The Ryan Hanley Show - Branding The Lie: Escaping The High-Achiever's Trap | Kendra Dahlstrom

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

Get the exact 5-step script that turned a broken sales process into an 80%+ conversion rate in under 90 days: https://game.findingpeak.com/masterclose/ Join our community of fearless leaders in search of unreasonable outcomes... Want to become a FEARLESS entrepreneur and leader? Go here: https://www.findingpeak.com Watch on YouTube: https://link.ryanhanley.com/youtube What if the feeling of "unworthiness" that plagues so many high-achievers is actually a lie? A lie we've been conditioned to believe by a society that rewards external validation above all else. My guest this week is Kendra Dahlstrom, a transformational leadership coach who works with top executives to help them lead with authenticity, imperfection, and truth. Connect with Kendra Dahlstrom Website: https://kendradahlstrom.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kendra.dahlstrom/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@theunworthyleaderpodcast After 25 years in the corporate world, Kendra realized she was "branding the lie, not the truth" by focusing on unworthiness. She now helps high-achievers recognize their patterns of chronic success-seeking and find a deeper sense of fulfillment. In this incredibly vulnerable conversation, Kendra and I go deep on: Why so many high-achievers feel like frauds and imposters. The surprising link between high achievement, dopamine, and addiction. How to process past trauma and use it as a source of strength. The one question Kendra asks herself every day to stay grounded: "Will this bring me closer to peace?" Practical tools for breaking free from the cycle of external validation and leading from the heart. This isn't your typical leadership podcast. We get real about the messy, human side of success. If you're ready to stop hiding, embrace your imperfections, and lead with your whole self, this episode is for you. Recommended Tools for Growth OpusClip: #1 AI video clipping and editing tool: https://link.ryanhanley.com/opus Riverside: HD Podcast & Video Software | Free Recording & Editing: https://link.ryanhanley.com/riverside WhisperFlow: Never waste time typing on your keyboard again: https://link.ryanhanley.com/whisperflow CaptionsApp: One app for all your social media video creation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/captionsapp GoHighLevel: It's time to take your business workflow to the Next Level: https://link.ryanhanley.com/gohighlevel Perspective.co: The #1 funnel builder for lead generation: https://link.ryanhanley.com/perspective Episodes You Might Enjoy:From $2 Million Loss to World-Class Entrepreneur: https://lnk.to/delkFrom One Man Shop to $200M in Revenue: https://lnk.to/tommymelloIs Psilocybin the Gateway to Self-Mastery? https://lnk.to/80upZ9 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

One is called the compass method, which is about coming back to your own core values and looking at what is your own internal compass, not the one that you think you need to live by because the world tells you, but what is your own true north? What is your own internal compass? It's about awareness, reaching that inflection point, making a decision, what do I want to do about it? Then you move through the transformation, write a passage, the undoing process. my mission really hasn't changed it's it's actually quite comical if you look at sort of

the movement of entrepreneurship and how we roll some of what i helped clients with i needed obviously to do my own work as well and um realized that the unworthy leader podcast well it meant so much to me and we can talk more about it coming out of the hospital it really resonated with me and I wanted to strike like a visceral cord with people. At the same time, I was branding the lie, not the truth, which is that they're really, people that feel unworthy are really just high achievers that are just in the continuous pattern of chronic success and achievements.

And a lot of it really aligns with your TEDx talks. I'm super excited to talk with you. Awesome. Well, let's get right into it. I mean, I, you know, let's start to, I really, I'd like to start with this idea of you branded the lie. What does that mean and maybe talk us through that? Because that's a really heady idea.

Yeah. Well, what I came out from my trauma-informed background and then some lived experiences was this idea that I was unworthy. And, you know, as a Christ follower and somebody who's done a lot of my own healing work, I realized, okay, I know that's not true mentally, but somewhere somatically and in my body I still felt those lies. And so I really wanted to message to all those leaders out there and really kind of cut the crap

and have this conversation around all of these high achievers out there and all of these leaders that I've worked with over my 25 years in corporate, including myself, who underlying have this sense of unworthiness and whether they identify as imposter syndrome or whether just selective unworthiness, maybe it's particular scenarios and situations it's contextual or whether it's pervasive it can really be all over the place and so I I think that I really wanted to speak to that and have

the audience have a very visceral reaction and like oh she's talking about the unworthy leadership I can I can relate to that what I realized through my own journey of launching and then publishing 26 episodes in my first season of my podcast since last February was that I felt unworthy having a podcast because I felt everyone out there has one. There's so many to choose from. Why me? I'm not famous. I haven't written a book.

I'm sort of always been known as the ghost in the boardroom because I work behind all these really successful executives, but I'm not really a huge known name. And I was struggling with my own feelings of unworthiness. And so as that's evolved, I realized that what I'm really looking to do is help high achievers and really circumvent the root cause that's driving high achievers to still feel so unfulfilled. So I can relate to this to an incredible amount. And honestly, a lot of my own work is maybe a different angle, but a similar path.

I came to the realization very early in my career that, I shouldn't say really early. I came to the realization in my career after a few major setbacks. and, you know, I had two jobs in a row that I loved. Executive leadership position. One was a CMO position. One was a CEO position. And I love them. And both times they ended up in me getting fired.

And having to go back, reflect on those experiences. Your first instinct is, it's not my fault. Why did they do this to me? All this kind of stuff. And it was, that was really the moment when I started down my own path and said, And when I did some self-awareness stuff, it came back to ego, right? It was always this sense of ego. And I think a lot of our unworthy feelings, and I'm very interested in your take on this,

is ego. We build up this sense of what I should be or how people perceive me or the status symbols that I want people to see in me. And then we're, but behind that, it's all empty. It's sticks. It's built on cards. You know, there's nothing actually there because you're, you're trying to prop up this vision of yourself or this image of yourself that isn't actually

you yet. And man, you make so many bad decisions coming from that place. So do you see ego playing a large role in the unworthiness? And maybe what other aspects of our emotional character play a role in this sense of unworthiness that so many of us deal with? Yeah, definitely ego is a huge part of it. I think the ego is what drives the need to get that external validation that unfortunately we have a society today that is largely driven on external validation think of it and I mean even from corporate standard what's your market share you know how are you marketing are you dressing appropriately are you know everything I mean you play a sport my

sons are both in sports okay the scoreboard gives you direct feedback how are you doing you know so everything is external validation and that's why for me I I find it's so important to be rooted in my faith. So I have a bigger mission and picture of sort of what my purpose is here and how I can live my life and that my worth is identified in being a child of God and Christ. And that is my worth. And it took me a long time to get there. I'm 51.

So it took me a long time to get there, right? But I think that ego plays a huge part of it. And I think there's a lot of good things that ego can do too, right? it's there is a protective mechanism there's a very long conversation we could have around all the good things it can do however i think there are a lot of lies that we end up telling ourselves in our society today around it i think we think that proving will finally make us free like oh if i can just get this next promotion i'll finally feel better well guess what ryan when you got that next promotion did you finally feel better most maybe for a little bit right yeah um and i find it to be almost like

it's very similar to addictions. So you get that serotonin and dopamine rush every time you achieve and approve that next thing. But just like that addict that needs the video game or more alcohol or more drugs, you need more of that achieving to actually get that same high, right? I think, you know, it's funny.

I was listening to, I'm going to forget his name, but his expertise is around sugar. And he was on the diary of his CEO podcast. Stephen Barlow's podcast, very famous podcast, if you guys haven't listened to it. And he was talking about this topic from a, from a neurochemical level, right? Why do we attach ourselves to things like sugar, right? Why do we attach ourselves to drugs or alcohol or porn or, you know, gambling? And it has to do with the dopamine receptors in our body.

And our dopamine receptors have a healthy amount that they can receive. and they have an unhealthy amount. And anytime we blast them for extended periods of time with more dopamine than those receptors can take in, they actually shrink in size to limit the update because we can only handle so much. And then as they shrink and again, I'm third partying this science here, guys.

So I'm sure there's a lot of nuance here. But essentially, we then have to chase that, right? So whether it's the next promotion in that feeling of high that we get or that next big sale or the award or all the way down to, you know, needing to have a cocktail every night or having to get, you know, high before you go to bed because that makes you feel, you know, whatever way. These all, you would constantly have to chase more to get to that same feeling.

And his whole point is if you go and you actually address those root causes, if you actually don't need that initial blast of dopamine, your dopamine receptors open back up and then you can have a very healthy relationship with these things but that doesn't seem like the work that a lot of people want to do it seems like most people choose the path of just masking it with insert vice or dopamine addiction um how did you like have you experienced that in your life and how did you personally start to overcome this sense of unworthiness well for me it was a tipping point where it became too uncomfortable to not address it, right? So, you know, I kind of hit

rock bottom and had a lot of abuse and trauma through childhood and then kind of on and off through my teens and then into college. And then I got into some drug use for a few years and just really realized this is not who I am. I'm not even, I don't even recognize this person. Like, this is not who I want to be. But at work, I would show up as a high performer. Nobody knew. Like, it was this closet life right and um as i got that all together and you know found jesus my husband had kids i started to really just go into that deep healing work i've i've done all of the you know esoteric sort of new age stuff as well as um now i'm doing some some really deep reparenting therapy that deals with like inner child traumas and stuff where it gives you a chance

as an adult self to go back and actually reparent the child the way in which you felt it wouldn't it needed in the moment that it didn't get and that's been incredibly liberating and so I really just had to do the work like there was no clean way to do it right and I'd roll up my sleeves and just going and do the work and then really reconcile with myself um you know how can I get this out of the way so I can I can actually live and feel free and not feel like I'm a victim or I'm triggered by everything or or I'm doing fine and suddenly I'm triggered by this random thing I just was tired of that and so I really went in and did the work and that's why I got into this work is because it actually keeps me in the work. It keeps me honest and grounded.

And I kind of feel like a professor who's out there doing field work, but also is teaching in the classroom. And I think that's why my clients feel so safe with me and can open up. And there's something in me. And I don't, it's just a gift from God, I guess, that when they get in the room with me or we're together virtually, I'm not asking, you know, really, you know, provocative of questions or anything. I'm just having conversations with them asking open-ended, insightful questions, but there's something in them where suddenly they give themselves permission to not, to put the peacock feathers down and to just be seen as a human and to finally admit to themselves, maybe that one lie that they've been telling themselves that they can feel free

from. And a lot of times it ends up being, they resign, you know, and that's not my intention, but a lot of times they resign and they realize, oh my gosh, this role is not for me. Like, I'm actually going to give myself permission to not beat myself up over this but i need to move on to that next thing and so that's kind of how i got into the work and myself is just doing it and then i've just found that i truly believe that god only put me through everything he put me through in life that i could help liberate others from it too yeah i was having a conversation the other day uh my mother is very devout christian and uh she's actually a um she would probably hate that if i described her this way, but I always describe her as a Bible purist, right? She's like a verbatim believer.

Yes. And I'm not. Believe her through and through. But, you know, we always have these arguments around, I believe the words in the Bible were written by men who are fallible, and she believes that they are verbatim as described by God. And that's not the debate that we need to have. But I was talking to her, and she was asking me about some things that, you know, I've been through in my life and she's been in her life and, and she has guilt for decisions that she's made. She has feeling, you know, she has these, these sense of doubt around some decisions that she's made earlier in her life. And I said to her like, and I firmly believe this, I don't think you can understand good if you haven't lived and experienced evil. And I don't

necessarily mean pressed upon you. I mean, decisions that you've made, actions that you've taken in your life that were driven by the enemy. And I think, you know, I think some people feel like their only acceptance will be if they live this pure life, like if they've never made a bad decision or they've never done something that was, you know, mean or or vengeful. And it's like, no, that's part of being a human. And it's very difficult. And I think what I hear you saying, and I'm sure this is what your clients can experience from being around you is that they can sense that you've lived it so they know they can relate to you.

If you came in and you were pure and I've never made a mistake and I've only ever been successful and da-da-da-da-da-da. Like so many people present themselves, you're like, well, wait a minute, how are you going to understand this crazy shit that I'm going through? Like these horrible feelings that I'm having if you've literally never experienced what that feels like.

And I honestly believe you have to go through that to be able to be in the position that you are and help people the way that you are. So how do you start to break that down for people? How do you start to present yourself to them in a way where they can understand that you, to some extent, understand where they're coming from and have experienced similar. 30 days was preventable. What if every, I need to think about it was actually your fault? What if every, can you send me more information, meant you screwed up that sales call? You'd probably get pissed, right?

It certainly pissed me off when I realized this is what was happening to my own sales team. And you should be angry because anger creates action. And action is what you need right now. Your conversion rate is stuck at 20 to 30% because you're using a broken script and a broken process. Meanwhile, your competitors are gaining ground.

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So click the link below, get the workbook, and start experiencing sales conversion rates. Most believe are impossible. This is the way. Yeah. Such a great question. Well, I'm a big fan of vulnerability. You know, it needs to be selective. and I'm a big fan of it in service of, right?

So I would only share something with you that I felt would really be in service of you not to make myself, not to fill that ego. So that's a learned skill, and it takes time to really feel into that and make sure that you're not doing it for the wrong reasons. But I often will share within context that, you know, stories from other executives,

if I'm meeting in the corporate context, so that they feel like, okay, she's worked with executives that have felt down and out or it felt like they're in over their skis or they're not ready for this promotion or they signed it for this job and now they're realizing it's everything they didn't want and they've got families to feed and all these things so you know in that context they share it with my private clients and my practice I'll share some of my trauma-informed background whether it's sexual assault or abuse or it depends you know on what's appropriate

and to help them understand that look I've walked through the valley of shadow of death as well and we all have different valleys, and there's no comparison. This is not meant to compare mine to yours, and there's not one that's better or worse. It's all relative, but I want you to know that I've been there, and I can hold space for that. And there's a coach I had years ago, Steve Chandler, and I think he even wrote it in a book with Rich Living, and I loved the quote. It said, you can only take clients as deep as you've been willing to go yourself. And I think you've summed that up very nicely in your question.

Yeah, I agree with you. Someone said to me one time we were talking about how to get through to employees, team members who we knew had a trauma, right? Maybe we don't know what it is because obviously that's private and a lot of times in that relationship, you don't necessarily want to know the specific thing because of different reasons, but they've been through something. and what he said to me was it's always whatever they went through is the worst to them right to your point on comparison of trauma like there is there is a there is an weird ante side to trauma where people will almost hold their trauma up as part of their ego right like look at how bad this thing that I went through was and my thing was so much worse than your thing and you know that puts me at a at a higher level of awfulness of previous life than you and it's and his point was

and I thought this was such an incredible point he's like whether it's just your parents ignored you or you got the crap beat out of you every day by your dad with a belt for the first 12 years of your life right those are the worst for both those people that's right and and the feelings that they have about those things are the same feelings even though you know if you were to technically stack them, you know, most people would probably choose being ignored, although that presents a whole slew of issues that are also oftentimes subtle and debruted as well. But like, I thought there was a really interesting insight that I hadn't wrapped my head around that it's like, no matter what they went through, it's the worst for them, for that person. And they're feeling

that same sense of pain. I had a question around the reparenting piece, because I'm very interested in your take on this so uh i uh first heard on joe rogan and then read read the book or technically listened to the audio book um uh i think it's abigail schreyer's bad therapy which was the core concept of the book broad stroking there was a lot in it was that we spend too much time um uh looking into our past reliving our past and if we if we if we spend too much time bringing up these old things that happened that are terrible, but if we keep bringing them up, we end up reliving these moments over and over. And her point was like at some point we have to move on. So you obviously had a really powerful and productive experience

with this idea of reparenting, which I think is really interesting. Did you feel any of that? Do you, you know, where do you kind of stand on spending time evaluating and kind of reliving those past moments as a way to get past them? Yeah, that's such a great question. So just to back up, I did therapy when I was 13, 14, 15, and then I stopped. And then I got into coaching in my 20s. So I was always very much the coaching methodology of, you know, looking forward, not really looking at causality and always moving forward.

Only in the last year as my parents start to age and, you know, it became really pressing for me like, oh gosh, before they pass on, I really want to heal some of this stuff. I feel like there's things I'm not going to be able to say once they're gone, but I need to do some work before I can say them, those kinds of things. And so I went back to therapy. And I think Abigail is right in what she's saying. I think it can become keeping you in the victim cycle. It can keep you kind of beating a dead horse part in the analogy,

but just really ruminating on something and feeling stuck and giving you an excuse to feel stuck. I think this is where the power of slowing down really comes in. and really giving yourself enough space and time to really sit. And this is where somatics also comes in, to feel in your body. Am I just, like, what am I benefiting from reliving this lie and ruminating on this story? Because it's benefiting you somehow, because that's why you keep doing it.

Like, at the end of the day, even if it's like, oh, I get a, you know, I get a not do as well at work, or I get a claim sick all the time, or whatever the reason is, there's a benefit. and unfortunately that's just how things work or is are you at a point where you just really have never addressed it have you stuffed it and what happened with me is there has been so much and then there have been so much dissociation that I just had stuffed so much that I never really even acknowledged it and because my parents didn't acknowledge it

everything was swept under the rug it and then I got into life and met friends that sometimes had trauma that was, from my point of view, much worse than mine. So I downplayed mine. Oh, I, you know, my friend saw her parents murdered in Bogota, Columbia. Like, oh my gosh, it's awful. What happened to me is like, ooh, you know, no big deal. So I downplayed my own stuff. So I never really gave my honored myself, right, and my inner child to even grieve the experiences that she had gone through. So for me, that was the telltale that like, okay, this really makes sense for me to go back and revisit. Now, do I ruminate on it? No, but what I found through that process was a lot of grief, a lot of grief in the childhood I wish I had had.

And then a lot of gratitude for the childhood I did have at the same time, a lot of really mixed emotions. But I will tell you, I think it's really important to slow down and then obviously work with clinical therapists and somebody who's trained to do this work. And that's where it gets really dicey with coaching because sometimes I'll work with clients who have had these things and I'll always say, okay, you know, I advise you go see a therapist because I think as an ethical coach, we just have to be really careful with that. Great. I get a lot of questions from some of the people that I coach around, and this is different, different, but similar around like fitness and health related things. And I've had to start telling them like, look, like I'm happy to share what I do,

but I cannot, I cannot recommend for you different things. And I think it's really important because I also think as a coach, that builds tremendous trust when they know they can bring something to you and you're not going to try to pretend like you know the solution. And I think this is really important from a leadership perspective, from a household leadership perspective, from a relational, whether it's a spouse, a partner, a child, even a deep friendship. Again, going back to this idea of ego or not,

wanting to be seen as less than we are, we pretend to know about things or have opinions on things that we don't actually know about. And just go on X for like 30 seconds and you will see examples of this all over the place where you have people commenting on world topics like the Ukraine war or what's going on in Israel, Gaza or some crazy economic thing. And you're like, there are people who've dedicated their entire lives to these topics and still don't like know the answer and you're out here spouting like you do and and granted i will say occasionally i get sucked into that i try very hard not to it's almost like x is almost like a practice like can i not respond to this thing that i'm seeing that i believe is crazy and i do think

that's another way we can build deeper relationships whether it's a coaching client or a teammate or or even just your spouse like we we often we try to be these things that we're not and it's like If we were enough, if what we actually were was enough, so many of the emotional bullshit that we deal with would go away. Does that make sense? Oh, totally. And that's why, you know, even though I label myself executive advisor or, you know, in my work, I'll be an executive coach or a leadership development consultant,

that's really just the nomenclature, right? That's just the container that they understand. What I really offer is a right of passage. And for me, it's that ability to where I look at it is where they're able to cross that threshold. They're able to either acknowledge or become aware of, okay, yeah, you're right. There's this thing that's not. I've outgrown this life I built. It worked for me 20 years ago or 10 years ago, but guess what?

I've outgrown it. And I need a new fish tank. I need a bigger fish tank. And so I help them create the bigger fish tank and then also figure out what's, you know, how can they live in alignment with who they are and their vision and their values? without all the things they've lost along the way, trying to stuff that vision, you know, that old vision. And so a lot of times they'll come to me

and they hit an inflection point where they're like, okay, oh, crap, I get to make a choice. And then they get to make a decision at that point. And guess what? Some of them decide, you know, like the board game, back to start, right? And that's okay. They're just not ready.

But the others, I call it the threshold. They're ready to cross that threshold. And that's the rite of passage. And that whole writer passage is about undoing, unsubscribing, you know, uncorporating, I call it. It's kind of like unschooling for kids. And I've been going through this process myself, and it's been fascinating because it's been everything from like the tactical things to, you know, oh no, I'm not going to do meetings after this time or before this time, to small things like, I can't be at a call five minutes

late. It's like, sure you can. Like it may not be the best thing to do. but you have agency, you're sovereign, you can. And the other day I was held up doing something else more important, and I was feeling so bad about it. And then I decided to honor myself and just do it, and I shut up five minutes late.

And the executive was thankful because he got five minutes to do his thing. And it totally worked out, and I just was like, well, gosh, you know, isn't it interesting? So there's just things that seem little, but they're actually pretty monumental in how we think, as we've been programmed into this corporate and business mentality, that have to be undone. And as you undo those, then when you're at the other side of the threshold, then that is obviously the embodiment face.

That's when you decide, okay, this is who I am now. And it sounds like you kind of went through that yourself when you came up your own corporate. And so that's really what I walk people through. Yeah, and I think that is phenomenal because social media gets a bad rap, right? A lot of people, we all use it, yet everyone, there's like this, it's almost, I'm going to try to articulate this the right? way. I feel like there are certain things that it's just, like, accepted to bang on without ever positioning the other side. And social media is one of those, right? Everybody uses it, yet everyone will also go, oh, and it's also the worst and it's rotten people. And it's like,

you know, I feel the opposite. It definitely can suck some time. And I have to be careful because I'm a voracious consumer of information. It's just the way that my brain works. It's like, like you know how in the first matrix like neo gets the thing in the back of his head and he's like you know give me more and he's like learning on karate and monkey style kung fu and all this stuff that is that is like the way my brain works like if there's actually if i ever get sucked out of the matrix and that plug goes in the back of my head that that's like heaven for me like give it give me all the info that's just the way my brain operates for better for worse um my point in saying that is i think if you what i do think social media and just digital

communication, maybe podcast is another one that I think is very valuable, is we've been able to see how people actually operate. Because in a long form podcast in particular, you can't hide. So all of a sudden you start to learn that Naval Ravicon, who's incredibly successful and smart, reads four hours a day, does one hour of, no more than one hour of meetings, and two hours of creativity. And he's done for the day. That's it. That's the most he'll do. and you learn that, you know, this other individual works this way. And all of a sudden you start to, you, I think what starts to hit me at least was I don't just have to do it the way that business was run in the 80s and 90s.

I don't have to, you know, just because everyone else shows up at 8.30 and leaves at 4.30 and, you know, a day is stuffed with meetings that that's how every day has to be. And I can set my life up so that I can make sure that I can pick my kids up from school. every day, you know, and there being no issues with wherever I work. Like, you can have that if you want it. You just have to craft your lifestyle to get there. And it may not be the job you're currently in. It may not be the field you're currently in.

But if that's what's most important to you, that life is available to you. And it's okay to want that life, which I think is the most important part. Like, for so long, the idea that, look, at 3 p.m. I'm not taking a meeting at three because I have to pick my kids up. It's just not happening. I'm good at 3.30. I'm good at 2.30.

But at 3 p.m., I'm picking the kids up from school because my kids are 11 and 9. I'm in the golden years, and I don't give what you say or what your meeting is or how important it is. I'm picking them kids up from school. That's the like, if you don't like it, I don't have to work for you, I don't have to work with you,

whatever. It took me 42 years to figure that out. Like, but it only, I only figured it out because of conversations like this, like these deep, long-form conversations where you get to go back and forth with people and hear like, wait, Kendra's okay sharing her trauma with her clients? Like, I can share more than just my surface level expertise with the people that I work with. Like, it's like, it's giving, there's so much permission granted if you use these resources from a positive standpoint, I think.

Right. Yeah. Well, and a quick story on that. So last year, we went river rafting and I ended up getting bacterial pneumonia and it turned into sepsis. And so I ended up in septic shock with respiratory failure and the beginning of liver failure. And I'm very healthy and almost died. And I had some really interesting conversations with God while it was in the hospital. And one of them was actually, I believe I was having a near death experience with a life review. And I sort of saw all these things I thought. that I was like, I just remember myself talking in my sleep and keep waking up and I was just sweating and just please forgive me for this and this and all these things I had done. And what was so interesting was that the passage, Luke 1225 came forward for me. And he said, what, you know what your biggest sin is? And I was like, no, you know, he goes, worry. He said, did you not live an hour more of your life because of all your worry? Oh my gosh, like if I counted all that, you know, hours, I, you know, worried, fear.

worry, concern, however you want to frame it, that was way more, I guess, than all these, you know, like lying to my teacher in second grade or whatever, all these things I was thinking about. And I thought, wow. And so the reason I shared out with you was I came out of that experience, a different person, and realized, um, because of my experience that, how grateful I am for each breath. I mean, literally at that level of like second to second. And we take so much of that for granted, Ryan. And I think that's why it's so important to have these conversations because when you start to talk with leaders, they're just doing the job. They're just doing that thing. And there's nothing wrong with what you're doing. It's how we live our life. But they

take it all for granted that they can walk and that they can breathe and all these things. And when you realize that without that breath, you're not even here. Your vitality is number one. And if you don't have that, you're nothing. And guess what? You can't help your kids. You can't help your wife, your husband, your spouse, your partner. So I try to kind of bring them back to that and like how they can best honor themselves in their most authentic way. And then they sort of start to see, oh, maybe this thing I'm doing in my life isn't really honoring myself. And maybe I just need to renegotiate it. Maybe it doesn't mean I have to leave. You know what I mean? Maybe it's like I just have to renegotiate things. So I always, I coined it as that you're showing up DOA.

whether you know it or not because of my near-death experience. And that's how I was living. And the acronym obviously stands for dead on arrival. But for me, it also stands for your doing just to do, just to keep busy because that's how we're trained and how we're rewarded in society. You've outgrown the life that you're living in and you might not even know it.

And the last one is you're achieving just for the sake of chronic achievement because you're trying to prove your way out of emptiness. and you think that achieving equals fulfillment and busyness is productivity and self-sacrifice equals leadership and external validation is the measure of success and you think that you can outperform this unworthiness. So I just wanted to share that quick story with you because I think that's what I try to bring people back to and I think that that's what's often missing is they just get caught up in the busyness.

No, I love that. I want to unpack a couple things there. The first is we're not honoring ourselves, that idea. How do you help someone find that? Because I've found with some of the individuals that I've coached over the years, sometimes they don't even know what they actually want. Like they feel this sense of disconnect, frustration, pain, anxiety, annoyance, reactivity. So they know something's wrong.

but when you ask them like what do you really want out of this job even not even going all the way to their life like people just don't know like or they can't articulate it how do you get them to how do you get your clients to a point where they can actually articulate to you what what their what the life is that they would actually want if they could just you know wave a wand and craft that life for themselves. Well, it's not, I mean, so there's not like a one solution for all because I know I was there probably even 15 years ago. And I remember a coach asking me, what do you want? And I was like, I just started crying. I'm like, I don't know. And oh, everything I'd answer is like, well, I want my kids, my husband. No, what do you want? You know, everything was about everyone

else, which isn't a bad thing to want, but you also have to be clear on what you want. you know for my own personal story this that doesn't have to be true for listeners but it sometimes can be so just a heads up is that you know i had realized that i'd lived a very codependent life where like with a codependent parent and so everything was always about somebody else and taking care of others and in order to stay away from on acknowledging my pain and trauma i was just always focused on everyone else and so um that was a took me years to kind of really get to the bottom of it but i think it depends on the person but i think a great place to start with someone who's very cerebral right in is let's start with what you don't want

you know let's get really kind of like what are the non-negotiables that you don't want and then then let's go back to the non-negotiables of things that are important to you because if you can because you're never going to get them away from their values right if their values are family and faith and community then that's a great place to start and so um sometimes i'll have a values conversation with them, and then I often tell them to visualize the values like a tree and kind of play with putting each one is the trunk of the tree and the roots of the tree. And so what you'll find over time is most people, even though family and community and prosperity or, you know, wealth or a career, things are on their list, there's always something

that's the roots of the tree. And so for me, it's spiritual connectedness. For me, it's, I want to feel that everything is being done through the purity of a spiritual connection. And it doesn't mean my family's not important. But if I do it through that lens, it's so much more rich for me. And so that's kind of an exercise I'll do to help people visually kind of see like, okay, I can have all these values. But there's really one that's a core driver that without it, the other things don't light me up as much.

Does that make sense? It makes complete sense. Yeah. Oftentimes I think people give lip service to family, community some of these things because that's what they expect people to think that the answer should be like good people you know prioritize their family and that's not not true but but you can't be your best for them if you're not your best for you and that is a very difficult thing and um find in myself so I'm going to speak for myself in the times when I felt the most

disconnected, the most off-kilter have been when. And I, this is a weird, it's weird to articulate this, but it's something I've been playing with in my mind a little bit lately. It's like in the moments when I was afraid to shine, to like, like, we, I feel like we don't talk enough about, we talk about the fear of failure all the time. Fear of failure, I don't, I have a whole diatribe that I could go on because I don't think failure is a real thing. And it's a failure is a contrive it's a construct totally agree yeah and you know that's a whole thing but there's this whole other side of it which is a fear of success like there is there's absolutely an unspoken unarticulated fear that so many people live with of what if i was the

best version of myself what does that look like i think that is actually scarier for most people Myself included. Me too. Then failure, right? Failure, I mean, at this point also, I've had enough practice at it that, you know, I know I'll survive for the most part. But, man, what if I get that enormous speaking gig?

What if, you know, some major, you know, Joe Rogan, diary, see your podcast calls and you know your life is going to change if you go. Like, what if all of a sudden you do get to that place that you've said you wanted to get to, And now you've got to be that thing. That, I think, is way scarier and we do not talk about it. One, you said you shared, so I really want to hear your feelings on this.

And two, have you experienced this with your coaching clients and how do you help them through this? Because there's not enough literature on this topic, in my opinion. Yeah, I agree. So first, I also want to tie back to what we just talked about because I think a lot of people are afraid to admit that that's what they want. so that's step one right so it someone's like they're afraid to admit well i want to have a million dollar company because they think it's selfish greedy whatever you know so they put all these constraints on themselves right and so they're afraid to even admit what they really want which also gets in the way of them knowing what they want right because they feel guilt or shame around it

so that's a whole other topic we could dive into but i i definitely have felt that because when you start to think about the power and i mean that from a impactful way not a manipulative way, that one can have when they actually are at their best and can achieve anything they want. We are really powerful human beings and we can do a lot and be really impactful. And so I think that can be overwhelming for our nervous system and for us to kind of put our heads around. And so we self-sabotage, which is a very well studied topic and whatnot.

And so I've caught myself getting in that over the years as well. And I think even with the podcast, I had to be really careful, like with the name change, like, okay, is this another form of doing that? Because it was starting to get some good traction, get some YouTube traffic and Spotify traffic. And then I really just settled in and did some meditation and prayer on it and realized, no, this is the direction. I want to move in. It feels more aligned with where I want to be. So I think it's really, in my practice, I think it's really hard because a lot of, people um first of all they don't necessarily know what they want outside of what they're told

they want well no i want this job and then they're afraid to admit it and so oftentimes we just have to have conversations around well you know who are you outside of work what makes you happy again going back to that values conversation i think when it comes to um working um with clients and in the practice around the scariness we have to explore you know, and I think you said this even in your talk, like, what's the worst thing that could happen if it did happen? You know what I mean? It kind of kind of play with that, that mindset trick of like, okay, what's the best thing that could happen, you know? And how might that scare you? And, you know, that kind of does that pattern interrupt where they're like, well,

the best thing that could happen, usually I would want that to happen. But then the fact that there's actually something there that may be holding them back is usually a big awareness for them. Does that answer your question? does and I think you know it's funny we have these conversations and the questions always end up being so tactical that you come out of them right like I find that when we when we talk about some of these really larger more introspective topics on the show people love them but then the questions are rarely about the high level ideas they're about like how do you actually get there right like what does what do I do so like

Like, it's like, Kendra, what, what, what, I believe you? What do I do, right? Like, is it, is it, is it, is it, is it, you know, miracle morning? Is it, is it, is it a coach? Is it, you know, do I go vegan, sober, you know, Bible beauty? Like, like, what do I, you know, like, how do I, you know, like, how do I actually get there? Yeah. And, you know, I know that this is probably particular to each individual, but do you have some just common practices for people who may be, like, you know, you know, like, how do I, you know, you know, like, how do I, you know, you know, be listening to say, okay, if you want to, maybe you don't spend enough time in your own mind, right? I don't think, I think today in particular, the vast majority of our society does not spend enough time inside themselves. And I don't mean ruminating on the past as we discussed. I mean, just literally, what am I feeling right now? What am I thinking right now? Why do I feel this way, et cetera? To start to get in there and actually do that, what are some common practices that you've either used yourself or coached others on that start this conversation, that allow us to start talking or understanding ourselves at a deeper level.

Yeah. So there's three things I offer. So one is I'm actually an emotional intelligence advisor as well. So I am a huge fan of the emotional intelligence assessment for those that want data and are very cerebral. It's not super expensive. And what it shows by and large is it shows how. not just how intelligent you would be on a scale,

but we're usually less concerned with that. What we're looking at more is how aware are you of your emotions and how much are they getting in the way of your self-regulation? And the thing I love about it is that unlike other psychometric assessments, it's not behavior, which typically doesn't change. It takes a lot of work to change it over time. It's skills. So you can actually take the assessment and then decide,

oh, I want to work on my emotional expression, and then in 30 days take it again and see that. number improve, which I think is super empowering and great. So that's a great place to start, and what you'll find on that assessment is by and large, most people have a pretty low emotional awareness number in comparison to their emotional expression and assertiveness number, which means that they're speaking and acting before they really understand what's going on. So that's like a huge aha and a great tool just to generate that awareness, and then you can work with a coach or somebody to work through that.

The second piece is I created my two methods. One is called the compass method, which is really about coming back to your own core values and looking at what is your own internal compass, not the one that you think you need to live by because the world tells you, but what is your own true north? What is your own internal compass?

And then I walk you through that method as part of what I call my aim true method, which I alluded to earlier, but it's really about awareness, reaching that inflection point, making a decision, like, okay, now I really see where this one thing in my life, or maybe it's more than one, aren't working, what do I want to do about it? And then you start to move through the transformation. You start to move through that right of passage, and then you go through the undoing process

as you cross that threshold, and then you move into embodiment. And so I walk them through that in 90 days. That's the process I've seen that's worked for me personally. over and over again, so that's the one I use. But as you said, it's very contextual. Maybe eating vegan is the right answer. Maybe, you know, Miracle Morning is the right answer. I think all these things help. However, they're not going to get to the root cause. And I think to get to the root cause, the number one strategy that my methods allow is giving yourself the grace of space and time, like you said, to have some reflection and really ask yourself the tough questions.

Like, what is it that I'm afraid to see? What is it that I'm afraid to say out loud? And acknowledge, what is the one truth that I'm afraid to, you know, admit? You know, like, what's not working for me anymore in my life? And make a list, and it doesn't have to mean it's cast in stone if you make a list. You may realize that, okay, next week, this one went off the list, you know? It's just start learning to have that relationship with yourself where you're taking time to reflect and have that mental process.

time like you talked about we're really good at talking but we're not really good at listening especially to ourselves have you ever read the book uh the untethered life by michael singer yes that i've probably one of the top five most recommended books on the podcast that i've that i've talked about um you know if i you know if i had to put my finger on one of a few books that has literally changed the way that i operate as a human being it was that book and And if I had to broad stroke it, essentially, the voices in your head are not you. And you have, and I'm giving you permission to not listen to them. Doesn't mean they're not data points, right?

But they're, but, you know, all this, the way I think of it, just the way my brain works is like, I was like, oh, that's not me. They're just data points. That's just my body and my mind sending me signals to keep me alive for one more second. Oh. That's why it tells you to stuff your face full of food because, you know, your body's going, I need calories to survive because it could, you know, I'm, I still think it's 150,000 years ago where I may not eat for a month, right? Like, like, it's just, and then all sudden, I started, it was, it was a weird moment

because it was almost like I was meeting myself for the first time again when I stopped listening to that voice because that voice was like, you're not good enough. You didn't come from enough. You haven't done anything. All the things you said at the beginning, right? You haven't done anything worth doing. You didn't come from a family that's worthy. You don't have any interesting, you know,

you're not the third generation son of some prince from wherever that's a fun story. You weren't, like, abused as a child so badly that that's a story worth talking. But, like, you kind of had, like, this lower class but semi-fine upbringing in a small, shitty town and kind of made your way out, right? like no one gives a shit that's not worthy you know like all this stuff going on in my head every time I wanted to do something and when I finally just went oh you're kind of an asshole I don't really like you because you say things that don't you know isn't align with who I am and and now I have permission not to listen to you anymore and that may sound crazy but like I literally sometimes will tell

the voice in my head you're an asshole like you're not out loud like but myself would be like nope that's kind of a that's kind of a jerky thing to say like I I'm not with you on that. Like, I'm going to keep going. When I tell people sometimes about that book and about what I just told you, you know, articulated in different ways sometimes, but I don't think most people know that. Like, I honestly think most people believe that voice in their head is them, like some subconscious thing that gives a crap about them actually speaking to them. And they don't realize that it is a selfish portion of either your brain or your body communicating to you

to literally keep you alive for another second which is their only goal and sometimes that aligns right like jump out of the way of the bus and but most of the time it does not align with your long term goals and like I guess

through your experience I'm gonna assume you've had different moments like this like when you have these moments of clarity like for me when I kind of learn this I turned to journaling for that was my tactic right and I just started right and things came out of me that I had never thought, written, or certainly not articulated before.

When you've experienced these moments of clarity, how do you solidify them in your life? Because I think they can be blips, right? You have this moment where you're like, oh, wow, that's not who I want to be. Like, I actually want to live this life. I'm okay making a little less money to have a little more freedom to be with my, because that's what actually aligns. And then we forget and we go right back to doing what we've always done

and we never put it into practice. So how when we have these moments, moments. We find something about ourselves or we are like, we really lock in on a value that we would like to live by. How do we make sure that we keep doing that thing, that we lock that into our lifestyle, that we don't backtrack to the person that we were before that was creating the frustration, pain, et cetera? Yeah, I love that question. So first of all, there's one core question I ask myself every day and now I ask myself probably hundreds of times a day. I'm not always perfect at it, but it's, will this bring me closer to peace? And what I find is if the

answer is no, then the answer is no. Now, if it's like a business decision, let's say there's like a contract or something I'm in, right? And I'm like starting to realize I'm halfway through the contract, and it's not bringing me closer to peace anymore. It's bringing me closer to fear. Then that's when you start to negotiate and start to bifurcate and say, okay, what part of it is fear and maybe I exercise a 30-day rule or and finds another advertiser or do you know what what are the options here and then you've honored your integrity right you've honored that peace and you then you get a sense of peace because you've done the thing that you know you needed your soul knows you needed to do if that makes sense so I just wanted to share because that's my one question I

ask myself about everything does this bring me closer or further away from peace because I believe that's our natural state that's how God wants us and that's how we need to operate and then we can save those amygdala moments for when we really need them, not be firing on it all day long like most of us do, myself included, up until now. So that's step one. Step two is I'm a huge, I love journaling, but I'm also because I'm a mom on the go and doing things, I'm a huge fan of I do voice notes. So I'll do memos on the phone or I'll even do the notepad,

and then I'll just voice to text in there, and I'll just say insights from walk on, you know, Friday, October 3rd, and I'll just start talking. I find that I like writing, but things come out me a little more prophetically if I speak it. So I tend to do it with my speaking. And that's how I kind of anchor it. And then if I want to take that further, I'll come back in journal. And then if I want to take it even further, I'll copy and paste it into

chat GPT and kind of say, like, in my own little private Jeep chat that I've created with my own rules and guidelines. so it sounds like me and saying, okay, like, how might this work into my current method or into my coaching methodology to get ideas on how to actually bring it out into the world? Because I really feel strongly when I get those clarity and insight that there are things that need to be shared. I completely agree. Yeah.

I love that you took it all the way to publishing because I think that's, to me, that's the piece that locks it into my brain. I completely agree. My way is slightly different, but exactly the same in the same regard. I tend to, for me, writing locks it in a little better, but that's just me. But I will agree, less articulate. But I find sometimes when I write weird things come out of me that don't come out of me when I'm talking. And again, this is just me.

That's not a judgment. But like the other day, I was journaling. I tried a journal in the morning every day, one page. It's not a big page just so everyone knows. This isn't like some crazy thing. I started doing it during a very rough time in my life because I read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron and I did the morning pages and that was very, very helpful. But I found three full pages every day as a dad and now as a single dad, like was too much.

So I have this one little, it's probably six by eight notebook and I just do one page at max. If I get a page, I'm done. Sometimes I will at night. I always date and time them just so I know. but the other day it was funny I was I was writing and you know I've been struggling with a few things lately just just different business stuff and where do I want to go with this and different stuff and all the sudden I just wrote stop hiding and like I don't know where that came from I hadn't had that thought right but for me again again this is just my way that this is

not a better or worse in any regard when I write weird things like that happen just these all the sudden, I'll be like, boom, and then I'll just stop hiding. And I'm like, I literally stopped and I looked at it and I was like, it like gave me chills. I just got chills saying it to you again. And I was, and I, and I, and I, I don't know that I fully, this was like four days ago, by the way. So I have not completely figured out exactly what that thought meant, but there is something

inside me that feels like I'm hiding from something and that came out. and whether it's through voice notes or it's through whatever your method is, writing, et cetera, you know, typing, whatever your method is, I feel like we have to get it out of our brain. But the part that I love that you brought up that I think is the linchpin to this

that locks it in is the publishing piece. And the publishing doesn't have to be public, but I do think you need to publish it. It needs, even if it's a personal Apple Notes folder, where you work out the thoughts a little more, right? Not just the voice note or the journal entry, but like you actually kind of go, what does this actually mean to me

and start to build it out? That really locks it in, I think. I think you have to take that next step. Just capturing it is enough because how many amazing things have we captured and never gone back to? Like it just, it's somewhere in some folder on, you know, something, but we've never gone back to it.

But when you publish it, it's like now it's, a real now it's an archive kind of that that is now part of your your brain which i think is wonderful um i have a few more questions if you if you have a few more minutes i know we're we're starting to get up to the time i just have a few more questions um and this is going to be slightly out of context but i want to come back to it um how do how do you know when to transition from like dealing with your shit to like suck it up and just go get it done right because There is another side to this sometimes, too, that's like, you can almost be too introspective sometimes. And sometimes it's like, look, like, everything's not perfect.

Yeah, you got this pain. You're frustrated by this. But you also got to go get some shit done. Like, how for you, do you, like, compartmentalize that shift? Or how do you know when it's time to go like, okay, I've thought about this enough. Now it's time to go execute. Or is that not a decision? It is at all part of the process.

Like, I'm just, I'm interested in that for you. No, I love that because I, as a ruminator and a thinker, I have spent a lot of my life overthinking on things. I think for me, the way I do it now, at least at this season, is my body. So for instance, if I am like really tired and just feeling like I'm hitting a point of like a day or two where I'm really just exhausted kind of out of nowhere, but my brain is like, no, you need to do all these things, I listen to my body. Like my body's like, nope, like trust the process, take your time, you know. if my body is energy but my head is like no stop this and that you know so i find that my head my body tends to be more the truth teller than my head a lot because of the conversation we had earlier around so just getting really clear on that voice and whose it is is it yours is it

you know gods is it a higher self is it you're you know angry stepped out is it you know whose voice are you hearing and what are their intentions for you um so i think that's really an important part of it. I think, you know, for me, this may not work for everybody, but I usually have, like, it's usually like a 24-hour rule. Sometimes it can be 48 or 12. It kind of, it has a standard deviation there a little bit, depending on what it is. But like, for instance, if like something bad happens, like let's say I lose a client or something, I'll give myself 24 hours to feel bad about it and then say after that, Kendra, you know, you're done. so here's your 24 hours you know and so i try to kind of put rules on it um obviously if it's like a

death of a of a friend or a family member or something you need more time than that but what i do is try to give myself time to grieve in each day you know so like you're going to be grieving through a whole without the whole day but like deliberate grieving time like these two hours i'm going to go on a walk and if i cry i'm just going to cry and and actually build that space into your life for these things so that you can move through and move on and so you know for me, those tools and tips work for me. What's worked for you, Ryan? I'm curious.

Yeah, I'll tell you the second one that you talked about, just letting yourself experience it was huge for me. You know, I was raised by a good father, but a very kind of traditional men, you know, are strong shoulders back, don't show emotion kind of thing. And, you know, when different very next, things happened to me in my life, especially early on, I would push down and repress and hold in and and it never, it, it rarely, well, it rarely then presents itself in any kind of

positive way, maybe as aggression on a football field as a child, but certainly not in any kind of real positive way. However, as I grew up and actually my dad ended up going to prison at one point in my life and I got space from that mentality and again I don't my dad was a tremendous dad he's a great grandfather he made some bad decisions that he paid for and has changed his lifestyle and it's all good but that space I I spent more time with my mom and more time and she's as I mentioned earlier on very biblical very very very very dialed into Christianity and I got a little more taste of acceptance of understanding and now just recently I had a guy that I know locally in my town unfortunately he's getting a divorce and his wife initiated divorce he's very

upset you know he did not want it does not want it and he's experiencing these emotions and I said to him the worst thing you can do is not not allow yourself to go through it and now like you 24, 48, whatever the appropriate amount of time is, an appropriate amount of time, I give myself permission to let that bad thing wash through me and experience all the negative emotion, right? Like you said, if it's crying, if it's anger, if it's, you know, shouting in a controlled appropriate way, not at other humans, you know what I mean? Like, if it's whatever you got to do to let that emotion wash through you, it's the only way to get past it. It's, there's just no other way. And it, if you, if you bottle it, if you don't

deal with it if you think that somehow being you can be stoic in public and still let something wash through you if that stoicism is what is needed right like there's a Jordan Peterson says be the be the strongest man at your dad's funeral and I think that's a wonderful I do think there's a lot of merit and I think it's a wonderful idea because other people may need your strength right but that does not mean nor is he advocating for you to not deal with that trauma so even if you for whatever reason need to be stoic in your public facing life you have to let that shit wash through you or it will literally eat you from the inside out and that has been one of the the biggest lessons and one of something i will carry with me forever and i advocate for it

and anybody who brings up trauma my first thing i say to the them is experience it experience that you're you're mad as hell be mad as hell you're you're you're sad you just want to cry and shout and curse and and and and do it like let that out because the only way to repair is on the other side of that if you're holding it it's just it's just it's just a cancer it's just eating you from the inside out so i i completely agree with that 100 and um it it's funny how we almost need it's why i think coaches counselors um you know why i think these these roles are so important is oftentimes it's simply permission it's someone who's having this terrible experience sitting down with you and you saying you know what it's okay for

you to feel that way like you're you're not wrong you're not bad you're not whatever because you're, all you want to do is cry for 10 hours today because of this horrible thing that happened. That's not wrong. Go do it. Like, it's just that, that little bit of permission that people need. And, and I just think it's, it's a wonderful profession. I'm so glad that you are out there. I love your methodology. I love the way that you approach it. I mean, I feel like people are lucky to be able to spend time with you. I certainly have, uh, on our time together here. Um, if someone does want to get deeper into your world, if they want to listen to your podcast, you know, how do people get deeper into your world, your work, your ideas?

Yeah. What's funny, I kind of joke that I'm the hitch of executive coaching because it's always been like secret and word of mouth kind of, you know, so now I'm doing podcasts, so putting myself out there a little more. But they can find me at Kendra Dahlstrom.com. They can find my podcast, which will be the high achieving leader podcast.com. They can find it on that alias as well as on Spotify. or on YouTube, a YouTube channel, and reach out to me.

I do work with only five or six clients a year. So I work with, you know, it's very curated, cultivated, very high-touch experiences as I work through the year just to keep it the quality. Quality is really important to me, so I want to have quality and attention to detail. And a lot of what these people are going through, as you've mentioned, are intense moments and life transformations. so whether it's career or personal it's just important that they have the support they need and I want to be I to my earlier point I need to be at my best self in order to do that so

means I only can take so many people a year so that's how they reach out to me and it's been a pleasure talking to you I think you and I are aligned on so many things and I love reading your substack and and following your work well thank you so much um when you do write the book you yes call me text me come I want to you back on the show because there's like a million more things we can talk about. I had a lot more so open invitation to come back. So please reach out because I know the audience is going to love this conversation and because I certainly did. So thank you so much. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.