing so fast and how fast it's changing is changing. It's the senseless acceleration.
We live in the curve.
If we're not refining our ability to adjust, adapt, pivot, or refine, you're going to have some real challenges. Finding the balance of stability and adaptation or consistency and adaptation is important. You can sometimes create things that are two seemingly paradoxical things in one. I'll give you an example and I'm making this up as I talk here. You can have an adaptation ritual where you do a thing. Every so often, you review things and go, “What's working well? What's not?”
There's still an element of ritual and consistency but it is facilitating this process of evolving or changing. There's a ton of stuff about humans that's paradoxical. I used to use this idea of planned spontaneity. What it was is I created a space on my calendar where I block a time. When that time showed up, all I would do was be like, “What do I feel like doing?” The only rule was that I did what I felt like doing at that moment. Whatever popped up, it didn't matter what it was. It might be read.
Being able to tune into that, how do we find these things? There are a lot of weird contradictions but we can often navigate them if we're willing to wrestle with it, sit with it a little bit, or talk with someone about it and poke at it. That's where this middle ground often exists of how we make it safe enough for us to be able to travel where we can just do it but still be attuned to the reality of the world, its change, and challenges.
The pieces that you pointed to are things that seem to conflict. There's a lot of paradox in the world. Seemingly opposed and incompatible ideas can both be true. The path to wisdom looks like, “Which one do I lean on at this moment in time?” I’m not saying that it's always this or that but, “What do I apply given the situation at hand?”
The Concept Of Constraint
“What relative volumes of them?” This comes back to some of what we were talking about with the idea of filtering things out or the concept of constraints. A good way to put it is on the surface, you go constraints. That sounds limiting. In one sense, it is but the part that people don't often see is when we constrain these inputs or options, what happens is we are focusing our energy and attention. That allows us to be more powerful.
The analogy I might make is the difference between a light bulb and a laser. For a light bulb, sure, it's light. It's useful and very functional. It’s a very important thing but it's like, “Here's this light. It's diffused. It goes everywhere. That's nice.” A laser is super narrow focused and as a result, it’s very powerful. It can do all kinds of incredible things. They both are very useful but you don't want to use a laser to light your room. It's being able to manage them.
At times, we need to be more like a light bulb. When we're trying to figure out what we want to do and where we want to go, we want to be able to scan more around but when we're trying to make progress, we want to be more focused like a laser. That's where constraints become powerful because we keep ourselves from getting distracted, our energy getting diffused, and all of that.
“We need to be more like a light bulb.”
Wise words. I love the idea of the relative volume piece. It's related to the yes and, where you're not rejecting ideas, especially if we're in disagreement about things. It's not that you're bad because you think you're, put the label on. That's one of the big problems we have in our discourse about anything that's controversial. It's getting worse. We are living in almost two different realities. It’s so bad. We can't even agree on what's truly happening in the world. That's where you have problems.
We have to be big enough to embrace and give respect saying, “This person is saying this for a reason. That reason is worth giving enough respect to value and try to understand without putting my thing on.” That can help us. Whether it's a controversial issue or something I disagree with, I've already figured that issue out so I have to go back there. Whatever that is that's making me close off that communication or consideration, the wisdom that I'm getting from you, Steve, is to respect and keep that valve and the possibilities open.
I'm not a big fan of most either/or things because most dichotomies like that are not genuine and legitimate. As you've pointed out, in our society, there are a lot of issues that are contributory there and that's its thing. It's often not either/or. It's both and. The key is it's about figuring out the mix or the balance point between the two. I lean into the idea of frameworks a lot versus structures. Some people might even say that that's the same thing. It's semantic.
What I mean is maybe I would differentiate between a recipe. “Take this much of this. Add this much of this,” these very clear step-by-step things. It’s fine for certain things but they're very structured. It’s the open like, “It’s improv. Do whatever you want.” A framework is more of a partial thing where you're like, “Using these concepts or principles, we know support a certain outcome but doing them in a way that aligns with what's the reality of the moment.”
If you're baking, it might be like, “What do you have in the kitchen? My ingredients are available to you,” and working with those. Also in business, it might be, “What are the resources I have available to me within my business and myself? How do I navigate a path that goes where I want to go but uses those things?” There's pretty much always more than one way to travel and one way to get there. It's not about what's right and wrong as a society because it's simple and easy.
It saves energy and all of that. It also fits a couple of bullet points or a five-second video. The reality is there's almost always more than one way. When we do these things that tune inward, what do we have? Who are we? What do we stand for? We start to do it in a way that is authentic to us but also unique and powerful, which is from the standpoint of more of a marketing thing. That's how we stand out. That's how we are unique. That's how we're able to connect with the right people and do what we're uniquely positioned to do in the world, whatever that happens to be.
There's almost always more than one way to do things, and when we tune inward, we start to do it authentically, uniquely, and powerfully.
You introduced a whole nother concept there, didn't you?
It's one of those coach things. We're always opening doors.
The thing that inspired me to think first off of that was going back to the recipe idea. “I like my cheese chili or spicy. I like it sweeter. I like beans. I don't like beans.” There isn't a right or wrong. It's being in touch with what you think is the highest and best. That could change. “This week it might be this. It might be something else next week, next year, or a decade from now.”
The point is our sensibility is being dialed into what's deeper and true. If you think the odds are good, there's going to be others who are going to share that same perception. The clearer you are within your communication lines or connections with the other world, the more attractive you are to those who see and are harmonic with that particular attribute, frequency, or whatever it is.
When you get that connection, things go better. You're not trying to be all things to all people. You're trying to be true to this idea and then people love and appreciate that. I've got a tribe, group, brand, or whatever we might group it. It's that process of clarification that is the key thing, being authentic, and not trying to be all things to all people. It's a little bit tough because we're trying ideas on for size but we also want to have that clarity. Maybe my last question is those two ideas, relative volume, how do we navigate those waters, Steve?
It's a refinement over time. This is where the more that we're willing to listen to and honor ourselves, the quicker and easier this is to dial in. We often let fear interfere with us. In business, I'll give you an example. This is going back to my psychotherapy practice days. At first, I did a bunch of different things. My website said that I do couples, anxiety, depression, codependency, and all these different elements. That was the part of me that was like, “I want to make sure that I'm appealing to more people.”
The problem is it made it diffused. It wasn't like it didn't work but it worked okay. There was up and down. I got to a point in my practice where I was clear about what I liked and didn't like. I was like, “I'm going to try to experiment here.” I'd heard from marketing people for years about you've got to be super narrowly focused and niche. I'm like, “I don't know about this.”
“You’ve got to be super narrow-focused in your niche.”
I go and try it. I changed it. I wanted to get away from jargon. I focus on helping nice guys and people pleasers. That was it. That's all I do. I hate it because I sound like a cliché when I say this. Almost overnight, my practice started growing fast. I was like, “What the heck?” It was clear. I had done that work forever. I had other components around it. I gradually whittled away.
This is where a sculpting metaphor may work. That stuff is there. We have to slowly sculpt away the stuff that doesn't belong. By doing so, we also become more vulnerable because it becomes clearer and more exposed. That requires us to be comfortable enough with our humanness and what we stand for that we're willing to be okay if people take shots at it because people will but that doesn't mean it's not valuable. It means it's maybe not for them.
I don't know about you. I can only serve so many people at once. I don't need to be for everybody. I don't want to be. I've also found this and you probably have too. When I'm working with the right people, it's a whole different game. It's so different and powerful. It's better for everyone. There are plenty of people where it's like, “Not me. Let me connect you to this guy. He's going to be a better fit for you.”
The more that we are clear about who we are, who we're for, and what we're not, the easier it is for our people to find and see us. It's just scary because it's all out there. It's all visible and vulnerable. People would be like, “Why would you bother with that?” They are going to say what they're going to say. That's the hard part. Learn how to ground ourselves in our knowledge and comfort that we're okay and doing good things. What we do matters and it's relevant. It is fundamentally important to be comfortable with it. It takes a large degree of vulnerability.
“We have to learn how to ground ourselves in our knowledge.”
That's pretty poignant and a good place for us to wrap up our discussion. We could go on riffing like this for a long time.
We barely even touched on music.
I know. We didn't touch at all hard on that. I saw in your bio, Steve, that one question that you suggested is Star Wars or Star Trek. I thought that'd be a fun thing to talk about, too.
I could go on in that one for length, although both have merit to be clear. I'm a Star Trek guy but Star Wars has a lot of merit too. You're right. I won't even get started because then we will.
We'll have to do this again sometime.
That'd be great.
Thank you so much, Steve. I appreciate you being on the show. I very much enjoyed our conversation. As I feel often with these things, I feel like I have a new friend. I love that feeling.
I love the conversation and your questions. It's always so fun to have somebody new asking about these things or looking at these things because it's a good challenge for me to be rethinking about these things, and tweak or polish them, and see like, “Maybe there's this additional piece here.” 1) It's great to be able to share some of these things. 2) It helps me to get clear and refine them so I'm grateful for that opportunity as well.
My pleasure.
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Thank you so much, Steve. It's been my absolute pleasure to talk with you. We went on a long time after the actual show was going on because we could keep going and going. As it happens to me a lot of the time I'm finding with my interview style formats, I feel like I find new friends all over the world. That's one of the best feelings. I love it. That'll keep me going for quite some time doing this kind of format with my show. Steve's insights were super valuable.
There are a few that I want to highlight before we go. One is the idea of using somebody else to help us navigate the challenging journey and be able to get past the unseen obstacles. We all have unseen obstacles because we have blind spots and we need other people. We talked about that a lot. Also, our relationship with failure. When we want to get out of overthinking or perfectionism, this is one that I have struggled with. I want things to be right, look good, and be respected. I don't want to look foolish, make a mistake, or give somebody bad advice, even as much as that. I want to be very thorough.
You can't help people if you're not in action so there's a balance there. How do you navigate those things? What Steve pointed to was learning to change your relationship with failure. That's great wisdom. Don't believe everything you think. There's a bumper sticker he saw and that's a pretty good one. I like that. All that does is it points us to that humility and curiosity. Stay in the question. Don't overestimate what you know.
We talked a little bit about the fundamentals and getting back to basics, the beginner's mindset. We forget what we forget. It's easy for us to miss some of the basic things as time goes on. I look at very accomplished people who wisely have gone back to the base. I'm a drummer. A drummer that everybody looked up to and still does was Neil Peart. He's one of the most influential drummers of the past. Late in his career, he went back to the basics and studied a whole new technique.
I have other examples of that. I remember Tiger Woods did that with his golf swing. Your body changes over time so you have to learn and change. When you make those changes, it makes sense to go back to the very beginning, get things built up as efficiently as possible, and take advantage of the wisdom that has been hard fought and won by other people. Having that humility to always go back there is very good.
I asked him about success metrics. We do a lot of that in my consulting practices, measuring the right things and getting focused on how we tell somebody succeeding. What are the inputs that are going to lead in that right direction and get everybody to see it that way? He pointed to another caveat there, which is to write in pencil. Make sure that we're revisiting those things. Whatever we're putting our attention to is where our energy is going to flow.
It's subject to revision because no matter what we thought at the time, things can change. We could have had some things that we learned from. We didn't quite see it the same way in the beginning that we did down the road so we have to be open to making those adjustments. For those who have a tough time with the new and want a ritual, he had a couple of things. There's an adaptation ritual. I thought that was a good suggestion.
He also suggested plan spontaneity. I thought that was pretty cool, the idea of putting a block of time in your schedule where when it comes, whatever you feel like doing, you do. That's a good way to fuel perhaps the creative element of ourselves and give ourselves a little bit of that flexibility and freedom that we tend to value. Finally, we ended where it was the incompatible ideas. Hats green, hats red. Look at it from one way. I remember seeing an episode in Between the Lions. Walk one way, that side was green. Walk the other way, the other half is red. They're arguing if the hats were red or green. They're both right and wrong.
That's why we want to be able to try on somebody else's perspective on size and get into that improv both and, yes and, a collaborative respectful way to approach communication. With all of that, I thought there were a lot of actionable items that Steve brought to the show. Thank you once again, Steve. I very much enjoyed our conversation. I’m glad to have you as a new friend. Thank you for reading, folks. I very much hope you got something valuable for you out of our episode. Be well.
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About Steve McCready
Building on his past experience as a psychotherapist and his extensive study of the the human brain, personal growth, and personal performance, Steve McCready is a coach who helps solo and small-business owners make a bigger impact in the world.