 You're listening to Barbell Logic, brought to you by Barbell Logic Online Coaching, where each week we take a systematic walk through strength training and the refining power of voluntary hardship. You're listening to the Barbell Logic podcast. This is Matt Reynolds. I'm here with Chris. This is another principles episode. Happy Sunday to you. And today, we're gonna talk about the value of admitting your mistakes, being able to take personal responsibility and taking personal responsibility certainly as a far broader topic than just admitting mistakes. So we wanna hone in on this one right now, but this has been something that I have noticed has been very much a pervasive and important thing in my life, something that's had a dramatic positive impact in my life. There are lots of things we'll talk about on this show that are principles that I struggle with, things like radical self-honesty and things like that we've talked about in the past. For whatever reason, especially in my later life, say in the past 10 years, it doesn't bother me to admit my mistakes. And what I have found is that it makes my life easier. And so I just wanna flesh that out a little bit, what that looks like and talk about the kind of psychology behind it. And so what do you think? When I said that and I presented that topic to you, like, hey, let's talk about this, what were the first couple of things that came to mind? The first thing that I think about when I think about admitting your mistakes is that it follows your own maturity path in life. I think, and I know this from at least my younger kids, that they really struggle with admitting mistakes that they've made. And it's not because of a culture in our house of not being able to say you were wrong because I say it all the time and so does my wife. I actually just think that there's something to the your own self-confidence. It takes a lot of self-confidence to be able to admit that you were wrong, that you made a mistake, and to recognize that that mistake is not a bad thing in life. In fact, they are amongst the best things in life. We learn so much more from mistakes than we do from doing something well. And so I think that as most people that I know who are good at this got good at it over time as they got older, as they gained confidence in themselves in what they were doing, they got to where they were able to admit their mistakes because they recognized that it was in coming to terms with their mistakes that they became better. Yeah, that's good. You pulled all kinds of great points out of that. Let's start with the immaturity factor. I think for our kids and for really everyone, it's sort of in our instinct to not admit mistakes out of I think self-preservation. I think for kids, they're trying to preserve self. They're like, and so it's interesting because you can reason with them when you catch them in a deep mistake and be like, buddy, it's okay, just tell me. There's been no pattern of behavior that says that if you say you're sorry and admit that you're wrong, that I'm going to beat you to death. We've never done that. That's not what we do here. So it's interesting because there's no pattern of behavior that says that if you admit you're wrong, then bad things happen to you in this household. As a matter of fact, it's almost always the opposite in my household. We celebrate the fact that, man, that's very mature that you were able to see that and learn from that thing, right? And so we celebrate that. Now interestingly enough, I think that, unfortunately, many people never grow out of that immaturity and they continue to make it this sort of thing that's about self-preservation. I think it's also about pride and it's often about stubbornness and especially as you get old enough to understand what those things are, but I still think there's a self-preservation piece and one of the things I've thought about for guys like you and me, and I know many of our listeners, I've said before, I don't know if I've said it on the show, that I dislike awkward conversations and confrontations as much as the next guy. I can't stand it, but I'm forced to have them all the time. I've been forced to have them. I had to have them as a teacher and of course, exponential increases in owning business and being a father. And what I found is that when I'm able to admit my mistakes, when I'm able to be transparent, when I'm able to be vulnerable, when I'm able to actually identify that Daddy screwed up or Matt Reynolds, the owner of this business, made a mistake, it's actually incredibly freeing. When I hold on to the mistake and refuse to admit it, I feel like it holds me in bondage to it, right? Like I've played in my flag, I had to make that mistake, but deep down in your soul, you know you did, right? Well, you're absolutely damned to make the same mistake over and over again if you can't confront it. And so that's exactly right. I also think that there's an aspect of this that's even more important for people who are in really any kind of leadership type position. And I'm not just talking about in business. I mean, parents too, you know, you want your kids to be comfortable making mistakes and growing from them. And you as a parent are unwilling to admit when you make mistakes, guess what? Yeah. You know, I mean like, so and the same is true if you're a boss, if you're a boss and you're the boss that can never say I was wrong, you're not gonna find a lot of your employees coming around going, man, I really screwed up on this one and this is what I learned from it. You know, part of the thing that has to come out of this is in the, I don't know if this term is used very frequently outside of the DevOps world, which is an area of technology that I'm used to, but it's the idea of the postmortem, which is when a bad mistake has occurred, some sort of incident has occurred and you need to go back and you need to examine as a company why it happened and make sure that you design and modify systems and processes so that it doesn't occur again. And over the last probably five or 10 years that phrase actually became a blameless postmortem. So you would get all the people into the room that were involved in fixing whatever it was, whatever the incident was, but there's a very clear protocol which is that we're never pointing fingers at people and screaming at them for it because what we want is open honesty about, you know what, I did this thing, I followed this process and maybe I cut a corner, maybe I didn't. Either way, the process needs to be modified so that this doesn't happen again. So this is this whole idea of learning from your mistake in the process. Yeah, and on top of that, obviously, you've now mentioned twice that we learn far much more from our mistakes than we do from our good decisions, our correct decisions, but I think it goes even further than that. I believe that I am able to have a far better teachable moment with my kids, with my staff, with whoever, when I'm able to admit my own mistakes. So it's not just about let me teach you and model how to do things right. It's let me teach you and model how to take responsibility for when you do something wrong. Not to point fingers at them because they're doing something wrong but because I'm modeling that, you know what? I had my head up my hind end right there. That was not okay. Like, you know, there have been many times where I've, let's be practical and honest for a second. Like there have been many times and I'm sure you have similar stories, although after going through our personalities, probably less than me, that I have taken out anger on my kids or my wife having nothing to do with my kids or my wife, entirely to do with stress in the business. Now, let me be clear, when I say anger, I don't mean I'm screaming and throwing stuff through the window or beating people, but it's just, you know, you just, you respond in a way that's less than kind, like maybe you even yell or you curse or whatever that thing is. And then later you were like, that didn't have anything to do with them. I was in a bad place because I was stressed because of this thing that happened. So then to go back to them and say, hey, listen, when daddy got mad a little while ago, that had nothing to do with you. That is entirely on me. It wasn't okay. It's not fair to you for me to take that out on you. And I'm really, really sorry. I love you so much. Nothing's changed in the way I feel about you. And I'm really, really sorry that I responded that way. And then you can see the teachable moment. You can see the, you know, their eyes get bright. And a lot of times their eyes will well up with a little bit of tear because they thought that they did something wrong and that's why you were mad at them. Oh yeah, yeah. But they didn't. Man, the introverts version of that is not, it doesn't show out the same way, but it does have the same exact effect. And that is for me, when I get particularly stressed or when I'm really maybe starting to border just a little bit on getting a little bit of depression, which happens to me, I get super, super quiet. I go right into my brain and I'm trying to solve things and I'm having arguments with people in my mind. Sometimes I'm thinking about something from about every perspective in my head that I can and I ignore the world around me. And so my kids and my wife will sometimes be like, why are you so distant, you know? And eventually I come out, I'm not done with it. I'm still working on it, that type of thing. But I mean, I get pretty quiet to the point that when people talk to me, I often don't respond. And sometimes I didn't even hear them. And my wife has worked with me on just telling everybody what's going on in my head. Hey, daddy's got a thing. I'm working through in my mind. I'm gonna be really distracted for a little while. It's nothing about you, but I need a little bit of time to process this and think through it and that's what's going on. And so it is the same type of thing. I don't typically lash out with anger. I'm just totally silent. I've become a rock sitting in a chair somewhere and nobody knows why I'm despondent, so. Oh, it's good. Another extremely important piece of this that I have found is that the value that it has for conflict resolution, right? So if I am in a conflict with a member of my family or a member of my staff or maybe it's an issue with a client or anything in the business and there's conflict or things go bad, even when it is pretty clear or even maybe abundantly clear that the other person is primarily in the wrong. Here's what I know. I can't control what they do. I don't have any power on what they do. So anytime that something bad happens to me involving a relationship or a conflict in family and business and whatever, the first question I ask is, what role did I play in this? And the answer is always something. Yeah, something, absolutely. It is almost never. Like even as a dad and someone who sees himself as the head of the household and I'm not talking about any of this, I'm certainly in a hierarchy over my kiddos, right? My wife and I are very much, it's pretty egalitarian in my life. And the same thing in the business, right? There are times that those things happen and when I can then say, well, now hold on. I'm the one that really sets the rules here in the family and the household. I'm the one that helps set the culture. And so if this thing happened because my kid did something, I still had some role to play in that, right? And it's far more true in the business. Like when something happens in the business, somebody makes a decision that I feel like is a selfish or a wrong decision. I don't have a discussion with them to try to get them to admit what they did wrong. I actually want to resolve the conflict and far preferably to reconcile the relationship. And that requires me to admit my wrongdoing or my narrow-sightedness or I was laser focused on this and completely missed this thing over here that kind of caused that problem. And what I found is that it immediately, 90 plus percent of the time tears down the walls of the other person so that it then makes it far easier and a much lower barrier to entry for them then to say, you know what, I played a role in this too. Here's the key. I have zero expectation that they're ever gonna say anything like that. Yeah, you can't have it or else it doesn't work. You think about it. The funnest one to talk through there is like when you have marital conflict, right? And if there's marital conflict, you're both at fault. Guarantee, right? What percentage doesn't even matter? Everybody's at fault a little bit. The spouse that goes to the other spouse and says, honey, I am really sorry for the part I played in that. You know, would you forgive me? Now, do you have something you need to say back to me? That does not go well. No, that last sentence has to be. That is not a, that is not, and not even, you know, obviously, that not just verbalizing it, but even having the internal expectation of that, the idea is not to set the other person free. The idea is to set me free. Honestly, I could actually say that in many mistakes on some level, there's a little bit of actual self-preservation, narcissism, and like, I don't want to hold on to the guilt of the thing that I did wrong. And so, and that even for the listeners of the podcast who listened all these years, I've made some really terrible choices, big time choices in my life over the past 40 years. Things have affected my family negatively or affected my kids negatively or whatever. I've hurt people, you know? And as a guy that's kind of out there and it's fairly public with the podcast and with the business, what I want to do is I want to be able to run away from those things and I want to hide them. But then it just eats me up inside and it's far easier for me to just like, I'm not going to go air the details of my dirty laundry out to the podcast, but to be able to say like, look, I used to be a really shitty husband to my wife and I'm so grateful that we've been able to come through that my marriage is stronger than it's ever been. Like that's freedom to me, that's not bondage. The other way is bondage. Then I feel like, oh, oh God, I'm hiding. I'm pretending to be this thing. I'm pretending to be the wonderful husband, the wonderful father, the wonderful boss, the wonderful business owner, the whatever and I'm not all the time. And so there's freedom in me for me to be able to admit those mistakes. I think there's an aspect to all of this. I think that underlies much of the conversation we're having that mistakes are bad and you don't want to make them. And I actually think that idea in and of itself needs to be completely tore down. Sure. Unfortunately, I think some of that has made it to our children, to our generation's children, especially who are terrified of making mistakes, who won't use like a classic education public education room or something, won't raise their hand and answer a question that they think they might be wrong about because the embarrassment of being wrong is so much worse than the value of being right. And if you look at any entrepreneur in the world that made a big dent in anything, they will cite that failure over and over and over were the main contributors to their long-term success. That's right. There's this quote that Michael Jordan, I'm gonna use him because everybody's watching the ESPN special right now. If you're not, it's pretty good. It's really good. But he said, I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games, 26 times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed. And I think when you look at somebody like Michael Jordan and what you realize is you have to get, by the way, that is not an endorsement to be like Mike. When I walk away from the ESPN special, I go, man, I'm glad I'm not like Mike. But props to Michael Jordan who's not listening to this. Anyway, the whole point is failure in life is literally the thing that you learn from. And they are, in some ways, I think about failures and mistakes as those things along our path that were always going to be there. So if you could see your entire life, as like maybe a big long trail that you had to get down, the failures and mistakes along the way, you always were going to hit one way or the other. The question is, do you hit it and fall over and stop? Right. Do you move on, learn from the mistake and go hit the next one? Sure. Because to make it to the end, you gotta hit them all. Why do we do things like really hard, linear progression squats? Right. Because at some point we're gonna fail. That's right. And we have to learn how to grind and we have to learn how to persevere. We have to learn how to do the voluntary hardship thing. And that's the reason, here's a thing again that is not moral or immoral. It's lifting weights, right? But it carries over so well to the rest of our life. And by the way, I think most of the things you were bringing up right there, those mistakes, so many people struggle with admitting mistakes when they are amoral mistakes. You made the best decision at the time that you knew how and it was wrong. Yeah. It wasn't immoral. It wasn't in the Judeo-Christian sense of the word, sin, right? It wasn't something that was malicious or depraved or evil, it was a mistake. It was often an accident, right? And that happens all the time. As a matter of fact, the vast majority of mistakes that I've made in business, I look back now in hindsight of 2020 and be it 2020, also in the year 2020, and look back and say, this I would have done differently. But at the time I did the best that I knew how, there are many people that struggle with admitting those things and I think that's maybe, that's a great first step, right? It could literally be as simple as, I'm sorry, I burnt the breakfast. Or I made a mistake. You didn't mean to burn the breakfast. You didn't burn the breakfast on purpose. You didn't burn the breakfast because you hated the person you were serving it to. Like none of those things are reality. And what is there to lose in admitting that you burnt the breakfast? I mean, that's a minor thing. Yeah. I actually think there's real value to admitting your mistakes at some level to the people who have been affected or could be affected by those mistakes, even when most of us would place some amount of morality or immorality behind those mistakes, right? And we're all over the board on like, what is moral and immoral? But you know, like you and I have talked about this before, like with our kids and like language, right? Like there are curse words that's just part of the vernacular now. We give people this podcast once every two months. We get an email like, boy, I sure do wish like, I sure would like to let my kids listen to your podcast, but just a little too much language in there. I'm like, I absolutely get it, you know, but we are who we are, right? And so in our generation, it seems to be acceptable by most, and I realize that there are gonna be people listening to this cringe, that our generation just kind of drops the F word sometimes in normal vernacular. And we don't consider it evil. If we said that in front of grandpa Lynn, he would not be happy at all, right? True. Now, there are ways to use the F word that are clearly mean spirited towards other people. And that's the difference, right? Like, so you can say, you know, maybe I shouldn't have said the F word on the Barba Logic podcast as a mistake because I just sounded like white trash, dropping a curse word when it didn't really need to be there versus there are times when I've told people, hey, you go F yourself. That's not the same thing, right? There is an actual, there's an actual like, I'm trying to degrade and disrespect that person. Both I think are extremely valuable to be able to admit your mistakes and take responsibility for. Now, you are probably not ever gonna be like me in that you would broadcast any major mistakes that have hurt people in your life on the podcast. But I do know as one of my best friends, if not my best friend and my little brother, that you are able to admit those mistakes to the people that you've heard or when it affects them. When you make decisions that are selfish or self-centered or not, it doesn't take into consideration other people's feelings. And I think that man, it's so important. So for me, I learned from those mistakes. I model teaching, I have a better opportunity to teach when I admit those mistakes. And for me, it's an enormous sense of relief that I don't have to bear the burden of those mistakes of my past on my shoulders. And so that's a huge principle in my life. Totally agree. Anything else? I don't think so. I mean, look, here's the thing. Everybody makes mistakes regularly. Everybody knows people who can't admit that they make mistakes and no one likes those people. So if nothing else, at least take the step of not being that person and then maybe over time grow to the point where you recognize and you maybe see your mistakes as being those mistakes you literally were always going to hit on your path of growth in life. So that you don't see the mistake as even a bad thing, you see it as this great opportunity for growth because it is just there is no better form of learning than making a mistake. Yeah, agreed. So that's it. I admit your mistakes. That's a big principle for both of us. And you can see how both an extrovert and an introvert do it. You have been listening to the Barbiologic podcast, our principle series on Sundays where we talk about all those important things in life that will certainly bleed into the gym and into, you'll see a lot of those principles and culture of what we do in the gym and at Barbiologic in those principles but they often deal with things like family, business, relationships, so on and so forth. Knowledge, reading, and so come and hang out. Hope you are enjoying the principle series that we do on Sunday and we will see you tomorrow for a content episode.