Shape Your Own Life: The Power Of Resourcefulness And Imagination To Achieve Your Dreams With Scott Allan
We have the ability to find creative solutions, even without abundant resources, when we visualize and dream big. That is the most crucial step in shaping your own life. In today's episode, Tom and Scott Allan, the bestselling author of Fail Big and Do the Hard Things First, delve into the concept of personal agency – the power to shape your own life. Drawing on Scott's experience overcoming challenges, they explore how resourcefulness and imagination can fuel our success, even without abundant resources. They'll also discuss strategies for prioritizing effectively, eliminating distractions, and taking action without waiting for permission. By incorporating these tools, the audience will gain a roadmap to become more productive and find greater fulfillment in their work and personal lives. Today's episode is something you don't want to miss if you're looking for practical strategies to overcome challenges and achieve success, so join Tom Dardick and Scott Allan now!
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Shape Your Own Life: The Power Of Resourcefulness And Imagination To Achieve Your Dreams With Scott Allan
On the show, it’s my great pleasure to welcome Scott Allan to the show. Scott is a successful author having over 500,000 books he has sold. He is a speaker, consultant guru, and coach who helps people connect to get their best lives, which you can imagine is something close to our heart here at the Eye of Power.
We have the opportunity to get into his experience with this and his insights as to what moves us forward and what can stop us. He’s talking all the way from Japan. It’s early in the morning here and for him, it’s late at night. We’re able to sync up in that way. I appreciate him taking the time in his schedule to be on the show even though it’s a little bit out of the normal workday for him. Help me welcome Scott Allan to the show.
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Scott, thanks again for being with me. Your expertise is helping people live more of their lives, lean into their gifts, and get on a better path. That is what I take from your profile. Do you want to take a second to illuminate how you came to that work and what it is that you feel like, if you can in a short amount of time, is the message that people need to know to get their feet moving perhaps?
Self-Discovery And Transformation
Yeah. This journey started way back when I decided that I wanted to make some serious changes in my life. We’re going back quite a few years. That was when I really got into reading a lot of these so-called self-help books and personal development. I realized that the more I read and the more information I absorbed and practiced the strategies, I was able to change my life.
In other words, I was able to change my mindset, which was the beginning of making very concrete decisions about what I wanted and I would make those into goals or turn those into goals. I would put those down on paper and then create a set of action tasks to move me toward those goals. I realized that building that system started to build this momentum in my life. I was able to move forward. I was in a place where I was stuck and I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to go, so I wouldn’t do anything.
I’ve been in Japan for about 25 or 26 years. How I got here was a process in that I figured out what I wanted, I figured out how to get it, and then I showed up every day and put in the work. I created vision boards. I do a lot of visualization. You can call it meditation, but it’s deep thinking into not what I wanted, but how I wanted to show up in the world and give my best.
I also realized that in the beginning, maybe it was for myself, but then afterward, it was like, “I could change my life. If I can do something meaningful with this life and create a great life out of this, what if I could teach that system to other people?” A lot of my work is built around self-confidence, doing hard things, and living a life of undefeated and greatness.
The message there is that you can have anything you want in this life if you can decide what it is that you want. If you’re not sure what it is that you want, do something for somebody else because there is something in us that is driving us forward to create a life that is so extraordinary. Even if we can’t accomplish everything in this lifetime, at least we can get to the end of it looking back without any regrets.
You can have anything you want in life if you can decide what you want. If you're unsure of what you want, do something because something will always drive us forward to create an extraordinary life.
We all have some regrets to some point, but at least we can get to the end of it and go, “I did not just do the best I could. I went above and beyond anything that I could ever imagine.” That’s the life that I want to live. I want to live that kind of life but also teach other people how to do it as well. I want them to do the things that they never thought they could do. Part of that is living the big dream concept.
Everything that has brought me up to this point was building that dream. I know it sounds a little bit corny or out there, but for me, building the dream isn’t something in the future. It’s happening now. I have to constantly remind myself of that as well because we don’t have that much time left. We’re all racing against the clock. Every day, I wake up, and if it’s a new day, which usually is, I’m like, “I’ve got one more day to make it and one more day to live this dream, build this dream, and help somebody else to show them the path.”
What I find uplifting about what you’re saying there is that it points to the agency that you have lived experiences. You were able to manifest and think about something, direct your energy, get it clear, and then move in a direction. Sometimes, it’s a process-oriented thing where your dreams might be a little smaller than what you can make happen in the world. We don’t really know what we don’t know.
Whenever this topic comes up, I always think about those thinkers out there who claim that free will is an illusion and that we’re a function of our genetics or the notions and ideals that are floating in the world that we happen to capture and embody. A lived life that you shared seems to go against that, at least to me. What’s your view about the idea of free will and people being the author of their stories and being able to shift that into whatever they might want?
You brought us some great words there. First of all, manifestation or transformation. If I’d gone back to when I was in junior high, high school, and elementary school and somebody had taken an analysis of my life at the time, as a student, I had learning disabilities. I had ADHD. I don’t know if it was something that I wasn’t very good at school. I wasn’t your typical A student. I’ll put it that way. I barely made it through school at all. I probably would’ve been nominated as the one student who would not have succeeded at all in life, and I knew that. I didn’t believe it though.
That was the thing. I had teachers telling me, “We’re going to hold you back because you’re not quite ready to go into that next grade,” or, “You shouldn’t go into Math class because you’re going to fail it.” I did fail it, but the thing is I did it anyway. When people told me that I couldn’t do something and that it was impossible, there was something in me that said, “If I believe that, it is impossible.” That has always been my attitude towards things. I’m willing to go against the grain. I’m willing to go against the negativity.
When people say, “You can’t do this because,” I’ll take not a defensive stance but more of an aggressive approach to this. It’s like, “I am going to do this because I’m going to prove that it doesn’t matter what your education is or if you were born into a rich family or a poor family.” We all have limitations, but those limitations may only be resources, not resourcefulness. Resourcefulness is what Tony Robbins said, “That’s all we need to succeed.” I always believed that. I always leaned hard into that.
We all have limitations. Those limitations may only be resources but not resourcefulness. Resourcefulness is all we need to succeed.
Having said that, when I was very clear on if I really wanted something and I decided that I was going to go for this one thing, whether it was getting into a school, getting a job, or whatever it might be, if it was something that I wanted, I would figure out a way to get it. Sometimes, all I had to do was show up and put on my best suit. Maybe I had to make a good impression on somebody in order to get that job, get into a certain school, or something like that. The point though is that I never wanted to be held back by someone else’s belief or disbelief that I wasn’t able to succeed because of whether it was a disability or I wasn’t smart enough.
For a lot of people out there who are struggling, you are always going to be listening to other people that maybe are intentionally not trying to hold you back, but sometimes, it’s the things that they say, and they may or may not be true. In the end, we have to decide for ourselves if it’s true or not because we all grow up believing things. When we get older, we hear a lot of different things, whether it’s negativity or things that other people believe that we are. In fact, who are they to decide what the truth is? We have to decide what the truth is for ourselves.
Those people, whether it be a teacher, sometimes a parent, a friend, or whoever it might be, think they’re helping us when they tell us, “You can’t do that.” They think they’re sparing us pain or whatever it might be. I don’t think they see it in maybe implanting negative brain viruses OR thought viruses that can cause us mental disease in a way. Something within you had a natural resistance to those things where you said, “I did it anyway.”
I like what you pointed out about resourcefulness versus resources. Often in these conversations, people are being reductionistic or materialistic and putting labels on things. It’s lazy thinking and saying, “Here are all the things that add up to this equation. It doesn’t add up. Therefore, it won’t happen.” They’re looking only at resources and not really looking at resource fullness, which is the creative capacity of the human being. It’s the ability to do something that no one would’ve thought possible or thought of that particular way to approach things. That’s the spark of humanity. That gives us our individuality and as part of the point of this whole exercise we call life. Would you agree with that?
Imagination And Creativity
Yeah. That’s great. Imagination and creativity have so much to do with it. We’re all creative. I’ve heard people say before, “I’m not very creative. I can’t do these things because.” We’re making a decision. If you decide you can’t do something, you’re right. You can’t do it. I’ve always been carried away by my imagination. I barely made it through high school because I was always staring out the window, thinking about stories I wanted to create and this adventurous life I wanted to live. I always carried that with me. I was willing to almost fail through school so I could have that imaginary lifestyle.
To me, in the beginning, I was building a dream and I could almost see the dream before I had it. I’ve always been able to project that future ahead of actually having it. That’s where I leaned heavily into my creative visualization and I started meditating. I call it meditation but it was more of a deep thinking trance where I could visualize the future that I wanted.
When I did, getting you back to your point about the manifestation and transforming your lifestyle, I realized, “That’s a real power.” That’s something that we all have regardless of where you come from, what your beliefs are, your genetics, and all those things. Having discovered that at a young age, I was able to apply that to difficulties in life. When I was faced with challenges, I realized, “I may not have the resources that some people have, but I do have the ability to think through this problem and find a solution to it.”
I’d like to explore the place between that imagination, that creative capacity, or that ability to visualize a future and the feeling that people have when they feel stuck or when they feel like, “I’ve been trying. I’ve been moving in this direction. I have it sussed out as to what I want, but I’m not able to move forward.” I’d like to get your view and insights on connecting somebody who feels like whatever stuck means or blocked means to them into motion. Can you talk about the things that can get the boat off of the sandbar and get things moving?
Clarity And Action In Achieving Your Goals
Sure. Certainly, I’ve been stuck many times. I’m probably stuck at least once a week. What I realize is that when someone’s in that situation, and I’ve talked this through with many people through coaching and conversations, when I ask a very direct question like, “What is it that you really want?” In many cases, there was a period of silence there or there was an answer where they weren’t sure. They thought maybe they wanted this, but then they would change their mind and it was something else.
What it came down to was having a lack of clarity on what they really wanted and which direction they wanted to move in. For example, like the boat being stuck on the shore, you can start to push your boat into the water, but if you don’t know where you’re going, any direction is probably the right one. What I did, and I still do this, is I will block off some time, sit down, and get clear on what it is that I want so that I can narrow in on what my number 1, number 2, and number three goals are. Maybe I have three goals I’m reaching for. I can only have one that’s the priority goal. I get clear on what my priorities are.
In the end, it’s about knowing what you want and knowing which direction you need to move forward. You don’t have to know the outcome or the end of the story, but you do have to know what your next step is. That’s the thing. When you take action, there’s something to be said for that because action is energy. That’s the thing. People think that if they have it all figured out before they move ahead, they have to know, “What is the one step that I could take?”
To give you an example, I was working with somebody. They were in sales. They weren’t getting any sales for the week. When we got into the conversation, it turned out that they weren’t making that many sales calls, and when they were, they were lacking confidence on the phone. They were setting themselves up for failure before that. We came up with a plan. I was like, “Your goal is to do ten sales calls per day at this point.” This person was probably doing 2 or 3. They could have been doing a lot more, but the fear was holding them back from that.
When this client and I started doing 10-plus sales calls per day, maybe she got turned down 8 out of 10 times, but those 1 or 2 times when she made the sale, that was all she needed. That turned into 3 sales per day, and then it turned into 4. The next thing you know, she was leading the sales team in her company. She was stuck because she wasn’t doing enough of the one thing she had to be doing. She had to really double down.
My advice to anybody is to get clear on what it is that you want because the problem isn’t the problem. The problem is that you’re not moving forward. For most people, they know what to do, but they’re waiting for permission to go and do it. Nobody is going to show up and show you the way. Somebody might, but if nobody does, are you going to sit there, wait for someone to show up, and say, “Here’s the door. There you go. You got to walk through it now.” It doesn’t always happen that way. We need to walk through the door, and then you may meet the opportunity that has been waiting for you.
I heard a great thing. It was on a podcast. It’s that when an opportunity shows up, it’s too late to prepare. The thing is you have to be ready for that opportunity. Somebody else mentioned it was the lucky bus that came around. You’ve got to be ready for the lucky bus. You’ve got to prepare for it because if an opportunity comes your way and you are not prepared for it, it’s going to go to the next person who is ready.
Shape Your Own Life: You should be ready for the lucky bus because if an opportunity comes your way and you are not prepared for it, it will go to the next person who is ready.
The couple of things that you laid out there that attracted my attention was when you talked about the priorities. That’s a word that we throw out there a lot, but it’s something that gets a little bit under-examined often. For instance, when I’m talking about the eye of power, I’ll ask people, “Have you ever made a New Year’s resolution and then not keep it?” Most people can relate to that. The question is why. Why can’t you decide to do something and then do it? As people think about it, the answer gets a little bit complicated, but it’s complicated because we are complicated.
The purpose of the eye power is to help people navigate those parts of themselves that don’t meet their eye directly. It’s the function of prioritization where we have competing values, maybe some things that are mutually exclusive things, and we want them both. That can short-circuit us. Under those conditions, we can then be in a state of what you said about perhaps waiting for permission, social recognition, or enough pain to get off our butt. We have to resolve those inner conflicts. That is the point there.
Let’s take the example you shared there with a sales function. In this case, it’s FEAR. FEAR is False Evidence Appearing Real in this case because there’s no real danger when you’re making a sales call other than the person’s going to say no. In our brains, we think it’s rejection. That feels like almost death because we’re wired to think, “I could be rejected and thrown from the tribe. Now, I’m by myself alone in the world to survive, and that won’t work too well.” That’s the ancient circuitry that’s being activated to stop us from making 10 calls instead of 2, but we don’t realize that.
Overcoming Distractions And Achieving Clarity
My question behind all of that is that in the prioritization process, some of it is facing fears and some of it is seeing what we didn’t know we were afraid of or whatever. Can you talk a little bit about that clarification process and what you’ve learned perhaps in your writings or in your experiences helping people? It could be 1 or 2 things that somebody might take away like a golden nugget saying, “Try this.”
I mentioned clarity. Getting really clear on what it is that you want or what is the number 1 priority or your top 3 priorities is hard work to do because we have a lot of what we’ll call distractions. I hear this all the time. I struggle with this myself probably on a daily basis, all the distractions that are in my environment. The thing is, something is only a distraction when you pay attention to it.
To give you an example, I’m working on my computer and I have 87 tabs open. To me, that’s normal. When I’m sharing my screen with somebody else, maybe it’s my mentor or someone, they’re like, “How many projects are you working on? You’ve got a lot of open tabs on your computer.” It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but there’s only so much you can focus on.
He had asked me what my priorities were for the day and I gave him a list of ten things. He was like, “What’s the one priority?” I gave him a list of five things and I kept pushing it off. I realized that I thought I was clear on what I was doing, but what I really had in front of me was a lot of busyness. That happens to a lot of people. We are surrounded by a lot of stuff with our phones, notifications, and all this. The thing is, a lot of those things can be controlled. It’s that we are allowing them to control us.
We came up with an idea to get rid of all those 87 tabs. I came up with a little system to get rid of them all. I do most of my work on the computer. Maybe you’re doing your work in your office, but if you’re in your office and it’s a total mess and clutter everywhere, it’s the same thing. You’ve got a bunch of open tabs as well. What I’m saying is you do have to be able to clean up your environment because your outer world does reflect your inner world. When I have all these tabs open on my computer or a room that’s very cluttered with a whole bunch of stuff, it takes up the space in my brain.
When we talk about priorities, when you look at something, it becomes a priority. If you pick up a book and you start reading it, that’s your priority at that time. I realized that in my business too, I have to have certain priorities or I don’t get the real work that needs to be done. That is a struggle for me to do the hard things, those are the levers that you’ve got to pull every day. It might be one hard thing that you have to do to push your business forward, help your family, build your community, or whatever it may be, but knowing what that one hard thing is is the challenge.
It comes with cleaning up the clutter, whether it’s something in front of you or something in your room. All of that is a reflection of probably what’s going on in my mind. All of it looks normal to me, but then when somebody else walks into the room, they’re like, “You’ve got a lot of things going on here.” When someone asks me, “What are your priorities? What are you working on?” I give an answer but it’s something that’s not even related to my goal. It could be an objective or whatever it is.
You can do this work on your computer but I like to go pen-to-paper. I’ll make a list of all the things, like the projects I’m working on, the work that I need to do, the forms I need to fill out, and everything. Whatever it is, I’ll put it on my list. It’s not a to-do list. You need to get clear on what it is that is distracting you because all those distractions are probably those open tabs that are not just on your computer but are open tabs in your mind. There’s a lot of them. There are probably dozens of them that we carry around every day. It could be things we have to do for our banking, our family, and things at work. There are hundreds of them.
If you think about it, all of these things are fighting for attention in the background. We don’t even realize it. That’s why you can get to the end of your day and feel exhausted. Maybe you put in a full day’s work. We have jobs we’re working at, families we’re raising, and those kinds of things. You can put everything down on paper or in a journal.
I love journaling. I keep everything in there. I spend the first 10 or 15 minutes in the morning doing that exercise. At night as well, I’ll decide what my 2 or 3 priorities are for the next day and be very clear on what they are. I may only get 1 thing done for that day, but at least getting 1 priority task done is better than doing 10 random tasks that aren’t moving me forward. It’s good.
Also, one more thing is having an accountability partner where you have somebody who you can work with on this as well. I’ve had accountability partners in the past where we would compare notes and ask each other, “What’s your number one thing today? What’s your hard thing that you’re going to do this week?” We would hold each other accountable for that.
I found that without that accountability, I tend to drift away because then, I’m almost giving myself permission to cheat. I’m like, “Nobody’s watching me. I can do whatever I want. I’m going to go and open up all those tabs on my computer again.” I’m using that as an example. ADHD might have something to do with it. I have a little bit of that or a lot of it, but I don’t want to use that as an excuse to say, “I can be chaotic and do whatever I want,” when in fact, what I really want is I want to create this calmness in my daily life where I’m showing up, I’m putting my best foot forward, I know what I want, and I have a plan on how to achieve it.
The plan is a set of action tasks. You can put those down on paper too, like, “Here’s what I want to achieve this week. Here are three things I’m going to do to get it done.” If you want to take a break and go watch Netflix and do all these other things, you can do that. I do encourage that we have to reward ourselves as well. I’ll reward myself like, “I went to a movie today because I got a project done this week.” You’ve got to reward yourself as well. It’s not always about work.
You’ve put a lot down there. I took a bunch of notes during that thought process there. One thing you inspired me to think about was how our gifts can be our limitations. Everything’s a dual-edged sword. You talked about school and mentioned ADHD. That also led to your imagination and your ability to picture a bunch of possibilities and take a whole bunch of things into account, which is the strength side of it. You then laid out what the costs or the potential traps are on the other side of it like the 87 tabs are open. That’s something most of us can relate to in some way, fashion, or form.
You also talked about the idea of that discipline of making the main thing the main thing and then recognizing that it’s not easy because we are creatures of habit and we do play out patterns. That’s how our brains work. For that reason, it is getting the help of another set of eyes to help us see our blind spots and remind us, “You’re back in your pattern again.” It’s that other human heart that says, “Are you on track with what you want or not?”
You get the power of making that decision in that moment to reset, refocus, and put your attention there. I love that idea of what you put your attention to. You’re making that your priority. You’re deciding your priorities by where you’re directing your eyeballs and your thoughts. That’s your tool for prioritization, right?
Yeah. I read a lot of Tony Robbins. I watch a lot of his videos and stuff like that. He might have mentioned something to the effect that where you place your attention, that becomes your life. Whether you define something as a negative event or a positive event, that defines that experience as well. Where you place your attention is where you place your focus, and that becomes your experience.
Where you place your intention, that becomes your life.
It seems to me that it’s a discipline in terms of how we place our attention. For instance, a trap that we can all fall into too much is the people closest to us, we are taking them for granted. The way our brains work is we’re looking for the new and the change and reacting to something that’s different. Our brain will filter out the familiar, the known, and the patterns that we’ve already sussed out. If that’s the people near us, there’s a trap where we’re not putting our attention towards the people that matter most to us.
In terms of our relationships, I see that as something that almost everybody could get better at. They could put more of their attention to the people around them, be present and open, and be that thought partner for them, whether they know it or not, by caring, seeing them, and appreciating them for the person they are. Do you have thoughts on that or how that might expand from there at all?
The Power Of Imagination
Yeah. I have some thoughts on that. I found myself sometimes getting a little frustrated with a family member or my partner and not getting angry but not appreciating them as much as I could have been. I started to put myself in a different situation. I asked myself, “What would your life be like without these people in your life?” I started to put myself in that situation. I started to imagine what it would be like. When you can visualize the future, imagine what something is like, and put your emotion into it, that’s when it becomes real.
I started to imagine what it would be like without my partner and what it would be like if my kids weren’t in my life. In other words, somebody waved the wand and they were gone. I realized how tragic that would be. Suddenly, when I had that vision of what that would feel like, and it wasn’t just a vision but it was a real emotion, I felt panic swelled up inside me. I realized how much I need these people in my life, even my pets. I started to break it down into the people closest to me and what would be like if my pets were gone. I started to break it down into everything that mattered in my life. When I did, I realized how much I deeply appreciated them. This sense of gratitude came over me.
That’s what worked for me. It may not be something that works for anybody, but I would challenge anyone to try that strategy. The next time you find yourself getting a little bit upset with somebody or impatient., or something like that, try to imagine what it would be like if they weren’t in your life at all. For me, there’d be a big hole there. I realized I didn’t want that.
You’re using your superpower, that imagination, to almost play out the plot of It’s A Wonderful Life in your life. That movie comes up in a lot of my conversations and a lot of my thoughts because we don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know the effect we have. That’s such a dramatic example of how we’re probably way more impactful and way more important than what we perceive.
The people around us matter. They matter so much more to us than what we naturally go on. Unfortunately, people have to feel the pain of loss before they become aware of that importance. The benefit of the exercise that you suggested is maybe you don’t have to feel that full pain. Maybe you can appreciate them in the now by using the strength of your imagination to ask powerful questions like that. Thank you for that. That was a tremendous gift.
Going back, my father passed away several years ago and I never had a chance to say goodbye. I realized there were opportunities where I had the chance to tell him I loved him, I cared about him, and I wanted him to be okay. The moment when I had that opportunity, something inside of me said, “Let’s say it next time.” The thing is my parents lived in Canada and I live here, so when I had that opportunity, it was at that moment only.
Maybe it’s a regret that I had, but I realized sometimes, we have these opportunities that something might be telling you to put it off and say it next time. At the time, I didn’t feel like I was mature enough to put it out there. For whatever reason, I didn’t say the words that I wanted to. When those opportunities come up, I’m like, “I’m not going to let that happen again,” whether it’s with my kids or with my partner. You don’t know if you’ll have that chance again.
That’s what life is. It’s a bumpy ride and nobody gets out of here alive. That’s how it goes. By way of wrapping things up, we’ve been on the individual what each person sitting in the seat can think about. One of the things I wanted to talk with you a little bit about is in terms of a leadership position where you can affect other people.
Against the backdrop of our conversation thus far, what’s your view of the modern leader of the dynamics that are changing? You’re in Japan. You’re talking to somebody in the United States. My guess is you talk to people all over the world like I do. The world is shrinking in that way where we’re connected to different people. We’re talking to different time zones and different cultures. All of this is directed towards emerging enterprises and capacities. Who knows what AI is bringing us? I wanted to get your view as to what you see applies from all the things we’ve been talking about to the role of leadership and the challenge going forward.
Leadership And Its Purpose
One of my goals is to be a worldwide influencer. What is an influencer? It is somebody who influences the thoughts and actions of other people. As I was thinking this through, I was like, “How can I do that?” That was when my imposter syndrome showed up and it was like, “Who’s going to listen to you? You’re not running for the presidency. You’re not running a major corporation.” My mind started to go through all of these self-doubts and everything. I was like, “Why have I been spending all these years scaling up my life, learning all these things, and reading all these books? What’s the purpose of all this?” I realized, “It can’t be just for myself. I have gotten better personally.”
I was discussing this years ago when I was going through a transformation. I’m always going through those things, and we all are. I remember talking about this with one of my mentors and he said, “You’ve come a long way. You’ve learned all these things. Now, what are you going to do with it?” I was like, “I don’t know. I’m a lot smarter because I have all this information.” He was like, “You’re going to go out there and do something with it.” That conversation always stuck with me.
A great thing about this world is you’re right. I talk to people all over the world every day through coaching and through the books or the material that I’m producing. It has provided me with a dream that I’ve been pursuing for a very long time. It’s not to make a bunch of money and retire on an island. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s not my thing. I love working.
I love working because the more work I put out into the world, somebody out there is going to be able to learn something and they’re going to take that and hopefully pass it on to somebody else. We call it paying it forward. If I’m teaching something to 1 person or 1 too many and those people take that lesson and teach it to somebody else, that’s the influence right there.
I used to be very, and sometimes I still am, self-centered in a sense where I’m thinking, “I want this.” In 10, 20, or 50 years from now, I’m not going to be here, but there are going to be a lot of other people who are and maybe I had an impact on their lives. They’re able to take that influence or impact and they’re going to be passing it on to other people. I want the ripple effect. That’s how I am thinking through this thing and world leadership as well.
A world leader doesn’t always have to be on stage in front of millions of people. Those people are very brave, and that’s great to do that. I’d like to have that someday too. We can all be a leader in a sense because if you’re teaching something, whether to your children or your community, you’re having influence right there.
I’d encourage anybody that, first of all, you do have to work on yourself because if you get better, you’re going to start to figure out ways to help other people get better as well. When I say get better, you can help other people to become more self-aware and help other people to express more kindness. Those are the things I’m thinking about from the 30,000-foot view. I want to have an impact on the world.
Help others to become more self-aware. Help others to express more kindness.
I love that. I’m sitting here thinking you want to make it Bedford Falls and not Pottersville, to give back to the It’s A Wonderful Life storyline. Thank you so much. I very much appreciate our conversation. I loved your take. I really liked the idea of using what seemed to be, at the beginning of your life, perhaps a liability of that attention and not being good at school.
School is a factory. It doesn’t matter what the input is. It cares about the output. It’s not customized towards the full range of human expression and human capacities. You’re asked to be something you’re not. Not just you, but a lot of people get saddled with notions that are negative in the sense that you’re somehow less than you should be.
We accept this judgment. In my mind, it’s not a judgment. It’s a condemnation. It’s one of the distinctions we make in the Eye of Power. We live with that and then have things like call reluctance down the road where we want to make 2 calls instead of 10 because we have some notion in here that we’re not good enough or we don’t measure up. You even mentioned imposter syndrome coming in.
You have to have a realistic view of yourself. It goes back again to your resourcefulness versus resource theme that you brought up where you’re more than this set of whatever observations people have. You’re a conscious, caring, connecting, and creating being that is supposed to be expressed in this world. The totality of what you shared shows that story very well. I have to thank you very much for that.
Thank you. It’s been a great conversation. I appreciate you bringing me on the show.
It’s my pleasure.
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Thanks again for being on the show and being my guest. You laid out a lot of good stuff and gave a little bit of a review as we were talking there. There are a couple of things that I would like to underscore. The idea of resourcefulness versus resources is a very good lens. It’s a powerful lens. What we tend to do is think of the line item things. We look at that, whatever that adds up to, and put an assessment of what that is and think that’s the whole picture. I can’t afford that. I don’t have time for that. That’s beyond my capacity to do.
We come up with those conclusions based on those lists that we make, either written or maybe sometimes in our perceptions, and leave out the resourcefulness part of it, which is that creative capacity that says, “I can find a new way. I can find a way around this. I can marshal the help of somebody else. I don’t have to do this single thing by myself. I can rely on other people. I can see my own blind spots by partnering with somebody.” There are all kinds of ways. Where there’s a will, there’s a way they say. I thought that was a good way of thinking about that.
The other thing is our priorities. Where we put our attention is where we’re putting our priorities. If you think of prioritization, start first with attention. One of the things we talk about there, especially in the pain quadrant, is our waste of energy with fears and worries. We’re putting our attention to things that we have no control over. Thus, our priorities and our attention are going to things that we cannot adjust. We can’t move the needle one way or the other. Therefore, we’re powerless there. We’re taking our priorities and moving something that we can’t control above what we can control thus bleeding our power that way. That’s an important thing to realize.
He talked about waiting for permission. Sometimes, if we’re in a fearful state or we might not even know we’re afraid, we are feeling some sort of resistance or some sort of thing. It happens to all of us. Let’s not get into the condemnation and beating ourselves up sort of thing. Everybody’s subject to this. It’s not a matter of denying and saying, “I’m a horrible person,” or, “I’m immature,” or some sort of condemning label. It’s a matter of seeing what’s true and real.
We’re all human beings. We have powers. That is another thing that Scott embodied very well. His superpower was one of having that great imagination and that ability to think about a whole bunch of things and take a whole lot of things into account, bordering on or maybe even being on ADHD where you’ve got 87 tabs open and your attention is split. Therefore, you’re not effective.
It’s a power that you can have that creative capacity to solve problems, find new ways, and dream new dreams, but then it’s a limitation if we aren’t able to marshal the discipline to get around it where we learn how to close those other tabs and make the main thing the main thing. Our attention to be able to do that, I thought that was fantastic.
He mentioned the accountability partner. He also mentioned creating a list. It’s not necessarily a to-do list but all the things that are taking up space in your mind. Get them out of your mind onto some sort of paper or onto a document of some kind. that gives you permission to be clear. You can say, “Here’s all the stuff. Now, I don’t have to worry about all that. Now, I can pick the one thing that’s going to move me towards my big goal or my dream, make that the main thing, and do that. Everything else can fall in after that.”
He said that leads towards a calmness and a peacefulness that allows us to be more effective. We live more elegantly. We have more of our resources. When we’re not calm, we’re not necessarily better. Calmness allows us to be open, to hear people, to be present, and to allow our own feelings to be heard. We’re marshaling much more of our energy and our power in that state than when we’re distracted or worried and thinking about a bunch of things all at the same time. That’s not the ideal place to manifest all of our power. I thought it was a great conversation. All the way from Japan, thank you, Scott, and thank you for tuning in to what we’re talking about. I appreciate it.
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About Scott Allan
With his books published in 16 languages, and over 500,000 copies sold worldwide, Scott Allan is on a mission to transform the human potential. Scott is the bestselling author of Fail Big, Relaunch Your Life, and Do the Hard Things First.
As a former corporate business trainer in Japan and Transformational Success Strategist, he has invested over 10,000 hours of practice and research into confidence development and mindset mastery training.
With an unrelenting passion for teaching, building critical life skills, and inspiring people worldwide to take charge of their lives, he is committed to a path of constant and never-ending self-improvement.