Jay Papasan:
When my old coach, Jordan, really wanted to twist the knife, he was catching me in some sort of bad pattern of behavior, he would often say to me, “Jay, we want to be examples to our kids, not a warning.” And that was usually something that would be kind of a gut punch to me, a reminder that I’m probably role modeling the exact opposite behavior I want in my kids.
But listen, our kids aren’t hearing what we’re saying, but they’re listening and actually remembering what we actually do. And that’s always an important distinction to remember as a parent and also as a leader, right? Our people are watching us and following our lead. And how are we role modeling the right behaviors, whether that’d be at work or at home?
So, this week, we kind of looked at patterns of behavior. Some of them may or may not have been things that I’ve had to break out of myself but that we see in our coaching clients in our training. And I want to give you The Five Permission Slips that Every High Achiever Needs. I guarantee you one of these is something that you need here.
I’m Jay Papasan. And this is The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
So, number one, you have permission to disappoint others. When you have to choose between work, friends, family, and yourself, who do you choose? Who do you prioritize? I think, often, in our busy lives, we let obligation, especially work obligations, drive a lot of our schedule, a lot of our choices. We may set some healthy boundaries around family time, but in my experience, a lot of high achievers will finally start letting go and things slip off their calendar in regards to themselves and their friends. And you look up, and they are so busy filling up other people, and serving other people, and doing all of the obligations that they feel around work and family, that they’re not also doing the things that fill them up and give them energy to continue that cycle of serving others. You have to fill yourself up from time to time.
So, it’s really, really easy to get your priorities flipped. And instead of starting with you, and that’s my argument, that you have to first not disappoint yourself, so that you cannot disappoint your friends and family, so that you cannot disappoint the people that you serve at work. And it’s the foundation that we’re talking about but it’s very easy to get that flipped when we spend so much time at work, everything there feels urgent and important, and it always feels like the other stuff, we can put off a little later.
Our hobbies, our pastimes, they tend to slip away. And it’s kind of an epidemic. When you look at high achievers and leaders, a huge percentage of them, if you listen to Liz Bohannon’s episode, feel Lonely or absolutely alone at any given moment. And that isolation could be the nature of the work they do sometimes, but it’s also the obligations that they place on themselves and on their time.
So, I want to give you permission to disappoint others. And that could include, at times, our family and friends, so that we can actually begin by not disappointing the person we disappoint the most, which is usually our future self. We will look up someday and wish we had stayed more connected to our friends. We will look up someday and wish we had spent more time at our kids’ soccer game than we did in front of an email browser, right? We will look up and we will disappoint ourselves in the future based on some of the choices we’re making now.
And if you’re living in that state of busyness that I talk about all the time, it’s really easy to slip into a cycle where everything that is urgent actually feels and looks important, and everything that’s important actually lacks urgency. And that’s that trap where the things that actually matter most are the things that we tend to put off and push into the future while we deal with all these fires that harass us from day to day.
Everybody’s been on an airplane. You’ve seen the safety routine. Who do you put the oxygen mask on first? You’re sitting by a small child, the oxygen mass deploys, who do you put it on first? Our instinct may be to save the kid but if we don’t put it on ourselves first, we may not be conscious to save the kid. So, we do have to do a minimum of self-care. As Chris Ducker would say, self-care is not selfish, it’s a strategy. We have to take care of ourselves so that we can be there for the people we love later in life when it matters.
So, remember, you have permission to disappoint others, especially when it comes to, at the very least, hitting the minimums around taking care of ourselves. So, put the oxygen mask on yourself first. It’s okay to disappoint others. It’s not being selfish. Sometimes, it’s the most selfless thing you can do so that you will be there for them at another time.
Permission slip number two, you can be bad at the 80%. Now, you might be wondering what’s the 80%. If you’re new to this podcast, it’s the 80/20 rule, and it’s the idea sometimes called Pareto’s principle that 20% of what we do will give us 80% of the results we seek. Not everything matters equally. Some things matter a lot more. And when we can understand the difference, often we use the focusing question – what’s the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary – we identify the thing that matters most. By identifying that, we should be able to prioritize it and let the other stuff slip off.
But as we become more successful, as high achievers get really good at what they do, sometimes, it can be really hard to step out of our zone of competence and confidence into the new skills that we need. And so, those skills that kind of got you as far as you’ve come today, in fact, may be holding you back from acquiring the skills that you need.
So, what is that for you? What is the previous 20% that is now your 80%? Those skills that you were incredibly good at, that got you here, that may be holding you back? I’ve shared this one before. I was chatting with a gentleman who was like the best sales person on his sales team. And eventually, he was having to move into the CEO role. And that journey from this area of genius, like, “I am really good. This is my zone of genius,” into this new arena of succeeding through others was very uncomfortable and it was gonna be very tough.
If you’ve ever had to level up and leave your zone of competence to kind of go into this other place that you know you need to do but, now, you don’t look as smart, you don’t look as talented ’cause you’re learning all of these new skills for the first time, it’s not a fun process to go through. That journey for me was succeeding through others. And for a lot of the entrepreneurs and leaders we serve, they were really good at a skill – sales, coding, whatever – and eventually they were promoted into leadership, and guess what? It is helpful that you know about the things that the people you’re leading need to know, but those aren’t the same skills that will make you successful at this level.
For me, that journey from going to “I do it,” to “We do it,” to “They do it,” was fraught with all kinds of mistakes, faceplant, egg-on-the-face kind of moments as I just didn’t know what to do and stumbled my way forward. And I see a lot of people stall out right there between the “I do it” and the “We do it” and the “They do it.” They’re trying to make that transition into succeeding through others and it’s uncomfortable. And what they inevitably will do is jump back in from “They do it,” to “We do it now.”
Now, I had a really good entrepreneur, if you’ve read Dan Martel’s book, he’s a friend, he shared with me he feels like if someone can do it at about 60% of the level that you do, that is amazing. That’s actually amazing. They’re not gonna jump in and do it as well as you did it. But if you have two people operating at 60% of what you could do, they’re doing 120% of what you can do. And now, you’re doing something different in the business and the whole enterprise is moving forward without moving backwards.
So, it doesn’t have to be they have to be as good as you day one. You have to pick people and select them – that’s a skill – so that they can join your team and they’re gonna be doing, sometimes, better than you, but often a little less good than you do, and then you have to train them up. But because they’re specialists, they’re not having to do the whole thing. Over time, in my experience, a lot of them will be better than you were because they got the privilege, because they’re working inside of your business while you’re building it of being a specialist. And long term, maybe they’re the best widget salesman that ever was, the best spreadsheet builder, whatever the task is, a lot of times, we can hire people specifically to that that end up being far better than us, but it is a skill.
So, here’s the mantra. No one succeeds alone. If you’re going to do extraordinary things, which is what The ONE Thing is all about, you will have to get out of your competence zone and get used to being bad at the 80%. You will have to say, “I can’t be good at everything. And now this thing that was my 20% is now my 80%, and I’m just gonna move out of that and into this new zone where I’m uncomfortable.” So, kind of get over always living in this safe place where we’re already confident and confident, and start building new skills so that we can go to the next level.
Now, those are the first two. We got three more to go. Let’s take a quick break and then I’ll come back and we’ll run through the last three permission slips every high achiever needs.
All right. Welcome back. Permission slip number three, protect your attention like it’s your money. Now, if you had a lot of money in your wallet, you just wouldn’t leave it on the counter like in the Vegas airport, right? You would protect it. You would maybe even put it in like one of those money belts if you’re traveling abroad because you’re afraid that someone might take your money. We want to protect our money. We put it in a bank, right? All of those things. What we don’t protect is our attention.
If you’re on the path to doing extraordinary things, there are some things that we lend our attention to that absolutely bring negative energy. They bring bad emotions into our life, and they slow us down, and they zap our energy. And I’m gonna just pick on kind of a soapbox moment, my number one complaint about the kind of times we’re living in. I’d have to go all the way back to Ted Turner to show you where it started, but when we started with this 24-hour news cycle, and then we added social media on top of it, we now have this opportunity to be constantly plugged in to this media machine talking about everything that’s happening in the world.
And the reality is 90% of what’s actually showing up in our news feeds and on the television set is actually just a bunch of opinion. It’s people talking about something that’s happened, and then opining about what it might mean about them and the world and everybody else. And a lot of opinions that we actually don’t need.
Now,, I’ve studied journalism, I’ve worked with journalists, actually played soccer for the New York Daily News at one point when I lived in New York, and I got to know a lot of award-winning journalists. News develops over time. It does not happen in the moment. We don’t know the whole picture. If you’ve ever known a detective or a police officer, they will tell you that you have to piece together everything, and it emerges over a period of time.
It’s usually this third or fourth day after a big event that all of the facts start to roll in and we get to see the entire picture. But if you just take one part of it, maybe the first thing we know about the news story, this thing happened and we’re seeing a third of the picture, what we all tend to do is fill in the rest of the picture with other beliefs. Not facts, but just other beliefs. So, most of the time the truth will emerge over a period of time and it doesn’t happen instantaneously.
So, there is nothing about instant news that actually informs us at the level that we are led to believe that it does. Yet, I know so many people, some of them close friends and family, that the soundtrack to their life is a constant news source playing in the background of their home or the constant interaction with this steady drum beat of news that happens on social media. Both of them, by the way, are algorithmic. They are driven to attract our attention and to aside our emotions.
If you are trying to do extraordinary things, you do not want to give too much attention to this because it will cost you all kinds of things. It can cost you peace of mind. It can create anxiety. It can undermine your emotional regulation. It can cost us relationships when we jump in and participate. And it can also cost us our sense of community. And what we need is to maybe be a little bit more curious and a little bit slower to give our attention to it. We should be seeking to understand and be curious versus to judge and create the us-them thing that we see ’cause that energy is the stuff that is distracting so many great leaders and entrepreneurs right now from their meaningful missions in life.
And that’s what I want from you. I want to give you permission to protect your attention just like it was your hard earned money because it is far more valuable. What we give our attention to will expand in our lives. What we give our focus to is where we will get the most energy from our lives. And we want, as much as possible, to devote that attention to things that actually matter most in our lives and that we have control over in agency.
So, here’s my recommendation on this and what I tell people who seem open to it, just go on a news diet. Treat it like a food diet, but go on a news diet. Limit how much attention you give it. You can be an absolutely informed citizen and just read the newspaper once or twice a week. When we’ve looked at all the facts and gathered all the information, now, we can actually say, “This is what happened.” All of this speculation in between just creates all of this emotional dysregulation. It creates all the conflict that we’re feeling.
So, I’m gonna recommend you go on a news diet. That you maybe limit how much attention that you have. The soundtrack to your life should not be a 24-hour news channel. I don’t think that’s healthy for you. I don’t think it’s healthy for our families. Put something else on. Put on some good music, something that makes you happy, something that makes you smile. Put on an audio book. Put on a learning something. How do we create a soundtrack and give our attention to things that grow us and keep us connected instead of just the opposite? You have permission to protect your attention.
All right, number four, we’re getting to the finish line here, you have permission to sleep on it. And this is more than just about having to make decisions in the urgentness of the moment. It’s literally about sleep, folks. All the stuff that you’re thinking that you have to do today, and you’re willing to sacrifice your rest and relaxation and your sleep for, will actually be waiting for you in the morning when you’re actually energized and fresh. So, you have permission to sleep on it.
Recently, we were doing an exercise. We had a few hundred people on the training call, and I just asked the question, we call it the magic question sometimes, where if tomorrow you magically got an extra hour to every day, how would you use it? By far, the most common answer, I think we counted 26 of them immediately, the thing that they would do if they got an extra hour every day was sleep. And it just says that these people, these high achievers who wouldn’t be in the room if they weren’t seeking high levels of success in entrepreneurship and leadership, they all were sleep deprived.
And I can look at their faces and tell you, yes, some of them had young children, but a lot of them didn’t. What they had were bad habits and behaviors that they’ve been role modeling for their families and their teams because they have been sacrificing their sleep on behalf of other things. When you sleep well, not only do we have energy, our body gets to heal overnight. We have better control of our emotions during the day when we’re not sleep deprived. We have better control of our memory and our attention when we have enough sleep.
It also does really weird things, like it turns on and off some of the digestive stuff that happens. If you are sleep deprived, you are much more likely to crave food whether you’re hungry or not. And a lot of times, we crave food that doesn’t belong in our bodies. And so, when you sleep well, some of those cravings turn off and like your diet that you need to be on really should maybe be about how much sleep you’re getting. It’s that strong of a connection between the two.
So, don’t underestimate it but given the responses we’ve seen in our training rooms and in our coaching huddles, the number of entrepreneurs and high achievers who the last thing that they have on their agenda is actually to get to bed on time, if you start prioritizing that and getting a healthy amount of sleep, it might be one of those keystone habits that makes a difference everywhere in your life.
So, you do need to rest. And the difference you can make just by making a few changes in your life, you’ll find it absolutely amazing how much better you feel, how much clearer you think, how much more energy you have to bring to the things that you love and the relationships that matter to you.
Permission slip number five, you have permission to believe in yourself. Now, this is a weird one, and it comes up a lot, and I talk about it a lot here on the podcast. It’s amazing to me how many of the most successful people in the room just don’t completely believe in themselves. And it could be because they’ve been cycling in and out of their competence zone, like I talked about earlier, but for the most part, they are comparing an idea in their head of perfection with where they are today or worse, an external thing. Like they’re looking at someone else and they’re judging their outsides. And then saying, my insides aren’t good enough. And we all know this and we tell it to our kids, but we don’t take our own advice. Like that’s really unhealthy. And so, we have to begin building the habit of believing in ourselves.
And I’ll just tell you in my executive coaching huddles, there are people who have achieved incredibly extraordinary things in their life. They’ve built extraordinary business. They’ve done physical feats that defy imagination. And yet, they fundamentally are still searching for the belief in themselves. And part of that, in my experience, is high achievers tend to give themselves very, very little credit for the progress they’ve made, and they tend to wallow in this disappointment between where they are and where they wish they were. Instead of focusing on how far they’ve come, how much they’ve grown along the way, they focus on the gap between them and where they want to be.
And the moment they get there, they move the goalpost, right? “Yay, I made it. Okay, now what’s next?” And so they perpetually are moving themselves into this place. Where they’re falling short and that starts to send a message to us internally, that’s not always helpful.
So, I was listening to a podcast and it lined up with some things that I’ve been doing in my life and in my coaching. So, there’s a coach, a high performance coach, Steve Magnus. I apologize if I didn’t say your name perfect, but I’m pretty sure that’s it. And he has coached some of the most successful athletes and people in the world. And one of the things he will do, and this is like for Olympic gold medal athletes, they often have crises of confidence. He will invite them to keep an evidence journal. That’s what I’m gonna call it. They’re asked to keep a daily journal and record the little wins. And what you’re doing is you’re just constantly bringing your attention from maybe five minutes a day to the little things that we are achieving every single day, but not giving ourselves credit for.
Now, I learned this practice from one of my employees. She showed up – thank you, April, for the gift again – and for an annual review. And if you’ve ever been an employee and had to do annual reviews. Man, that whole process, nobody’s got it right, but we’re supposed to sum up an entire year, like, in a few hours, What did you get done this year compared to your goals? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it’s really hard. Well, I don’t know if someone gave her the advice or it was her nature, but she had kept meticulous notes and she went through her year, quarter by quarter, sharing her goals and what she actually did, where she fell short and what she accomplished.
And it was all just like in one little note document. But I remember thinking, “Wow, this is really impressive,” right? There’s this thing called the recency bias, where we tend to remember what someone has done for us lately. It’s like, you know the saying, what have you done for me lately? Well, that’s what our brain says all the time when we’re judging the people around us. She had created notes, so that that recency bias would go right out the window and we would look at a larger picture of her life.
And I asked her, I said, “How do you do this?” She’s like, “Oh, I just keep a little notes document. And whenever I kind of cross the finish line or I feel really good about something, I add it. And then, at the end of the year I decide what I’m gonna share.” And I was like, “That’s a great practice.” I immediately went to myself and my coach and said, “I’m gonna start doing this.” Opened up a little note on my phone. I started cataloging my wins throughout the year. And it’s amazing how many things if I didn’t stop and just ask the question, how did that event go? How did I perform at it? What happened? I would’ve never remembered at the end of the year without starting this little journal habit.
I got all of my employees to do it. I’ve coached my coaching clients to do it, but what we’re doing is building an evidence journey. And it doesn’t have to be big stuff like I finished first in the race. It could be the little stuff too, like, “You know what? I went to the gym even though I didn’t feel like it.” There’s an argument that says that’s the most important thing you did for your health that week because you kept the streak going. You did not give up on yourself that day.
So, when I’m working with people, this is how I coach them to do it. Set an alarm on your calendar for whenever your day typically ends. So, maybe that’s at 5:00 or 5:30, maybe that’s at 6:00 or 6:30. When do you typically start winding down your day? And just have that little alarm go off. Maybe it goes off on your watch, goes off on your phone. And your job is to open up that note on your phone and just write down your wins for the day .
And not to judge them, right? I see a lot of high achievers, if they didn’t cross a really big public finish line, they won’t give themselves credit for anything. So, I just say, did you eat a good breakfast? Did you get a good night’s sleep? Did you have the hard conversation maybe that you’ve been avoiding? Did you make yourself do the thing that you know you needed to do that you didn’t want to do? All I want you to do is take five minutes and just jot those things down and then move on.
But that evidence journal, even though you’re only engaging with it for five minutes a day, you’re building up this evidence in your head as well that you have a history. And every day, whether you give yourself credit or not, are doing hard things that matter in the long run. Those things that serve your future self, that serve your future clients, that serve your future family, that serve your future friends, you’re doing a lot of the little things every day but you’re not noticing it, you’re not giving yourself credit.
And this evidence journal starts to provide evidence that you are indeed someone that when you say you’re gonna do something, you can start to be more confident that you will do it., that you will persist through the tough times, that you will emerge on the other side. More often than not, you may fail a few times, but you’ll get there.
And that is so important because all of us, whether it’s happened to you or it’s gonna be in the future, you will go through a season of doubt. You will. You will have a season where despite your best efforts and your best intentions, it just seems like you can’t do anything right. And you will start to doubt yourself. If you’re a fan of baseball, we hear about people getting in a slump. All professionals go through slumps. And that is where it is most important to either start building this journal or to start looking at it to remind us, “It’s just a slump. This is just a bad season. I am a. Good professional. I’m a good parent, I’m a good partner, I’m a good whatever having a hard season right now. It doesn’t mean that I’m not good at those things.” So, simple practice to help you and make sure that you always have permission to believe in yourself.
So, those are the five permission slips. We’re gonna start all the way at the top.
You have permission to disappoint others, right? We do need to be a little selfish sometimes, so that we can take care of ourselves, so that we can take care of our future selves and our family, and our friends, and our customers. That minimum amount of investing in ourselves, and our hobbies, and our friendships is so important for our foundation.
You have permission to not be great at everything, right? Your 20% may have moved, and you may be bad in the beginning, but you need to focus on that journey rather than hiding in all the things that you do well that may not be priorities anymore, right? And worse than that, you don’t need to be great at this stuff that doesn’t matter at all.
Number three, you have to protect your attention. And in this day and age, a news, a social media diet might be the healthiest thing you can do so that our attention is going to the things that ultimately matter far more. And there are also things that we can control and actually make a difference in.
Number four, you have permission to sleep on it. Chances are if you’re listening to this podcast, you are one of those people whose work, work, work, do, do, do. And you are sacrificing rest and you are borrowing from an account that you will have to pay at some point in the future.
And finally, I want you to do that evidence journal. You have permission to believe it in yourself.
I hope one of these speaks to you and that you can take action. My challenge to you, I would love to just say all five, but we’re not doing that. We’re The ONE Thing. So, I had to make the hard choice. I’m gonna challenge you, ’cause I know very few people who do, to open up a note on your phone. If you’re driving, wait till you stop. If you’re running, maybe step off the running trail. Open up note on the phone and just call it “My wins.” And then, set a recurring alarm every day at the same time to remind yourself until it becomes a habit to record your wins for the day.
I promise you this little practice will start building confidence in yourself, and that confidence will then allow you to do the things that you may be afraid of or uncomfortable to build the confidence you need to do extraordinary things.
So, my challenge for the week, between now and next week, can you do seven days of keeping an evidence journal on your wins and see how much that changes your perspective on what you’re capable of and how you feel about your performance.
Next week, we’ve got a real treat for you. It was huge for me. I got to interview Sahil Bloom at our live event this summer. He was talking about his amazing book, The Five Pillars of Wealth. Sahil is someone I’ve looked up to from afar. He emerged and made some hard choices around his career to lean into his values and lived the life he was intended to live versus one he was expected to live. Great episode with a great thinker of our time. Sahel Bloom. Next week, we’ll see you there.
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