Jay Papasan:
This week, we’re exploring a very important question, can serial achievement actually become your Achilles heel? Maybe this is you. Maybe it’s someone you know. Maybe it’s someone you work with. There’s that individual in your life that’s always chasing something. The moment they cross the finish line, they have to have a new mountain to climb. It’s this idea that we think that maybe through this achievement, something else will happen. We’ll be happy. We’ll be satisfied. We’ll finally have that part of us that’s waiting to be filled, be filled. And the problem is, if we don’t know what we’re chasing, we’re actually ignoring a bigger question.
This all comes together in my conversation with Kim Zuroff. She’s our director of growth and someone I’ve been friends with for over a decade. She came in to see me many years ago to share her journey of summoning Mount Kilimanjaro. And frankly, I was a bit of a killjoy. I wasn’t as interested in her achievement. I wanted to know why. If this sounds like you or someone you care about, this is an episode you don’t want to miss.
I’m Jay Papasan and this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that leads to extraordinary results.
All right. So, Kim, we see this a lot when we’re training with The ONE Thing. We’ve got these high achievers, and they are serial achievers, might be the best way to put it. And I always think about a quote from one of my favorite authors, Morgan Housel, and he talked about this idea of moving the goalposts on yourself. It’s just this idea of kind of being addicted to success in a way that actually doesn’t serve you. And you’re here because I feel like this has got a little bit to do with you.
Kim Zuroff:
It does. It does.
Jay Papasan:
When you sat down in my office to talk about Kilimanjaro, I had the benefit of history that our listeners don’t. We met on a bus at our annual convention. So at that time, you were an agent.
Kim Zuroff:
I was. Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
So you were achieving. Fast forward some amount of time, and then you’re in San Antonio and you’re one of our top, we call them productivity coaches, who help a large number of agents achieve kind of their goals. So it’s a great leadership/coach position. And you were doing so well with that, that you had achieved national recognition already.
Fast forward, and suddenly you are a bold coach and for those who don’t know, it’s like our premier trainer coach position. Did I miss a step in there?
Kim Zuroff:
No, you’re on track.
Jay Papasan:
It’s like, wow. I was like, this person is on this trajectory. Right. And then I look up and you’re now a CEO. We call them a team leader, but you’re a CEO for a big office outside of DC. I think at this point, I just got angry and said, the next time you’re going to make a leap, would you at least give me a call so we can talk about maybe there’s a spot in my world. But then you ended up growing in that role over eight years to run multiple offices and start and run multiple businesses. And along the way, you’ve run Ironman events, but you’ve done many. Like, what did I miss because I know that there’s like a lot of boxes I didn’t just check with that little journey.
Kim Zuroff:
That’s really the journey. I mean, you summarized it quite well. But along the way, I mean I was also pushing myself. I’ve ran several marathons, did several half Ironman’s, one full Ironman.
Jay Papasan:
And one of our visits, you just come back, or you were going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. Do you remember that afternoon?
Kim Zuroff:
I do. Yeah. It was after I got back from Kilimanjaro. It was six nights, seven days on the mountain and 19,341.
Jay Papasan:
Feet? Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
And it’s way above altitude. So it’s, I mean, it was challenging. Of course, I couldn’t go when there was no ice and snow at the top. I went when there was ice and snow at the top. And that made it just —
Jay Papasan:
A little harder.
Kim Zuroff:
Just a little bit more difficult. It’s actually pretty rare for every group that goes to the summit that every single person makes it. And every person in our group made it.
Jay Papasan:
You got to the top.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
You got your photograph. How did that feel in that moment?
Kim Zuroff:
Oh, it was great. And I was so ready to come right back down. Just like, okay, because really you don’t want to stay at the top for too long.
Jay Papasan:
Because you can’t breathe. It’s like thin oxygen.
Kim Zuroff:
You cannot. Yes. Like you don’t stay at the top for more than a few minutes and then you’re on your way down.
Jay Papasan:
All of that for like three minutes.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. Yeah. Three glory minutes.
Jay Papasan:
I love it. Got it.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Got it. All right. So back to my office, we’re talking. Yeah. And what do you remember about that conversation?
Kim Zuroff:
I think you asked me some really hard questions and you acknowledged that you had been watching me achieve big thing after big thing after big thing. And you asked me, what else do you have to prove to yourself? And the next question was, how do you know when enough is enough?
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, that’s a big one.
Kim Zuroff:
It’s a big one. And it just kind of made me pause of like, why isn’t Jay super pumped that I just got to the summit?
Jay Papasan:
I’m such a wet blanket. I mean, I’m such a downer. Yeah.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So like, why isn’t he just super pumped? And here it’s just like punched me in the gut of like, wow. Like, however, after reflecting on those questions, what else do you have to prove to yourself? It just made me stop and realize of like I hadn’t really appreciated all of the things that I had done along the way. And I just kept charging hard by default. And I was just stuck in a cycle of really being addicted to achieving and push, push, push. And it was unhealthy in a lot of ways.
Jay Papasan:
Well, we’ll break that down. I guarantee you, because I know our audience, the people attracted to The ONE Thing, the people attracted to the company we’re both a part of, a lot of them are serial achievers. And I know I’ve suffered at times, so I’m speaking from experience of failing to actually celebrate the moment because a lot of times when I achieve something, my first feeling is not, yay, I did it. It’s, ah, I didn’t fail. Like it’s such a perverse kind of mental conversation to be having. But I’ll have this moment of, yay, I didn’t fail, but then I have to figure out where am I looking for next versus living in that moment and experiencing. That’s my wife’s — like, okay, let’s stop and celebrate. Let’s savor this moment before we start thinking about what’s next.
So some of the dialogue we had might’ve been me talking to myself out loud. But each time I met you, I got to observe that you had made some giant leap forward in your life, right. From humble place to higher place, to higher place, to higher place. So it’s probably after seven of these conversations that I became such a wet blanket on you.
Kim Zuroff:
Absolutely. Rightfully so. I mean, I’m grateful for it.
Jay Papasan:
I think that when we think about this syndrome, call it Achievers Anonymous and no disrespect to any 12-step program. I know people, it saved their lives, but like, I don’t know that there is one for achievers, but there might need to be one. Hello, my name is Jay. I have an addiction to achievement. How do we recognize the symptoms? How do we — using The ONE Thing I believe is a great tool. How do we work our way through it so that we can define enough and get out of this cycle, which can actually be quite destructive.
Kim Zuroff:
I mean, there’s a lot of tools that I started to really look at and utilize to help me break things down to really start to shift from where am I headed? And certain life situations, things that I went through in life, post-Kilimanjaro, post to the Iron Man, just really made me catapult into the desire to be seeking more fulfillment than high achievement.
Jay Papasan:
Well, let’s talk a little bit about the cost. I can tell you what I’ve observed, and you can tell me what you’ve experienced. Like, when I look at people that I feel like have been in this cycle of kind of continuous success, like I have to always be doing the next thing. One, I think they, like me, they fail to celebrate the journey.
One of my favorite books is The Gap and The Gain that Dr Benjamin Hardy. Is that right? And I love this idea. We focus on the next gap instead of realizing how far we’ve come. I know that it leads to a lot of people to burn out. It can lead to stress and health issues, and it can lead to relationship issues. Right? Because instead of focusing on ourselves, taking care of ourselves and self-care, we’re focused on pushing ourselves to the next thing. Instead of realizing that we’ve got this support network and we can also invest in it, we’re focused on the next thing. Like we’re just this focus on the next thing. Did any of those ring true to you?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. I mean you look at the social cost, right? Like I just kept charging hard, hard, hard and distance myself in terms of relationships away from people that actually matter most to me.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Kim Zuroff:
And so that was part of it. The other part of it was just the constant state of exhaustion. That can lead to burnout if you’re not working in things that you’re super excited about. I went in and out of burn out probably a few different times. We don’t always think about who else we’re impacting by living in a constant state of achievement and who else is being impacted by the choices I’m making today.
A lot of times, it’s our family. A lot of times, it’s friends, people closest to us, business relationships, things like that. And when you’re constantly pushing yourself, it’s also impacting the people around you in ways that we don’t even consider.
Jay Papasan:
Tell me more. This feels like a really important thing to cover. Can you give me an example of how that plays out?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. I think when you come into the office, if you’re a leader in an office and you’re in a constant state of achievement, you’re moving fast, you’re driving hard and you’re not slowing down enough to recognize the people’s love languages around you.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
You’re not appreciating them like you should be appreciating them. You’re not showing up the way that you could be for them, and you’re just moving so fast that you’re blind to the effects around you.
Jay Papasan:
What kind of effects? Like, are you just missing opportunities to nurture people around you because you’re so focused on your goal? Are you not nurturing relationships? I’m trying to get a better understanding. I think I know, but I don’t want to assume.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. So for my situation, I was in such a constant pursuit of bettering myself and achieving for myself that I wasn’t developing the people around me.
Jay Papasan:
Okay. And as a leader, that’s big.
Kim Zuroff:
And as a leader, that’s huge. And when I started to make that shift a couple of years ago, my whole world changed because I had been investing in myself, achieve, achieve, achieve for 10, 12, 13 years. And now I’m kind of in a state of it’s exciting because I get to shift and impact other people and develop and grow the people around me, and it’s just making things way better.
Jay Papasan:
So I’m going to validate that. Hopefully, this is not uncomfortable. If it is, we’ll just cut it. Right. I was doing your reference checks, right, because you were onboarding with our team, and I really strongly believe and going a few deep talking to the people you sent me to, and then the people they send me to. And a couple of different people said, I’ve noticed a big change in Kim in the last few years. She was always knocking it out of the park. But there were times where it felt a little, and I hate this word, but they used it, transactional. Like, I’ve got to do this thing and then do the next thing. It became about things. But what I’ve noticed is that she’s become very relationship focused.
So there’s some validation the path you’re on, if that’s important to you, is working. You left my office. You started on a journey. If that was, in fact, the start, or maybe that was just a nudge that you were already on that journey. I know that you got a new coach, our mutual coach Jordan around this time. What were the steps that you took to kind of get out of this cycle and have a different relationship with success?
Kim Zuroff:
There’s a lot of different variables and a lot of different things that I worked on. And I think one of the biggest impacts for me was really getting clear on my someday goals.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
And going through that exercise of writing my someday letter and then working it backwards, which would really be goal setting to the now, based off of where I want to be in 10 years. When I worked everything backwards, I realized that I had to make some different, really hard decisions to get in alignment with being on track for where I actually want to be.
Jay Papasan:
Let’s take a second and break down exactly what a someday letter is, why it’s important and how you use it. What someday letter is a letter that you write to yourself in the future, and it’s not the near future. It’s the distance future. When we talk about our program of goal setting to the now, the first question is around someday. What’s your one thing for someday? And that’s in the distant future, beyond five years.
Typically, when we do this in our training exercises with our coaching clients and corporate clients, we arbitrarily set a date around 10 years in the future. Depending on how old you are, that can feel like forever away. Or if you’re a little later in life, that can feel like it’s right around the corner. We all know that time moves more swiftly the older we get.
The idea is that we want to break free from what you think is truly possible. What does your world look like 10 years from now or someday? And we prompt you with a number of questions. How old are you? Who are you spending time with? What are the skills that you’ve mastered? What are you focused on? What do your days look like? What does your work look like? What does your personal life look like? What hobbies do you have? And it goes on and on.
The very first time I did this exercise with my coach Jordan, my first realization was in 10 years, it was unlikely that my parents would be there. It was unlikely that my dog, my number one companion on a day-to-day basis would be there. Thankfully, my wife and kids should still be there. But it immediately gave me clarity around the relationships that might not be there in 10 years. And I had a strong sense of, man, now that I know that I might have limited time, I need to do things differently today. That’s part of the gift of the someday letter. By going into the future, we can discover what’s important today.
So let’s get into the why. It gives us perspective. You write this letter based on the questions to yourself in the distant future. Jay, in the someday, 10 years from now, this is what my life looks like. This is who I’m hanging out with. This perspective allows us to understand the things that we might not enjoy the future or that are really important to us in the future.
And because it’s so far out, we don’t ask questions of could I really do that? Would I be able to write a novel in 10 years? We all know that it’s possible in 10 years. Would I be able to start my business in 10 years? Maybe, maybe not. Probably yes. It gets us out of this kind of math question about what is probable and isn’t probable. And like we talk about in the book, get out of the probable and get into the possible, what’s possible for your life. So it allows you to dream bigger than you would normally let yourself. It shows you what’s important. And it also shows you what you might lose.
How do we use it? With the someday letter in hand, we can then go through our goal setting process. Every year, my wife and I revisit our Sunday goals, our five-year goals. And we make sure that our values are aligned around those things. We do all of this foundational work before we set our goals for the following year. The whole point of this exercise is we should be working backwards from a distant goal. So with your someday letter in hand, it will equip you to better imagine a future where you’re setting goals in the distant future and five years from now. And those become your target that you’re aiming at when you set your goals for next year and closer times.
And so that’s the someday letter. It allows you to go out into the future and imagine what your life would look like. It tells you what’s important. And where you should be aiming your life. And it gives you a compass today to set near term goals that are in alignment with that. Hopefully, this is helpful and that gives you more context for this conversation with Kim.
The 10-year letter, the someday letter, I think you can also look at that and it also shows you what your core values are that maybe you’re not addressing. Did any of that happen for you?
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. I mean, really getting clear on the core values was probably the start before the someday letter, because once our values are clear, decisions become easy.
Jay Papasan:
Yes.
Kim Zuroff:
And at the end of the day, if you’re not clear on your values, you’re going to have a really difficult time deciding where it is you want to go.
Jay Papasan:
So did you work on the kind of the purpose values piece first? Is that what you’re saying? That’s great. I was going to wonder if you had reverse engineered them from your someday goals. But you actually started with them and then they were reflected in your goals. Like, oh, there it is. I want to have more time with my family. I want to — what are some of the things that you realized you needed to have new focus on?
Kim Zuroff:
My health, putting my health first versus the constant pursuit of taking care of everybody else and being addicted to being needed and all those different things. So health. Then also time, freedom to make sure that I’m really just able to be where I need to be with who I need to be with when I need to be there.
The great example there is having the ability to take care of my mom when she was sick. Starting to work on all of that stuff made me realize I need to focus on my health. I need to really live in my 20 percent. So getting very clear on what belongs and what does not belong. Those were a few really big things.
Jay Papasan:
Well, I love that, that you designed your life in such a way that you could step away from a really big job and be a caretaker for an extended period of time. You don’t have any regrets. You were there for the people you love when they needed you the most. And so you’d successfully designed your life around that value.
I think it’s funny for someone who I think of as a very serious endurance athlete and pickleballer I would add, you take your athletics very seriously, but you weren’t taking care of your health. Was it because you were doing too much?
Kim Zuroff:
Oh yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
No recovery. I’ll go.
Kim Zuroff:
Doing way too much. Like if you’re not spending that time to recover, you’re going to end up where I was. The periods of recovery are equal in importance to the periods of stress. So as much as you’re stressing your body, you also need to spend that time recovering. Otherwise, you’re going to end up exactly where I was. Like after I went through all this stuff, helping caretake my mom and the push, push, push, and all of the endurance athletic events, like my body was just done.
Jay Papasan:
The very first thing we’re supposed to time block every year is our time off.
Kim Zuroff:
Yep.
Jay Papasan:
If you’re going to achieve extraordinary things, you’re going to need time off to recover. And I love that Gary was so clear about that for so long, because I know he’s had physical challenges too. And I try to make sure that my people do that. Like, no, let’s take some time off. Let’s recover. Because if you don’t take a break, your body will break, you will have a breakdown at some point. It’s going to happen. So you can schedule them or it can happen in a very inconvenient, unscheduled manner.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
I think this is a perfect place to take a quick pause. And then on the other side, let’s break down kind of in detail, the steps that you took to break out of the cycle. Does that sound good?
Kim Zuroff:
Awesome.
Jay Papasan:
All right. So let’s get back at it. So I’m going to recap where we started. You’ve been in this cycle of success. You realize that you need to make a change together with your coach and on your own, because I know that you’re very like, if you decide you’re going to do something, Kim’s going to do it.
You started with purpose and values. What are the things that matter the most to me? Because when we work on those things, they give you a different kind of energy and fulfillment. You went way out someday, 10 years, and tried to imagine your life. That’s the second step. What are you doing?
Kim Zuroff:
Really, it’s a big journal exercise. And I wasn’t going for perfection. I was just really working to get my thoughts out on paper. So it’s questions like if I’m imagining my ideal life 10 years from now. And someday could mean a lot of different things. It could be 10, 15, 20 years. I focused on 10 years.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
And so I asked myself questions of how old will I be? Who will I be with? Like, what will I be doing? What are some of the things that I’ve achieved or that I’m working on? What are the things that I’ve learned and mastered? So I went through a whole series of about 50 questions that I just journaled answers of like, ideally someday, this is exactly what I desire. And once I got it all out on paper, then is when I said, okay, working it backwards, goal setting in the now.
And I think one of the important things is this exercise was really hard for me, because as I started working on it, I realized as an adult, how much I forgot to dream.
Jay Papasan:
I’m laughing because we have the same coach and one of his refrains is there’s two groups of people, the doers who need space to dream and dreamers who need space to do. And I think that category of doers that are always doing, they don’t give them space to be in dream.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. And that’s what this exercise really helped me to do. And just transparently, our coach wanted me to do this exercise much sooner than I actually was willing to slow down enough to sit and dream. And so from when I was first asked to do it to when I actually did the work, it was about eight or nine months.
Jay Papasan:
I had a similar story. It took me about that long. I started doing it. And when I asked the question, who am I spending time with? I came to the hard realization when you look at 10 years at all the relationships that are likely to be gone. And it actually shows you where you have hard limits. And if you don’t focus on it, it won’t happen.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. And that’s a really powerful thing of when you understand that there’s certain people that you wildly value, they won’t be here. You get far more intentional. I think one of the examples that you and Gary give in conversations is relative to kids. You only have a certain number of summer breaks and spring breaks and winter breaks. And how are we choosing to spend that time? And If I don’t spend that time purposefully, am I going to regret it later?
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, you’ve got nieces and nephews. I do too.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
And you look up and I mean, I have kids and that was, I mean, the subject of my TEDx Talk, just how hard it hit me when I realized I only had 10 spring breaks left with my kids. And I wasn’t thinking, oh, if I only had 10, how would I spend them? The moment you create that constraint, it’s amazing how clear you get about what’s important to you.
Kim Zuroff:
And it’s amazing how purposeful your actions become.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. All right. So everybody listening, if you get the opportunity to work with one of our trainers and coaches and do a 10-year letter, don’t take nine months, and I think you’d beat me. I think it took me a year to finally do mine. Don’t wait that long because even if it’s an uncomfortable exercise, the clarity you get from it is precious.
I’m going to throw this out here as I’m going to go back to the beginning. When people don’t have a real definition of enough, they’ll never be enough. Did the someday letter kind of serve as a definition of if I can achieve these things, or was it is that still a journey for you? Do you have a definition of enough now?
Kim Zuroff:
That’s kind of an ever-evolving thing because it changes.
Jay Papasan:
Okay.
Kim Zuroff:
As life situations and circumstances happen and come, I think it changes. However, I’m really shifted into a state of like I don’t have to prove anything to myself anymore. With that comes a much more calm energy. If you talk to the people around me, they’ll say Kim is a much more calm version of herself than she was five years ago. And just the calm in the piece that you have within knowing like, hey, you don’t need to be in a constant state and pursuit of knocking everything down to achieve, achieve, achieve. The internal feeling of just peace and calm is priceless.
Jay Papasan:
When I work with people who are perpetually busy, right? Like I got with you to see a long timeframe of this kind of achievement, how it most often shows up is people who don’t have enough time, they’re always rushing from this to the next thing because they’ve said yes to so much and they’re just busy. And at some point, I realized, cause when I looked at my own periods where I’ve done that, a lot of times I’m actually hiding from something. I’m avoiding having a conversation with myself or with my life that might be uncomfortable. And I think busyness is actually for a lot of people or the serial achiever is hiding from something that’s maybe more important for them to achieve is uncomfortable.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. I mean, for me specifically, I was just moving at such a fast pace, achieving, achieving, achieving, because I really didn’t want to slow down enough to deal with all of the past stuff that I had to unravel.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Kim Zuroff:
I had a lot of unraveling to do from childhood to where I was at in adulthood. There was a lot of unraveling that had to do that I was avoiding because it’s not fun to sit in your stuff. It’s not fun to sit there and work through it. It’s hard.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah, I’m nodding my head and I’m sure there’s people listening that are nodding their head too, because it is uncomfortable. I remember as a parent learning that how we talk to our kids matters. When we only acknowledge them for getting an A on the test and don’t talk about how hard they prepared, their attitude, their effort, the other things that matter more in the long run than the outcome of the event, did you get a first place or man, I think that you gave it your all, that language can lead to, and this is me punching myself in the gut by the way, can lead to a relationship your children have with you, where they feel like affection and value is contingent on achievement and it can lead to perfectionism.
I mean, I know so many people who’ve been through that where they felt like they had to always be doing that. I’m not suggesting this is your journey, but I know as a parent, like, we became hyper conscious because we’re achievers. So when our kids did something. I wanted to go crazy and celebrate it. But then I realized that we have to celebrate a lot more than that or we might be fostering the very kind of syndrome that we’re talking about.
Kim Zuroff:
A hundred percent. It’s being aware of as a leader, as a parent is my love, and is it conditional or is it unconditional?
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Kim Zuroff:
Is my leadership and how they’re showing up, is it conditional or unconditional? Like you’re going to be there no matter what. Or if you do these things, then I’ll show you love
Jay Papasan:
When love becomes unconditional, everybody becomes calm. You, the person giving it and also the person receiving it. It’s just a whole different relationship with other people. And I love that.
All right. So, I mean, I got to get back to the practical stuff because that’s where I live. You’ve done your work around your values. You go out and you do your someday goals. And the next step is you just work backwards from those.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. I mean, you work backwards all the way to what’s the one thing I can do today such that by doing it, I’ll achieve what I want to in one year, three years, five years, and then someday. And then that can filter into the other tools, right? The GPS and the 411. And just giving you extreme clarity in what I need to be doing each day. What do I need to be saying no to, to be able to get where I want to go?
Jay Papasan:
I love that you said the no word.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah.
Jay Papasan:
Because I do feel like a part of this journey, and if you don’t say it, I’m going to say it, is you have to learn to set boundaries. Because you got clear about where you’re going and why it’s important to you and then you have this narrower scope of what you’re going to do in five years and one year and working backwards. I think the key skill that people fall off the wagon, they do all this work, but then they don’t have the discipline or the practice they need or the support they need to set real boundaries and start saying no. Because then someone says, hey, the whole gang that did Kilimanjaro is getting together and we’re going to do the 11 peaks in seven continents or whatever. Like, and that’s fine if you choose to do that, you just have to do it because it’s in alignment with where you’re going. Not because it’s another trophy to put on this some sort of fictional wall in your head.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. And I think one of the filters and questions that I ask myself now is, is this decision going to get me closer or further away from where I want to be?
Jay Papasan:
Ooh, that’s a good one,
Kim Zuroff:
Right? So is what I’m choosing to do in this moment getting me closer to my goal or is it taking me away? And that’s like the filter for pretty much everything in my life right now is if I spend the time to do this, am I getting closer or further away? It’s a really good filter to help you just kind of make your decisions purposefully and be okay saying no.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah. We have to learn to say no. We have to set some boundaries. I’d throw one other thing out there and I think it’s implicit in how I see you show up. You have to realize that your identity is not so much as a human doing, but like you’re a human being. And who am I, not what am I doing has to become the default kind of relationship you have with yourself.
Kim Zuroff:
Yeah. I think for a while in pursuit of all the achievement, my identity was really wrapped around the results.
Jay Papasan:
Yeah.
Kim Zuroff:
And that’s very unhealthy. And just unraveling that, we’re so much more than the results that we get in our chosen profession.
Jay Papasan:
Totally. So, like, we’re going to look back and we’ll revisit this conversation in the future. There’ll be the chapter of Kim, the achiever for achievement’s sake. And I just want to note, I don’t think you’re going to slow down. I just think the achievements are going to be for fulfillment’s sake in this new chapter. And like, you’ve jumped into your, do your director role with us already making a difference and you’re going to be striving. Like you showed up for work the other day, having already played like three hours of pickleball.
So let no one believe that this means that Kim is slipping into an early retirement in your thirties or something. No, but like the point is, if we’re going to push ourselves, let’s connect that with valid reasons to be pushing ourselves to become a better person, not to satisfy some person in our past or someone outside of us, or to check some box that doesn’t actually matter.
Kim Zuroff:
I think the most exciting part is we share one of our core values, which is impact. And that’s the season that I’m shifting into and I’m doing things I enjoy, impacting a whole lot of people along the way. I say like living and giving freely, being able to live life on my terms while giving in abundance and impacting people. And it’s pretty fun when you can shift, make that shift from high achievement to being an achiever leader and helping lift people up because we all know that no one succeeds alone.
Jay Papasan:
Well, let’s test that value right now. How we end our episodes these days is either me or our guest will do a challenge for our listeners. Based on this conversation, what would you challenge our listeners to go do, a first domino, towards achieving some of what you’ve achieved?
Kim Zuroff:
I think the challenge that I would give them is something as simple as pulling out a pen and a piece of paper, journaling answers to a few questions, thinking about your goals and are my decisions moving me toward where I want to be or away? And based off the decisions that I’m making today, who else is it impacting?
Jay Papasan:
Kim, thanks so much for sharing with us today.
Kim Zuroff:
My pleasure. Thanks.
Jay Papasan:
Well, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Kim and that you’ll take her challenge to heart. Spend a little time with yourself and start dreaming about your future. I promise you, you won’t regret it. It’s done great things for me in my life. It’s given clarity to my decisions today, knowing that I’m working for a tomorrow that I truly want.
Stick around next week, we’re going to have a great conversation with my coach, our head coach at The ONE Thing conversation, Jordan Freed. Everybody gets stressed out this time of the year. We have so much on our plate. The kids are getting out of school. We have to adjust our work schedules. We have holiday parties, holiday gifts, holiday travel. Jordan has coached thousands of people, and we walk through some very practical techniques for how you can find your calm during the chaos of this season. I can’t wait to share it all with you next week.
