Passion Struck with John R. Miles - THE POWER OF INTENTIONAL GREATNESS - The Best Passion Struck Podcast Moments of 2022 EP 233

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Today's special year-end episode of the Passion Struck podcast features some of our best moments of 2022, showcasing the power of intentional greatness. You must not undervalue the effort required to change your life. There are habits to break, ideas to reconsider, and abilities to hone as you aim higher, which I explore with our guests in today's episode. The Power of Intentional Greatness Show Notes Jen Bricker-Bauer, Susan Cain, Seth Godin, Rachel Hollis, Jean Oelwang, Daniel Pink, Gretchen Rubin, Robin Sharma, Claude Silver, Admiral James Stavridis, Jeff Struecker, and Jeffrey Walker are just a few of the influential and motivational guests who have appeared on the Passion Struck podcast in 2022. Some of their most memorable moments are included in this episode. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/the-power-of-intentional-greatness/  Brought to you by American Giant. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/u9gWZdyCT9c  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Episode 121 with Susan Cain: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/susan-cain-on-bittersweet-the-happiness-of/id1553279283?i=1000556277566 Episode 197 with Daniel Pink: https://passionstruck.com/daniel-pink-the-power-of-regret/ Episode 107 with Jen Bricker-Bauer: https://passionstruck.com/jen-bricker-bauer-on-everything-is-possible/ Episode 140 with Admiral James Stavridis: https://youtu.be/lTQU4_mVA7A Episode 134 with Gretchen Rubin: https://passionstruck.com/gretchen-rubin-the-key-to-happiness/ Episode 187 with Seth Godin: https://passionstruck.com/seth-godin-we-need-systems-change-save-planet/ Episode 191 with Rachel Hollis: https://passionstruck.com/rachel-hollis-becoming-your-best-self/ Episode 209 with Robin Sharma: https://passionstruck.com/robin-sharma-everyday-hero-manifesto/ Episode 101 with Claude Silver: https://passionstruck.com/claude-silver-on-using-heart-leadership/ Episode 212 with Jeff Struecker: https://passionstruck.com/jeff-struecker-being-a-person-of-your-word/ Episode 165 with Jean Oelwang: https://passionstruck.com/jean-oelwang-what-will-you-love-into-being/ Episode 99 with Jeff Walker: https://passionstruck.com/jeffrey-c-walker-collaboration-systems-change/ ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

coming up next on the PassionStrike podcast. And what I found from these 21,000 regrets is that in most cases, people regret not taking the chance, not in all cases. But in most cases, people regret not taking the chance, not going on that trip, not speaking up, not asking out that person, not starting that business. And that's what I call a boldness regret. And what I found is that around the world,

when you just go one layer beneath those domains of career education, health, finance, whatever, those were the regrets that were persistent. Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armeils. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into's most inspiring people and turn

their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of week, with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 233 of PassionStruck. And I hope for those of you who celebrated either Hanukkah or Christmas, that you had a truly wonderful holiday. And I hope for those of you who celebrated either Hanukkah or Christmas, that you had a truly wonderful holiday. And I so appreciate it that you're here today to listen and learn how to live better, be better and impact the world.

And I wanted to share some incredible news that we received over the past couple of weeks. That interview valet has recognized us as being the third most popular podcast in the world for mindset and the fourth most popular podcast in the world for mindset and the fourth most popular for conversation. And I reached out to Interview Valley to better understand what their selection criteria was.

And they told me it's based on the podcast being highly rated, having a respectable following, featuring both well-known and up-and-coming guests, but most importantly providing quality content to its audience. In speaking of both well-known and up-and-coming guests, I had both of those spectrums on the show last week. The first featured New York Times best-selling author John Kim in his partner, Therapist Vanessa Bennett, on the release of their new book, It's Not You, It's Me. And then I had a new up-and-coming guest, James Bell on the show, and we discussed his book, Hope Realized. I also wanted to thank you so much for your ratings

and reviews throughout the course of 2022. We now have over 11,605 star reviews just on Apple alone and they go such a long way in helping us promote the popularity of the show, but more importantly, reaching those who want to be part of this passion start community, where we can provide them with weekly doses of inspiration, hope, and action and meaning. Thank you all so much for tuning in with us throughout this past year and since this podcast started. This week I decided to compile a couple episodes featuring the best of 2022.

And over the course of 2022, we have featured a number of influential and inspiring guests, including Susan Cain. We discussed her brand new book Better Sweet, Daniel Pink, on the power of regret. Robin Sharma, where we discuss the everyday hero manifesto. Rachel Hollis, where she and I unpack the secrets to becoming your best self. Admiral James Stavridis, on Tariska Doll, Jen Bricker Bower, on how to create a mindset that everything is possible.

Jean O'Wing, on the Power of Partnerships, Jeff Walker, on the Criticality, Collaboration for Systems Change, Lod Silver, on the importance of emotional optimism, Seth Goden,

on the Carbon Almanac, and Jeff Struker, on the importance of being a man of your word. Here are some of the best moments from those interviews that I did with those guests. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide

on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. One of my favorite books of the year was Better Sweet by Susan Cain, and Susan has been one of my favorite authors since she released Quiet, which completely revolutionized how I looked at myself and what it meant to be an introvert. It was such an honor to have her on the show and during our interview. I asked her why this whole topic of melancholy and better sweet doesn't get much press or attention in society, and why she felt it was so important to concentrate on the importance of what it means to be better sweet. Our society is so afraid of it,

disgusted by it, really. We like to say it's all fear, it's not only fear, it's also disgusted, which I'll come around to, it is really a grave mistake because these states of being really are some of the deepest, most reliable pathways that we have to creativity and love and transcendence. So we're really missing out by organizing the emotions of our society the way that we do. But I do think there's a kind of disgust and it's rooted in our history. We really do have a history that developed especially during the 19th century in American culture of dividing people into winners and losers. You can actually trace the development of the word loser. We used to speak of loss as merely the act of losing something.

Lose a friend, you'd lose a necklace, you would lose a job, whatever it was. And there was a kind of idea that misfortune had befallen you, and so you lost something. Then during the 19th century, when everything became so focused on kind of the rise of business and who is a success and who is a failure at business, there became this idea that if you had somehow lost in your business endeavors, that it was probably because of some failure in the man. That's the way people would talk about it, like a failure inside you in the man. That was what it caused the loss. And you can trace this historically.

So by the time we get to the depression in 1929 and the 1930s, there were people who were losing everything because of forces that had very little to do with themselves. But the newspaper headlines would say things like, loser commits suicide. You kind of can't believe it. And this word loser through the 20th century themselves, but the newspaper headlines would say things like loser commits suicide. You kind of can't believe it. And this word loser through the 20th century into the 21st has become used more and more.

Okay, so what does this have to do with sorrow and melancholy? Well, if you're trying to be a winner, the first thing you want to do in a culture like ours that's so focused on self-presentation is you want to do in a culture like ours that's so focused on self-presentation is you want to appear like a winner. And how do you appear like a winner? You have the emotional attributes of, or what you think are the emotional attributes of a winner. So you're smiling, you're just like striding confidently through the world, nothing's

bothering you. And this was explicitly taught. So in the early 20th century, boy scouts were taught that they should have a cheerful face no matter what was going on. They should be whistling through it because it would make themselves feel better and everyone around them. Of course, there's some truth to all of this. I want to hasten to add, like I'm not in any way. I'm certainly not an advocate for depression, which you could describe as an emotional black hole, which I wish would never befall anyone. So I'm not advocating for that.

I love states of joy and happiness and uplift. So my point is not against those states, but the point is that we're not getting anywhere by denying what it means to be human, which is to have a balance of joy and sorrow, always, and that we're not really turning out winners, the way we think that we are, by telling everybody that they have to present always a happy smiling countenance. I could give you an example of how that's playing out in college campuses, if you like.

I went to Princeton, which is relevant for the story because Princeton, especially back then, I think it probably is still, had a culture where people were very shiny. I don't mean everybody, but like the dominant campus culture was like very shiny and adapt, let's say. And everybody presented as if wherever they were supposed to be in life, they had already arrived, everything was good. And I started to wonder, like, is this really what is happening? Is this really what everybody truly felt back then? And it was a time of my own life where I was going through various struggles. And it always felt to me like I was the only one. I couldn't go back in time to find out what people had really been thinking, but I decided to visit my alma mater as an adult. And I went a few years ago. And this time I went with my journalist notebook. And I sat down and I talked to

students. And you know, and when you show up as a writer, people will tell you stuff, you know, they'll have pretty open-candid conversations. And what I learned about two minutes, literally, like two minutes into these conversations, a student started telling me about this phenomenon that they call effortless perfection, which is apparently a catchphrase at many of the country's universities.

And it basically describes this social pressure that students feel to be perfect, to be attractive, beautiful, thin, fit, socially skilled, athletic, great grades. There's supposed to be everything. And then on top of that, it's also supposed to appear to come effortlessly. And this is a really great pressure.

And it explains why in recent years, there's been a kind of rash of media reports, of college students who were dying by suicide only days after they had been posting on Instagram, you know, these smiling, shiny photographs of themselves surrounded by all their friends. You know, so like these people who appeared to have everything going, but so much is a facade that we're presenting to the world. And I think that if we could learn instead, well, let me back up, the message that we are sending our kids and our adults out, the message is

that when things are going well, that's the main story. And when you experience sorrow or longing, that's a detour from the main road. If we could instead understand that it's all the main road, then what that would do is normalize our experiences. When difficult things would come to us, we would be able to experience them very differently. And also look at other people's difficulties in a more open way, because we wouldn't find them so scary or so distasteful. And on this topic of powerful emotions, one of the most influential books this year came from Daniel Pink on the power of regret.

In our discussion, I asked Dan about his extensive research, which initially came back with a list of things that on the surface, people regret the most. But then he did a much more diverse sampling, and those findings changed. It was so amazing what he learned. I'm glad to asked that question. It goes to like the research and the process by which one comes to these conclusions and so it's easy to bypass that and I don't like bypassing and I like talking about it. So here's what we know. So when scholars had looked at this question, which I was curious about, what do people regret? Surprisingly, they didn't

explore that question in any depth until rather recently, until this century. There was some research in the 80s and 90s asking people what they regretted, and the consensus, the overwhelming consensus was that people had more education regrets than any other domain. So we think about the domain of life, career regrets, education regrets, romance regrets, family regrets, health regrets, whatever. Education always came out on top in these studies. And then someone, again, this is the way science works. Someone said, wait a second, all these studies, the participants were university students, a university staff, and every single one of them

was done in an education institution. Huh, no wonder education was the top regret. If we had done it in hospitals, with doctors and nurses and patients, maybe health would have been the biggest. So then these two researchers did a very good overall sample of the US population using, again, for giving me forgetting in the methodological weeds here, but did what's called random digit dialing, which was a

waning a little bit now. It's basically a way to get a represented sample in a poll of the US population. They did that and they discovered that people regret a lot of stuff that the regrets were all over the place. They were in all different categories. Some people had career regrets. Some people did have education regrets. Some people had romance regrets.

Some people had finance regrets, all right. It's all over the place. So I said, okay, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do a better version of this. I'm going to do the biggest public opinion survey ever conducted on this topic. And we did it with working with Qualtrics, a big data analytics survey company. We did a really, really, really good public opinion. I mean, I'm very proud of what we did.

We did a first rate public opinion survey of American attitudes of regret, where we sample people, we had them listed regret and then we had them put them into the categories career education, et cetera, et cetera. And I discovered once I crunch the numbers that people were going a lot of stuff. It was all over the place. So that's kind of frustrating because now I spent this time and treasured on this big survey, looking for demographic differences of which there were not many and trying to crack the code of what people regret it and didn't do that. differences of which there were not many and trying to crack the code of what people regret it and didn't do that. Qualitative piece of research came in. So let me indulge me with this explanation here. So what I discovered is when you have people slot them into these existing categories, they are all over the place.

But those existing categories are less revealing than something else going on beneath the surface. And that is what you get from the qualitative stuff. That's what you get from reading people's regrets over and over and over again. I read the first 15,000 of these of these regrets. And let me be specific and concrete here. The best example of what is this? So I've got people who regret not a lot of regrets about not traveling. Okay. I had a chance to study abroad when I was in college, but I didn't do it. I had a chance to go in this adventure with my friends,

but I didn't do it, all right? So people who regret not traveling, let's say, let's say not studying abroad, I'm pretty specific one. So that's obviously an education regret. Then you have people who, and I got a lot of these, people who regret not asking somebody out on a date.

X years ago, there was a person who I was really interested in romantically. I wanted to ask them out on a date, but I was too chicken and I've regretted it ever since. I got a lot of those. I got a lot of those from around the world. That's a romance regret, right? So then I've got also a huge number from around the world. They're basically, Hey, I stayed in this lacklister job. I wanted to start a business.

I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn't have the guts to go out and do it. I wanted to start a business. I wanted to launch my new and enterprise, but I didn't do it and I didn't have the guts. Okay. So that's a career regret. But in my view, and I think it's pretty clear, those three regrets are all the same. There are regret about being at a juncture and having a choice of either playing it safe or taking a chance, playing it safe or taking a chance

Playing it safe and taking a chance and what I found from these 21,000 regrets is that in most cases people regret not taking the chance not in all cases But in most cases people regret not taking the chance, not going on that trip, not speaking up, not asking out that person, not starting that business. And that's what I call a boldness regret. And what I found is that around the world, when you just go one layer beneath those domains of career education, health, finance, whatever, those were the regrets that were persistent. For of them, including boldness of risks. I was fortunate to have Jen Bricker-Bauer on the show

this year. Jen is a motivational speaker, airlist, and author of the New York Times best-selling book, Everything is possible. And in our discussion, I talked to about how often we want to accomplish something important in our lives, but our inner voice

keeps telling us that we can't. We end up in this constant loop of being stuck. And I asked her, how do you change from a mindset of, I can't, to one of, I can? There's a lot in that. I normally kind of have my ending message wrapped up with all these things, but I'd say if anyone has seen stuff online or anything, a lot of headlines or titles have been, can't, isn't part of your vocabulary or can as a four-letter word and things like that. It's from my book and just from headlines that people have made. And so that comes from my childhood where my parents said, can't, isn't part of your

vocabulary. Where that comes into play is kind of tied into your question. So it's more than just like saying that as a sentence. It's removing that from your thought process and from your life and not in just some philosophical way, but in like a reality kind of day toto-day things. So the title of my book is everything is possible. I didn't like do this, I didn't try to make up some master plan. I just as the book came out and as I talked more, I'm like, this actually hand in hand. So the taking the can out of your vocabulary and everything is possible. It the way it comes out practically is like the one thing that all of us have in common. There's one thing everybody in the whole world and why do I worry if I'm having common

and that's obstacles and struggles because nobody is free from those. Nobody gets a free pass in life from now, nobody. So it's kind of like a nice equalizer, levels of playing field. And the way I think that it plays out practically is that we all are going to have like these mountains in our lives.

And so when the mountain comes, it's because it's wind. And we see the mountain and sometimes we're afraid and we're like, how am I going to get, like I don't even have all the answers. That's like, yeah, that's normal. I mean, I have certainly been there and I will be there again, all of us will. But I think where it practically makes a difference is that If we can look at the mountain and be like, okay, I don't have all the answers, I am afraid like I don't know, I don't know, but that I know I can somehow get to the other side, that I have to go around or over it or chisel through a little every day, day by day, believing that it's possible. I think that is where we win or lose the battle, just there. Like before we even go over it, or it's the difference

of looking at it and being like paralyzed and then never moving or being terrified and then just running away from it. You know what I mean? And I think that is a, I like practical things and things that I can just make sense to me. And so for me that whole taking can out of grip vocabulary and everything is possible, that is to me how you can kind of break it down into this like, oh yeah, okay, that makes sense. And it's also like a day by day thing. It doesn't have to be this huge, unattainable thing, you know, that's like out there somewhere in the wind, but it's, this situation sucks or it's overwhelming or it's whatever, but I believe or I don't that's kind of it. See, we believe it or we don't that it's possible to somehow get over there and that doesn't mean that it's going to be fast, but at least you believe that you can and that motivates you, you know what I mean, like it gives us that that grit and that just the beliefs that like, yeah, I can get through that. I can do it.

Another one of my favorite interviews this year was with Admiral James Stavridus and we discussed his book to risk it all. During our interview, I asked Admiral Stavridus about the true meaning of courage through the story of Medal of Honor winner, Commander Ernest Evans. The book you want to read here is the last stand of the Tin Can Sailors. Great title, right? By James Hornfisher. It's an extraordinary book, and it tells the story of he, in full of destroyers, the Japanese think, well, this can't be just a bunch of destroyers charging us. Clearly, there's a mean American battle fleet back there, so they shoot up these destroyers. They sink the Evans, they sink a number of others, a couple others survive and go

limping away. But the Japanese admiral is shaken. He just can't imagine that a bunch of destroyers would attack the massive main thrust for the Japanese battle line, so he turns around. And that's what saves this American landing force. I mean, casualties would have been tens of thousands, if not over 100,000 could have been killed down there. It's really a remarkable moment. So that's the story of Commander

Rebens, who tragically does not survive. He's badly wounded on the bridge of the ship. Ship is sinking. He's last seen in the water, trying to rally his crew. He's been wounded in three places. The odds are high that he simply died and slipped into the waves. By the way, just a year ago, the USS Evans was found and recovered. One of the deepest, not recovered, we didn't bring it up. But we found it.

We put artificial capability on it to examine it, we know it's the USS7s, we know it's his ship, so it's been found. So Captain Evans destroyer has been found and it's a remarkable end to his story. So the quality of him, I think, is pretty evident. In this case, it's fortune favors the bold. It is the courage and a moment to charge, to go for the threat. And this is really, at the end of the day,

what we ought to cherish about Commander Evans or Nostevins and what we ought to cherish about our military is that we are men and women who will rise to the cage. We will go toward the danger. And in so doing, in this case, because he risked it all, he effectively changed the course of this battle of Lady Gulf and was part, significant part, a central part of driving away this Japanese battle force,

remarkable storage, the quality there is, sometimes you just gotta act boldly, and that's what he did. One of my other favorite authors is Gretchen Ruben, and she and I discussed happiness, the importance of knowing yourself and how to declutter your life. But another topic that I asked her about

was that if there are many problems in your life that you need to work on, how does one identify the priorities, as well as how do you go about fixing them? Ooh, what a great question. So I think that there are a couple ways to think about this, depending on what perspective you wanna take. One, I think is start with your own body

because our physical experience always colors our emotional experience, and it's very hard sometimes to do bigger things, more transcendent things when you just are struggling with your physical self. So I think things like making sure that you get enough sleep, most adults need at least seven hours of sleep. People tell themselves that they've trained themselves to get by on less, but actually research shows that people are quite impaired. Getting some exercise, you do not need to train for the marathon.

If you on the podcast, we talked about walk 20 and 20. This was our challenge for listeners in 2020. And what research shows is that if you walk 20 minutes a day, if you start out being completely sedentary, you will get this huge boost in health, immune function, energy, mood, so getting some movement in your life. Also, if you have trouble sleeping, a lot of people who are struggling have trouble sleeping, either they can't fall asleep or they wake up

in the middle of the night with racing thoughts, people who exercise sleep more deeply and fall asleep faster. Getting morning light, research is showing that their circadian rhythm influences the body in ways that we're only beginning to understand. Morning light helps reset the body clock, helps set you up for energy and focus. So if you get a 20 minute walk first thing in the morning, oh my gosh, you're already well on your way to feeling more energetic happier, not letting yourself get too hungry or thirsty, a lot of times people, they skip breakfast, they skip lunch, and then they're so hungry, they can't take time to have a healthy meal,

they're just like grabbing whatever is in a crinkly bag. And strange, this isn't true for everyone, but in terms of like physical comfort and feeling good in your surroundings and kind of having that that sense of physical comfort outer order, I have found the two a surprising degree outer order contributes to inner calm and energy for most people just getting control over the stuff basic things, might give you a boost in energy and kind of a feeling of self mastery that then could make it easier to do other things. And what I would say the other thing to think about is relationships. Relationships are a key to happiness. people who are happier, they see that we have to have enduring bonds with other people. We need to be able to confide. We need to be able to feel like we belong. We need to be able to get support. And just as important, we need to give support. So if you're thinking about things to do to make yourself happier, thinking about deepening your relationships or broadening

your relationships is a great place to start, whether that's reconnecting with your friends, maybe connecting again with an old friend that you've sort of drifted away from, doing work to repair a relationship, which you feel like it's kind of not working that well, taking time for fun family traditions, whatever relationships you feel, maybe you're going to get a dog. There are so many ways to work in a relationship. But this really is something that is crucial for our happiness. Loneliness is a big problem right now, all around the world. Now more than ever, it's something that researchers are studying. It has terrible health consequences for us

and terrible happiness consequences. So I think that working on your body and working on your relationships are two great places to start. Once those are kind of, you're in a better place with those, then I think it starts to feel easier to work on other things that you might also have as priorities, but you have to start somewhere. So I would start with those two areas. Seth Gooden joined me to discuss a very different topic for many that I cover here on the podcast. He was instrumental in coordinating the creation of the Carmen Almanek, which is a book

that lays out about a thousand different facts on climate change and does it through the lens of having over 300 different collaborators put this information together. And during our interview, I asked him why it's going to take systems change to solve this global issue. So there are a couple ways to think about where systems change comes from. And if you think about the fact that 100 years ago with very little technology compared to today,

human beings paved most of the earth. We didn't pave the earth with a coordinated top-down approach. We didn't build the interstate highway system for years and years after that. It's because we created the economic and cultural condition for it to work. If you didn't ever road near your house and you couldn't get to Disney World or Disneyland, then you spoke up because you needed a road. That when Henry Ford figured out how to make the car, the company world or Disneyland, then you spoke up because you needed a road. That when Henry Ford figured out how to make the car, one third the price, suddenly a lot

of people wanted to buy a car and that led to the rise of gas stations. Who wants a car if there are no gas stations? Hard to sell that, right? And so the system ends up changing. So what needs to shift is the inputs of the system so that the marketplace can wake up and start doing things appropriately. So a simple example is if it's 20 minutes faster for somebody to get on a private jet to fly to England instead of taking a commercial flight, it's their company's money, they might do it.

But what we're seeing in places like France is they're saying, we don't want 15% of all of our air travel to be private jets. It's hurting all of us. So if it turns out that you take private jet fuel and charge twice as much for private jet fuel, people will make different choices about how to fly somewhere.

And those choices are based on the costs of the input that if Amazon was on the hook for taking back all the packaging they use this entry stuff, I guarantee you, it wouldn't take more than a couple of days for them to change the kind of packaging they use when they send you stuff. Because the system would change in response to the price of the inputs and the way that we're measuring the outputs. So there are lots of ways to do it. One of the things that gets talked about in the Almanac. Again, none of this is my opinion. We are reporting what other people have shown is that when you offer people a

climate dividend, when you send everybody a check for three or four or five thousand dollars and pay for that by appropriately charging for carbon, people change what they buy. And they do that in a way that causes the systems to change. That is completely different than the myth of plastics recycling, because it turns out almost no plastic is successfully recycled after you drop it in the blue bin. That was invented to make you feel like you were doing something when you didn't actually do something.

So the only purpose of the Omnitack is so that someone who's hearing me rant with you today can look it up and then they can start ranting too. Because if we don't start talking about it, the systems aren't going to change. Rachel Hollis is a three-time New York Times best-selling author, the host of the very popular Rachel Hollis show, which has over a hundred million downloads, and one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the world. Jean-I had a very candid discussion about how her life has transformed over the past few years, and I asked her about this season of her life,

how she was able to overcome its challenges and her advice for listeners. Well, I think that one, we have to readjust our perception of what life is supposed to be, because the internet has been amazing for so many reasons, but one of the tricky things that has happened with the invention of the internet and the invention of social media is that we've been given the perfect visual, right? We've been given the great Instagram photo, the amazing YouTube video, we're seeing people's highlight reels, we're seeing the best of the best, we're seeing people in the top of their game. And it does really mess with our psychology

to make us believe that that's what life is like all the time. That we always have it together, that we always have the right answer, that we always do the right thing or win the game or have successes. And that's just not real. And it's not accurate. And it's hurtful to believe something different. My audience is predominantly women. So I can tell you after 15 years of doing

this work that the thing women are most petrified of is failure. They're so afraid of getting it wrong, they're so afraid of doing it wrong, and if you unpack that with them, if you sort of dig deeper and try and understand the psychology there, what you find is that they're not afraid of failing, they're afraid of other people seeing them fail. Those are two very different things. And if you're afraid of other people seeing you fail, you will never do anything. You will never run for political office in your hometown. You'll never start the business, you'll never ask that guy out on the date, you'll never do anything different than exactly the comfort zone that you currently live inside of. So what I've found is that a readjustment of the way that we look at things, I think that this life that we are blessed enough to get to live is supposed to be an experiment. We're supposed to

try stuff and see how it goes. And if that doesn't work, we try something else. If that doesn't work, we'd try something else again. In my own life and my own business, my career, how I've shown up as a parent or a partner, it really has been just testing stuff out. When we brought our kids home in the hospital, we didn't know know we're doing. Then the baby would be crying and you try something and then like, okay, they're so crying, that's not the answer. And you're like, well, we got to figure out, we got to do something else. If we could approach our lives from a space of experimentation until we get to the right solution, we wouldn't be so afraid of getting it wrong. And I think it would really lower a lot of the stress, it would lower a lot of the pressure.

I think we'd see more freedom and creativity. I think we'd see more people try stuff and be weird and experiment. And I think art would explode and business and science and all of it, because we wouldn't be living in failure of getting it wrong. So I mean, I have said for as long as I've had a platform and as long as I've been a writer,

that people will continue to watch me fail. And it has happened again and again. I've failed publicly many times. But what I'm here to do is learn and evolve. I'm willing to have a failure occasionally because that was the cost of the lesson I needed to learn. I just have a different perception about it than most. And I think that that is what helps me to keep trying, to keep growing, and ultimately to keep achieving new levels of success

because I'm willing to keep showing up. Robyn Sharma is one of the world's top leadership and personal mastery experts and has sold more than 15 million books internationally. Robin joined me on the podcast to discuss his latest bestselling book the Everyday Hero Manifesto. During our interview, I asked him why taking the first step is the most important thing that you can do on your journey to greatness and how by taking that first step, you can transform your life

by unleashing your gifts and innate talents. Well, it's the old Lao Tzu philosophy that a thousand mile journey begins with a single step. And it's very easy to put Kobe, Jordan, Ali, Mandela, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Serena Williams, etc., etc. up on a pedestal. And one of the things a lot of people do, John, is they say, well, these people are just not like us.

Or they say, these people are cut from a different claw. And the reality is, we all have gifts and natural talents, but the key is, these people had an idea, and then they out-practiced everyone around them, and they stayed with the mission day after day after day until they went from being an amateur to a professional and a beginner to a master. This morning, during my workout,

I read about Sir John Templeton. Have you heard of Sir John Templeton? I have. Yeah, one of the great financial geniuses of all time. I learned he grew up as a poor boy in Tennessee. He just fell in love with stock picking and he tried this and he tried that. And you know, he stumbled his way to world class. And so for anyone who might be stuck right now, and there's a lot of people,

one of the first chapters of The Everyday Hero Man of Festo is, it's okay to be okay. I mean, the world is messy right now and there's a lot of people. One of the first chapters of The Every Day Hero Man of Festo is, it's okay to be okay. I mean, the world is messy right now. If you weren't a little bit frightened, a little bit scared, a little bit insecure, you wouldn't be human. So that's okay. Yet we do have power. We have the power to choose. We have the power to get up a little earlier tomorrow morning and work out versus sleep in. And then we have the power to eat something clean versus something that will drag down our energy. And then we have the power to go to work and under promise and over deliver.

And then we have the power to come home and be with our family and listen and connect and be a great family member. And then we have the power to read a little bit before we go to sleep. And so one of my favorite ideas, and I talk about it in my books, is small daily, seemingly insignificant improvements, when done consistently over time, lead to stunning results. And so it's not what you do once a year that makes the difference. It's what you do every day. I call them micro wins.

And so they're so easy to do that we neglect them. But if you look at the great athletes, it's every workout counts, and they optimize every workout. And consistency is the mother of mastery. And your days are your life and miniature. So every day you make those small, little incremental improvements in the areas that are very important to you. And over time, you create enormous momentum, and you don't even see it. And then maybe it's three months later, but all of a sudden you're at a completely new place. Claude Silver is the chief heart officer for Vayner Media. And when she was initially placed in this position, which is the first of its kind globally, her boss, Gary Vaynerchuk, told her that he wanted to build the best human empire in the history of time.

Claude wondered, how do you pick up that gauntlet after it's been thrown down by the founder and CEO of your company? For Claude, it starts and ends by possessing emotional optimism. And during our interview, I asked her to talk about the power of emotional optimism, and how it can address this global issue we've seen of employee disengagement. For me, emotional optimism is actually the opposite of another buzzword called toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is, you know what, you had a terrible morning, but it's all good. It's going to get better. Toxic positivity is, yes, we just had to let 20 people go, but don't worry, you're safe.

Like toxic positivity is devoid of reality, I think. Emotional optimism for me is the reason that I put the word emotional first is because of what I said earlier, which is we all, every single one of us, unless we are robotic, have emotions that are going through our bodies and our minds 25 times a day, much more than that, right? And emotions are data. They're literally signposts for us to say, mayday, mayday, I'm getting

triggered up here, mayday, mayday, I'm getting angry up here. Mayday, mayday, I'm getting angry over here. I feel happy over here. The emotional part is when I say emotional optimism, it's not to negate or to shove your emotions away or to pretend that that never happened. It's to identify what your emotions are telling you as data, as information. And then also be able to see the hope, the positivity, the possibility. Because it's one thing to be able to say, yeah, I'm really hopeful. I'm a glass full type of tell you that I am, you know, I have a dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear friend that is

suffering with terminal cancer right now and that gives me a lot of emotions and I'm really upset about that and I still have a lot of hope and I'm still gonna get up tomorrow morning and I'm still gonna take a crack at life But that doesn't mean that I'm gonna forget him and Forget how I feel when I think about him, you know? So the reason that it came to me, and that's a question that actually no one's really, really asked me is, first and foremost, I'm an emotional person.

My parents used to tell me, I think too much with my heart, they'd say, Claw, you think too much with your heart. they'd say,, Claude, you think too much with your heart. Why don't you gonna start thinking with your head? And I used to think, wow, there's something wrong with me. Like, I don't know how to think with my head. I don't know what they're talking about. Like, maybe there's this missing chip in my brain.

It wasn't a great feeling to have, you know? But I couldn't help the fact that I felt deeply about things as a real empath. And I saw Shaman, believe it or not, he was also a psychotherapist but he went to Shaman. When I was looking at London and he looked like Gandalf, he had an Austrian accent like Freud or young, with a long beard. And he looked at me and I thought, wow, that's it, that sums it up. He said, you're the only person I've ever met that can be inside of a coffin and still see the light.

And it was so profound. And what I meant, what I feel like he meant by the coffin is I can hold a lot of emotion for people. I can hold space for people. And I also know that I don't have to have the answers, that it's not about me. And then I can be a passenger and ride shotgun with people in their journey. And to me, you put all that together and I think that's really what an emotional optimist is all about. It's the ability to feel your feelings. You know that you have the ability to change them or adapt with them and move forward. Jeff Stricker is a pastor, author, motivational speaker

and former Army Ranger who earned the Silver Star for his bravery during Black Hawk Down. And to give you some context, he was in the lead Humvee during the operation and had just come back from recovering Todd Blackburn, another Ranger who had fallen from one of the Black Hawk helicopters. And on their way back, they took gunfire from Point Black Range that ended up taking the life of one of the men in that Humvee with Jeff. And upon getting back and going through that entire ordeal, the general who was in charge of the operation told Jeff and his team that they had to go back in.

Jeff thought he was going to die, but went out anyway. And in our interview, he discussed with me the importance of being a man of your word. I'm impressed, John, because most people just want me to recount the stories that's already in the book in the movie Black Hawk Down. And I'm happy to do that. But you just asked the question for a warrior on a battlefield, and I don't know if most people understand

this going into the military, even especially those that have never served. So by the time that I went to Somalia, I was a squad leader in Bravo Company Third Ranger Battalion. I'd been in the Ranger regiment for about six years. And I want the listener to know that before going to Somalia, I had already taken part in the US invasion of Panama in 1989 with the Ranger regiment. Arnie went with the Rangers to Kuwait as part of Desert Storm in 91. So by the time I get to Somalia, man, this is not my first rodeo. And in the Ranger community, being a 24-year-old that's already been to combat twice makes me a really old timer.

And I mean, that literally, like you're a really seasoned guy at 24 years old, with that kind of combat experience. So I get to Somalia, I've got a squad that I'm responsible for, and our job is primarily to be the ground reaction force on a humvees for all of the missions that task force ranger, the community that you just described, for all of the missions that we do, most of them will go in by helicopter. The Humvees will arrive as the helicopters are pulling off and they'll all go out by helicopter. There's one mission that we did that was only on Humvees, but there's always a Humvee element to the fight. And my job is to lead the Humvees, to be the first couple of Humvees

in the city streets, which means the one that attracts the most gunfire. Black Hawk Down is our seventh mission. We have been successful, but it's taking us much longer than we thought to go kill or capture Mohammed Farah ID and the high ranking leaders of his organization. We're getting lots of pressure from President Clinton's administration. I don't have time to get into the national command authority and how this special operations force works when they go overseas, but they basically work for the president

and for the Secretary of Defense. And they don't really answer to anybody else when they're overseas. And now we're getting hammered by the Clinton administration about how long this is taking. And our big boss, the Joint Special Operations Command, commander is on the ground leading the whole force,

a leader that I have the utmost respect for, Major General Bill Garrison, and Garrison launches the force to go get these two bad guys in Sunday after the October 3rd. Without going into the whole battle, I will say that the movie Black Hawk Down portrays these events very well. It's still a major motion picture, but man, they're very accurate with what they describe. We go in

on humvees and immediately get notified, hey, we've got a critically wounded ranger. Jeff, I need you to put them on your humvees and take them back to our surgeon, get them immediate medical attention, because Blackburn has fallen from the helicopter, missed the fast route landed in the city streets. And I make my way back to the base, and on the way back come through intense gunfire and

Dominic Pella is shot and killed just inches away from me. Literally takes around in the forehead and dies just a few inches away from me. And just so I can break here and my understanding is you were the senior most ranger. So most likely you would have been in the first Humvee. And the first Humvee. There are other more senior rangers with more rank than me out there that day. But I'm the guy who has been navigating the vehicles through the city streets every time we roll out. So I'm the guy who knows where we're at and how to get to where we need to go. And that's why they dispatch me and my squad. I am the lead home these and me and my

squad are taken blackburn back to the base. We come through this intense gunfire vehicles are rid of bullet holes and most of us should have died on the way back to the base. And John, this is a long answer to your question, but I want to set up the answer so that your listener understands how important that question you just asked was because when I get back to the base my Boss comes up to me and he says hey Jeff second black Hawk just got shot down We've already put the Ranger search and rescue force in at the first crash site We don't have anybody else out there

We need to get you back on your humbies and you need to go out to the second crash site, we don't have anybody else out there. We need to get you back on your humbys and you need to go out to the second crash site and I'm thinking to myself, everybody's going to die if I do this. And here's where being a man of your word comes in, John, because the Rangers swear their lives to one another almost every day. They do it quite literally in what we call the Ranger Creed. And one of the phrases of the Ranger Creed says, I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy. And now I'm at my humvees getting ready to roll back out in the city streets with a guy whose dead body is being pulled off of the back. And I'm thinking, if I go back out there,

I'm going to die. All of my men are going to die. But if I don't go back out there, the guys at that crash site are going to die and I've sworn my life to them. I gave my word and said, I will never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy. And now keeping my word is probably going to cost me my life. And I'll just be honest, man, I had this moment where I had to wrestle with, are you going to be a man of your word or not, Jeff? And if it cost you your life tonight, are you going to do what you promised your brothers and sisters and arms that you're going to do? And that really, that moment and my strong faith gave me the courage.

My faith gave me the courage to get on the homies, but that moment is what pushed me in that direction because had it not been for the Ranger Creed, I don't think I would have gone back out there, not once, but multiple times all night long that night. Gene Owing is the founding CEO and president of Virgin Unite, an entrepreneurial foundation that builds collectives, incubates ideas, and reinvent systems for a better world. Over the past 15 years, she has worked with partners to lead the incubation

and start up several global initiatives, including the Elders, the B team, the Carbon War Room, Ocean Unite, the Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator, the Carbon War Room, Ocean Unite, the Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator, 100% Human at Work, the Virgin Unite Constellation, and the Branson Centers of Entrepreneurship. And last year, she came out with a great book

on the Power of Partnership and during our conversation. I asked her how she became the catalyst for so many incredible collaborations and how she brought them all together. Yeah, I think that's one of the favorite bits of my job is helping to bring folks together and convene and catalyze. We're very thoughtful in how we bring those people together

and who we bring together. When we were starting the elders, for example, we spent two weeks where we brought together front-night leaders from around the world. We brought together business leaders, we brought together government leaders, we brought together government leaders, we brought together some of the elders. And we spent time together really learning and listening to them.

There was a moment there that was a massive learning for me in this convening process, because it was when I first started my job at Virginia Night, and we literally spent months like perfecting this PowerPoint. And we brought it into these sessions, and I'll never forget Richard and Peter, the first night saying, no, no, no, no, no, no PowerPoint, and staying up all night doing flip charts.

And I remember standing in this room with many of my heroes standing in front of me like Archership Tutu and President Carter. And I remember with my little flip chart presenting the idea of the elders. And I remember President Carter's like piercing blue eyes, looking at me and I'm thinking, he must love this idea, he's paying such great attention.

And then I finished. And at the end, he stood up and he said, I don't like this idea at all. And I just remember looking at the back of the room and seeing Richard and Peter's face almost falling to the floor and I literally wanted to melt into the cement. And we scurried back into what was Richard's office at the time. And I've never before since seen them so silent. And we were just like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do now?

And then it was this beautiful moment where we picked ourselves up. We believed in each other. We believed in the idea. We brought ourselves back out into this group of 50 or so people with President Carter there still. And for the next two weeks, we brought ourselves back out into this group of 50 or so people with President Carter there still, and for the next two weeks we co-created the idea of the elders with this group of very different people from all over the world. And by the end of

those two weeks, the idea was way stronger than the one we came in with. So it was such a good lesson for me about the sense of co-creation. When President Carter eventually retired from the elders many, many years later, he said it was one of the most important things you'd ever done in his life. And part of that was because he was there at the beginning helping co-create it and build that set of values and that purpose in it.

And so in convening and catalyzing, I think one of the most important things we do is we listen and we pause and we bring different people from across different, that was really clear to me, is often we'll bring collectives together and we'll bring people in the room because of their title or because of their experience. But what we should also be thinking about is what are the relationships in that group? Making sure that at the center of that group,

we have some people that have a deep connection with each other so they can model the right values. They can make sure that it stays on track. They can model how to celebrate fiction, and we don't think about that often at the center of these collaborations. I head on Jeff Walker. And if you're not familiar with Jeff,

for over 25 years, he was the founder and CEO of CMP Capital, and JP Morgan Partners, he also became the vice chairman of JP Morgan and company, as well as becoming the chairman of the JP Morgan charitable foundation. He is currently the chairman of New Prophet, a social change investment fund,

and vice chair in the office of the United Nations OnVoy on Health. Jeff is one of the most prolific philanthropists I have ever met, and he sat on more than a dozen different boards. And we discussed in our interview the importance of collaboration in creating impactful systems change. We've been exploring that for a while and some written some pieces on that. My last book, The Geronstein Networks About Loring those walls between donors and doers. And it's understanding that we all have something to offer. And they actually were all afraid to partner with someone else.

And so not only is it hard for a social entrepreneur to go to someone and say, can you help me do this? Can you help fund me? But that person on the other side is afraid that they're going to be treated just like money. Or they're going to be treated, you know, as someone who that has to be put up with and reported to as opposed to becoming their partner. And that person is afraid of what their spouses are saying or what their other world will say if they make a bad investment. So the strategy that we've come up with that

seems to work with many others is to build these collaborative partnerships. And I cheer also another social change group, venture film philanthropy group called New Profit, and we helped start up Teach for America and Teach for All and Kids Schools and a whole bunch of other things over the last 20 years. And we look at these collaborative models and say, how can we take businesses, individuals, foundations, and collaborate on a problem-like workforce? How do we train more people and upskill them more effectively and more cost-effectively?

And we can do this better if we work together. And we did an X Prize, we brought Walmart, and Marion, and Lumina and a variety of others together because they actually wanted to take their employees and give them an upskilled them. And if they got jobs in another company, that's a success. So whatever that is, let's have a strategy that everyone wins from, that they can share

these strategies across companies, across individuals, and new profit or board. We have private equity guys, venture guys, but we all love working with each other, hindering from Wendy Cop, about what she's been doing and teach for all. And so, starting to figure out and set up these philanthropic support groups is a winning strategy. We did that in malaria. We've done that in community health. I have a partnership with the last 12 years to bring community health to Africa.

And over the last three years back to the United States. It's a set of philanthropists who we just love on Thursdays at 10 o'clock, again, zoom with each other and talk about what we're working on with our team and we have a small team that we help fund of people that I call catalysts. These are orchestrators. These are people that help unify different parties together for a common cause like ending Destinaleria, like cutting-and-half maternal deaths in New Jersey and others. And when you do that, people want to be around it. You start understanding the marketplace better. You start understanding the influencers

that could affect your problem more effectively. You're not trying to, you have solutions and innovations that come to bear, but you're not backing any one particular solution. You're allowing those multiple solutions to come together to figure out what really works in a local city, local state, whatever they might make it. So you're not telling them what they have to do. You're making these resources available to you.

And that's actually my last article in Stanford Social Innovation Review is all around locally driven and network supported organizations. People that are those network supporters that help share that knowledge to local actors who really understand what it takes to change in their account. And that's what's happened with community solutions where they've driven homelessness down to near zero and 14 cities where they build partnerships with the governments, with the local businesses, local foundations, and others.

One, it's much more effective than the single solution where a philanthropist will go and say, I have the answer, it just hasn't worked. And it's also not the single NGO nonprofit that you're gonna back. I'll give you all my money and then you'll just grow. Kip Schools is wonderful, great organization, but it has 250 schools. There's a hundred thousand schools in America. How do you take those ideas from Kip and bring them

out to the world? And that's what a network support opportunity is. So yes, philanthropy is changing, it's learning from its itself, hopefully. It's finding others who can be passionate about a common problem you can work with. There's lots of good examples of those. And it's how to breed more people who are these orchestrators, catalysts, who help unify the action and unify that approach to solving that common problem. I hope that you enjoyed today's show. But more importantly, I hope that over enjoyed today's show, but more importantly, I hope that over the course

of 2022, that we brought you content that was transformational to your life. Links to all the guests from today's shows and their episodes will be in the show notes on passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. All the proceeds go to supporting the show and making it free for our listeners. Everties or deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com.

Slash deals. Videos are on YouTube, both at John Armiles and on our new Clips station, Ashenstruck Clips. Please check them both out and subscribe. I'm at John Armiles, both on Twitter and Instagram. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. And if you wanna know how I've booked these amazing guests throughout the year, it's because of my network.

Go out there and build yours before you need it. And our episode on Thursday is going to feature the best this year that we brought from the worlds of medicine, psychology, behavioral science, and neuroscience. This is going to be an episode that you do not want to miss. The greatest compliment that you can give the show is to share it with those that you care about. And in the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live

what you listen. And we'll see you next time. Live Life, Passion Struck. you