 Welcome to the show, Dr. Beecham. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How are you guys doing? Great. We're excited for this conversation. I know a lot of people in our audience view themselves as top performers and they're constantly looking for that edge, certainly when it comes to mindset, and that's certainly what we're going to dig into today. Good. I'm ready. You start off the book by explaining how elite performers make it a priority to really understand their unconscious mind and pay close attention to their thoughts and behaviors. That's a lot to unpack right there. What led you to this conclusion and how can we work to actively bring that mindset into our lives? If you simplify that thought, the question is, do you have the capacity to observe yourself? When I say observe yourself, I mean, what are you doing in your head? What's the thoughts that you're having? What's the emotions you're having? What are the beliefs that you hold? What are the things that you think are true? Do you truly have a clear understanding of that, and especially how it comes to do with you? What I think a lot of people do is they bullshit themselves. In other words, they tell themselves things that just the rest of the world wouldn't shake the head and go, yeah, you got that right. There's the guy that I really am, and then there's a guy that I want to be. It's really important that I understand that those aren't the same things. Like I have some bad habits, or I have some responses to things that I think are ridiculous and absurd, but yet I still have that response, a preference if you will. We have these ideals, we have these beliefs about how we think it should be. I think people who generally, what we call successful people, is they have a greater capacity that when they look at themselves, they can see their own inconsistencies. Let's say I want to be a kind person, but I'm not always a kind person. The question is, when I'm not being kind, do I recognize that I'm not being kind? Furthermore, do I understand why I'm not being kind? If I'm mad about something, do I really understand that? It's that level of awareness. It really becomes this relentless desire to, if there's anything I want to be really good at, the first thing is that I want to be good at telling myself the truth about myself. Which means from time to time, I'm up to say, Stan, you didn't put forth a very good effort there, or you let something bother you that was really pretty trivial. Because of that, you behaved in a way that you really want to. Just that capacity and really commitment to, I'm going to be honest with myself about who I am. Even when it's bad news, I'm going to be able to do that. Versus, I think we live in a culture that frequently when people do poorly, it's kind of like, well, it wasn't my fault, right? Johnny, you upset me. I behaved the way I did because Johnny upset me, right? Versus no, I behaved the way I am because when people don't behave the way I think they should, I react negatively. It's that kind of stuff. So that's why I made this whole concept about whatever your belief system is, which is just a fancy way of saying what do you hold is true, okay? Whatever that is, that's a huge deal. When you're young, you don't have much world experience to shape any of the beliefs about yourself and the world around you, separate from those experiences. And of course, you're trying to understand how you should behave. And of course, in order to find of what you should believe or how you should behave, you're going to ask the people in your tribe, in your herd, where we are herd animals and socialization, belief structures, they're handed to us by others, by the media, by social media, and we adopt them. And it's not until we don't be able to make, we're not able to make progress in the areas that we want to grow. So it's at that point that we have to start asking ourselves those hard questions. And if we're honest with ourselves, give the hard answers to, why am I not able to achieve what it is that I want to? And if it now comes to, do I set off on my own path to figure this out? Or do I just accept what everyone is telling me are the reasons why and learn how to be comfortable with that? I started off my career working with athletes. And what's interesting, so taking Johnny's point about what we've been told, I would say a child doesn't know if he's especially talented or not in any particular area. They come to believe what they believe about themselves, whether they're smart, dumb, pretty, ugly, fast, or slow based upon what other people tell them. I mean, you do get some life experience. And what I think is interesting is, you know, if you listen to parents talking about their kids now, okay, nobody describes their child as average. Okay, so it's not like your child's in school, it's like your kid is in the honors AP advanced program, right? Nope, nobody's kids on the soccer team. Everybody's kids on the travel select soccer team, right? And so we live in this culture where being normal or being average is this terrible failure. When I think just the opposite, I think that in most things, I'm average. There are some things that I might do especially well. And then there's some things that I'm really poor at. But to your point, Johnny, part of being able to tell yourself the truth is acknowledge that in most things, you're kind of like everybody else, right? I think a big part of it is having the willingness to even explore and question, where am I average? So to your point, there's a lot of entitlement that comes along with everyone getting a trophy, everyone getting a medal, everyone feeling like they're the best at everything. And many of us don't really take account of where we are average. We don't seek out that feedback. And we aren't even aware of it because the feedback that our parents and our peers have given us at times is not grounded in reality. In order to tell the truth, one must first know the truth, right? So I tell people all the time, you know, I do a lot. So now most of my clients are business folks. And what I say to business leaders is, for me, the most compelling reason why you really want to work on yourself and get your shit together, okay? I hope it's okay if I can be loose with my terminology. You can. You know, the main reason to get it together is that whatever work I do on myself that I become a more full and complete human being, however far I get down on that path or not, everyone that comes into contact with me is either going to benefit or suffer based upon the work that I did, right? So if I work really hard to tell myself the truth and really learn how to persevere and overcome difficulties and really understand that in a deep and true way, then every person that I interact with will benefit from the fact that I've done that work. And if I don't do that work or the areas where I'm still pretty damaged, every person that comes in contact with me is going to suffer because I haven't done that work. And so, you know, getting your act together is actually probably one of the most altruistic things that you can do, right? And not getting your act together is probably one of the most selfish things that you can do. I couldn't agree more. It starts with, you know, I'm a flawed person. I'm struggling. My intention is to do right. I continue to fail myself and other people. It pains me to see me do that. At the same time, I'm 58 years old and I realize that whenever I die, I'm still not going to get it all together, right? But hopefully at 58, I'm in a better place than I was when I was 48, you know, or 55. And, you know, and so this whole thing about success is you're not going to get there. There's no there to get to, okay? You're either engaged in the struggle or you're asleep at the will, but there's no, you know, there's no success that you're going to achieve, right? There's no, okay, finally, now I'm going to kick back and feel good about myself. It doesn't happen. It's just not reality. I love the way you put that. You're either engaged in this struggle or you're asleep at the will. And I love that because it's a saying of mine of that. Once you have awakened to this idea and you begin to push yourself, you start looking around and you realize that that is exactly it. People are just out of it. They're unconscious. They're asleep at the will and giving up opportunities to grow. And once you get engaged in this sort of work, each day becomes, hopefully if you're doing it correctly, better than the last. You feel better. You're able to decipher and interpret your world better. You're able to maneuver through it better and you're able to slowly inching your way to some of the things you may have put on your list that would tell you you're successful to bring you some happiness, to bring you some joy, and to look for the next rung on that ladder. You want to be on an uphill roller coaster, okay? So you're constantly, you know, getting to more and more of your true and complete self, but it's not a straight line up, right? It's not a this. It's a, you know, it's a this. And I mean, look at anything. I mean, look at the stock market, right? I mean, if there's ever a better example of an uphill roller coaster, it's the economy. It's the stock market that whenever it goes down, it's always come back. And so as you're getting yourself together and as you're really truly working on yourself, you have to accept the fact that you're going to have some really bad days. And in those bad days, you're going to think, I've made no progress at all. And then two days later, you realize, oh, actually, I have, I just had a bad day. You know, and that's part of, you know, what I try to teach the athletes that I work with is that, you know, you, you, you judge each day as a win or a loss. And the goal is to have more wins and losses, right? But what's interesting is we've confused this concept of success or high performance or being enough. We've confused this with the concept of being perfect. Okay. And this is one of the things that's really harming us as a culture, I think, is, is that we believe that I'm going to get to a point where I have all this figured out, and then I'm not going to struggle anymore, and then my life is going to become easy. For those people who are slowly waking up or noticing that there's more out of life than what they've been striving for or, or what they, they can have, they start to look at people who are in the, in the struggle, who are engaged and tend to think those, those people are different. They're not like me. They're overachievers. And I remember the first time that I was called an overachiever and it's, and I find that hilarious, but it's, you just keep stacking better and better habits and more and more processes to your behavior. As you know, that they bring you joy, well-being, happiness. And you want to continue that ride of each and every day, once you get engaged, is better than the last. Well, why wouldn't you, why would you want to stop? And for those people who are outside looking in, you know, this is attainable. You are just like all of these people. It's just that they're, they're decided that they're going to commence battle with themselves. One of the questions I ask people is, what is it you want? Where are you trying to get to? And, and what most people, if you listen to them, what they'll say is, is that I want to be happy. I want to have peace. I want to enjoy my life. You know, I want to have nice things. I want to have friends. And, and then you say, well, you know, when people start giving you physical answers, you know, I want, I want a job, I want a new car, I want a house, all this. And you say, well, why do you want it? It's because of how they think it's going to change how they feel about themselves, right? I mean, that's ultimately what we want is we want to get to a point where we're no longer suffering. I mean, if you take, you take Buddhism, for example, right, 2,500 years, when Gotama, you know, the original Buddha, when he talked, right, his whole thing was about ending suffering, right? That was a whole intention. And now look at what Buddhism is all about being happy. And so we've replaced, and if you don't look closely, you'll miss this because it's a big deal, but we've replaced the goal of not suffering to a goal of being happy. And what, what's happened is, so if my goal is to be happy, then it's likely that I want my life to kind of go easy, right? I mean, I want things to go my way. And so the belief is, is that in order to be happy, you know, you kind of get what you want and things go your way. And I think that is so contrary to what I have learned. What I have learned is actually, you don't want an easy life. Because when your life gets that easy, you're going to get bored. What you actually want is a challenging, difficult life. Okay. But you want to embrace the challenge and not be afraid of the challenge. But that's what I tell people is, is that actually, you want to continue to do things that you take yourself all the way to the edge of you, right? It's like, you know, if I can run six miles, then go run six miles a day, don't run five miles, don't run five and a half, run six miles, go up to the edge of yourself and keep going to that edge. And when you do that, it's going to be painful or difficult or uncomfortable, but keep doing that. But desire to do the difficult. Don't desire an easy, you know, life, desire to do, desire to do things that are a challenge, that are struggle, that are difficult. Those are the people that are really on fire. Those are the people that are really fully alive. And I don't think that story gets told well enough or clearly enough, right? I mean, if I was talking to a person who was really depressed, what I would say is, is it's going to be totally counter to your depressed mind and the chemicals that are in your mind right now. But you need to go do something that's really hard that would physically exhaust you. Like that is your best chance of getting out of this. But when you think about when people get depressed or get stuck, they don't seek challenge, right? They want the opposite. Exactly. And that just prolongs your depression or your suffering. So you get out of your suffering by pushing yourself to the edge of suffering. And see, this is what elite athletes understand. I mean, we, you know, we praise the Michael Jordan's and the Larry Burns and the, you know, pick a great athlete. And we say, man, I'd like to have the skill and ability that that person has. But what they, what they fail to understand is it's not that these people wanted to be successful. It's that they wanted to do the things, the activities that led to success, right? So great athletes, the main reason that they're great is they love to practice or they love to do the things, right? I mean, great students are people that love to learn and to read and to study. Well, they make the choices that lead to success, that make success inevitable. And I think many of us, and we even see this in our X factor accelerator mentorship program that you come in focusing on skills and gaining the skills and your elite athlete is such a great example because if you actually crunch the numbers, the difference in skills between a starting professional player and a bench warmer is really not that great. It's the mindset of taking that winning shot and air balling it if it's Kobe in the, his first playoff appearance and then turning into a lethal shooter at the end of the game over his career because of that setback. Many people don't realize that he air balled a game winner in his first playoff game, but it's not about just gaining the skills. It's about unlocking the mindset that leads to this elite performance, the consistency in maintaining that skill set and sharpening that skill set is what makes all the difference when we're talking about those elite performers. But many of us, and you bring this up in the book is we believe our beliefs are valid because we believe them. We don't interrogate them. We don't ask, well, where did this come from? My dad told it to me, so I held on to it. And now it's a belief that I hold this true, but we don't actually go through the process of trying to interrogate it to see is this belief about myself really true? Or is this limiting me and my abilities? And in the book, you have a great exercise where it's literally writing down all the things you believe and being thoughtful in writing this down because if we're not even conscious of our beliefs, these are invisible roadblocks to our success. If most of us did that in a diligent way, it would be a very short list. The things that I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's a short list. And I think that's okay because here's the deal. If I come to the conclusion that I don't really know that much, then I'm going to do one of two things. I'm going to feel sorry for myself because if I damn stand, you're 58 years old, right? You've been a, you've got three different college degrees. One of them is a doctorate and you still don't know that much. And then so you can say, well, you should feel pretty bad about yourself. Or the other response is, is then I would stay curious, right? So if I start from the mindset of I don't know most things or I know very little, if I'm not a narcissist, then I can, then I can get in this place of being curious and say, well, I want to find out, you know, I want to seek the truth, right? That was, that was what Einstein, you know, that's how he described himself and people said like, oh, you're so smart. He said, no, I'm just really curious. You know, he said, that's how I, he goes, that's what I noticed about myself is how curious I am. You know, and I've got a couple of friends who are artists and they're painters, you know, and if you walk around with an artist or a painter, what's, what's inevitable is like they see stuff that you don't see. Like when they look at something, they see color, they see shading and you're looking at the same thing, but you don't see it, right? And we know this about from expert coaches, for example, if you went to a really good, let's say you're golfing, you went to a really good swing coach, he would look at your swing and see something that everybody else wouldn't see. And that's, that's the other thing that's interesting to me is that when you truly develop expertise, okay, like if you, like if you're an expert artist and you and I are looking at a mountainside or whatever it is, you're actually going to see things that I don't see. And if you're an interior decorator and we walk into a building, you're going to notice things that I don't notice. And, but as a psychologist, hopefully, you know, the things in terms of, I think what I notice is the words that people use and how people say things, because all that is, is a description of what's going on inside, right? I mean, just how you answer the question, how are you doing? I mean, that's informative, because most people can say they're doing fine, when in fact, they're not. But if you learn to pay attention to that, you can, you can, you see the variations of it. So that, that to me, I think is, is, is, is one of the things that I really encourage people to do is, is how do you pay attention? And part of what keeps you from paying attention is your own biases, right? Your own belief systems. I mean, look what's going on in the social, political arena in America right now. I mean, these are crazy times, right? I mean, because people are looking at America and seeing a whole bunch of different stuff. And, and everybody feels pretty strong that the way they're seeing it is spot on. Yeah. I think many of us feel like we're living in alternate realities to other people that we're talking to or seeing online. And of course, social media and the algorithms play a role in all of that. Now that we're realizing that our beliefs may be flawed, they may be imperfect, and they may actually be holding us back. The next challenge that, that we've confronted with our clients as well is, is the action of trying to change those beliefs because many of us are walking around with a set of beliefs that are influencing our behaviors and ultimately influencing the results we get out of our life. And Johnny can attest to this in our programs when, when we actually start exploring beliefs, we don't start our coaching program with that because first everyone wants the skill set. They want to know, okay, what are the gaps? But as we start to impact, hey, there are some limiting beliefs you have and some insecurities that are manifesting in ways that you may not realize in your behaviors, you can feel pretty naked. You could feel pretty lost in that moment of, wow, these beliefs are no longer serving me. So what do you recommend we do in building new beliefs and rewriting some of those limiting beliefs that are holding us back? The first thing I think is you, you realize, you come to realize and understand where, where does my current belief system come from? And what most people realize is I believe things that the things I believe is because somebody told it to me and I believe them. So I believe my mom, I believe my dad, I believed, you know, whoever. So you're working off the assumption that they got it right. But then you realize they got it from their parents, right? So, so most people's belief system is, is a borrowed one or an adopted one. If I hold something is true, then I have to say to myself, how do I know this to be true? What life experiences do I have that show me that this is true? And if you do that, what you realize is for many of your belief systems, there's not. When you start challenging your beliefs and you realize that the evidence that you have to think something doesn't involve any facts, figures, and there's no data to back it up there. There's no life experience that you did get it from. All of a sudden you start thinking about your next action and how, what you're going to choose because you have been choosing and making decisions based on these prior beliefs. Now you've opened yourself up to coming at these decisions with a clean pilot. Well, have I enjoyed where these decisions have led me? And if I'm unhappy, and now I don't have any evidence to back up what I've, what I believe, I am now free to choose B over A, so to speak, right, the less traveled road or a new way of doing things to see how that affects my life. And when I started asking myself these questions, I started doing things differently because I realized I was not happy at where I was at to change that, to have a much better desire now come on, needed to change behaviors. And of course, this is when everyone who has known me for the last however many years are now confused because I am not acting in a manner that they are used to. I am my pre behaviors now are not predictive. So they start to get agitated because while I'm not following, I'm not towing the line that I had used to and that line, because I was towing it, and they were towing it backed up the beliefs that they had. And now all of a sudden they have to start questioning why they are doing things and they have that opportunity. A lot of people get very scared when that opportunity presents itself because they've never questioned these behaviors before. They've never questioned what they believed and now all of a sudden they're forced to. As I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about, you've used this word overachiever a couple of times. And I think it's wise to spend a moment to really sit with that of, you know, what is an overachiever? Because I don't think there's such a thing. People that we call overachievers, these are people who are achieving closer to their full capacity. I mean, I don't think I have achieved my full capacity. And I think there's a pretty good chance that I want to, I won't ever do that. So if you look at people who have really achieved to their full capacity, they frequently don't choose that. Okay. They were forced into it. So for example, if I said to you, how many days can you go without water? You're probably never going to be able to answer that question. How many days can you go without food? You're probably going to live your whole life never knowing that. How many miles could you cover in a 24 hour period? So 99.99999% of us, we're never going to answer that because we're not going to be forced into a situation to find that out. Right? So in terms of, I'm just using very basic physical things, but in terms of these physical things of what we can achieve, you're probably never going to know because you're not going to be forced to do that. And most people don't sign up for that, right? They don't put themselves in a situation where if this doesn't go well, I'm going to die. Most people in fact do just the opposite, and they avoid that. So you achieve to your full capacity because you put yourself in an arena that would require that. And most of us just simply aren't going to put ourselves in that arena, right? So we're not going to find out what we're capable of doing because we won't be forced to. But anyway, I just find that whole thing interesting. I mean, I've worked with some really good athletes, and I spent a lot of time working with endurance runners. And so one of the questions that I'd ask them is, what's the furthest run you've ever gone on? And you're like, I'm talking about, these are elite marathon guys, ultra marathon guys. And they would throw a number out there. Like I might say, well, I've run a marathon or I've run a 50 mile or I've run $100. And then I'd say, well, how far do you think you could go if you had to keep going? And the honest answer is, I don't know, right? The honest answer to stand, what are you capable of? The honest answer is, I don't know. And I'll probably never find out. And that's okay. Yes. Well, it's true. It's true. Right? I mean, that's what's true is that most of us will go to our grave, you know, scratching the surface in terms of what we have the capacity to do, because we won't be forced into it. Because we don't want to struggle, we resist the struggle, because the struggle is painful, right? I mean, you guys have seen the emotional triad and that stuff, right? Where you do what's pleasurable, you avoid the painful, and you expend the least amount of energy as possible, because we're an organism that's designed to survive and reproduce. That's what we're really good at. We're not designed for, you know, success or greatness. We're designed for survival. We have to force ourselves out of the comfort of just doing enough to get to the next place. And with survival, there's a limited amount of resources. So we have to act to expend the least amount to survive versus struggle, which is expending the most resources. It's putting yourself in the deep end, so to speak. That's the conversation that we need to change, is we need to get away from, you know, do you want to be successful or not? You know, do you want to be great or cool or not? The question is, is, do you want to struggle or not? And how much do you want to struggle? I think I got a quote in my book. I think it's a William James, you know, quote, where he basically says, you know, go do at least one thing that's really difficult every day. Like that's a decent way to live your life, right? So if getting up in the morning and exercising is hard for you, then get up in the morning and exercise. You know, if making your bed is difficult for you, then get up in the morning and make your bed. But you don't have to want to do it, right? I mean, that's the other thing. This is one of the things that hopefully, you know, parents teach their children is that you can do something even if you don't want to do it. Because if all you do is do what you want to do, you know, great things ain't happening. The results are not going to be pretty. I mean, but look at us. So we're a country that, what, two thirds of us are overweight, one third of us are obese, right? We're a country that, despite the great wealth, the majority of people don't participate in that, that wealth because they spend all the money that they make, right? So in the U.S., you know, 10% of the people own 85% of the money that's in the stock market. So most people, if they make $100,000, they spend about $104,000, right? Versus, well, I made $100,000 and I spent 70 of it and I saved 30 of it, right? But if we lived our lives that way, it would, you know, it would be pretty amazing. But that means you have to do stuff that you don't want to do or eat food that you don't want to eat, you know, or save money that you'd like to spend. And so there's just, you know, one example after other all around us about how we make those choices, right? I mean, I don't say this, you know, in a trivial way about the difficulty. I mean, most people shy away from that, you know, saving money is a difficult thing to do, you know, eating the salad and not the, you know, fried chicken is a difficult thing to do. But yet you can do that. But if you make it a habit of doing the difficult, that's what makes you feel empowered. You don't feel empowered or special because somebody told you were, you feel empowered because you know that you're consciously choosing every day to kick your own ass, right? And then you realize, oh my goodness, there's a lot in there that I had no idea I could do to which makes you want to see what's beyond that. I think a lot of us, and especially with the media and social media, see the end result. We often don't see the struggle. Absolutely. So you hear about it. You hear about, you know, Kobe and Jordan being in the gym for hours on end, LeBron being the first in the last out. We hear about it, but we never actually see the real struggle that the people we look up to are going through day in and day out. And many of us quite frankly would not actually want to change places with those people because we don't have it in us to put in that amount of effort or struggle and deal with the pain that comes along with getting that level of success. It's so easy to say, I want to be Elon Musk, not realizing the amount of hours that he has spent working on ideas, staying up night after night, even famously saying, get four hours of sleep at night. Many of us want the comfort of our own bed. We want the eight hours of sleep. We want to be able to get up in the morning and eat that breakfast and not worry about work. We want to unplug from the struggle, but yet at the same time, we look at these elite performers and their results and we're like, man, I want that. I feel I deserve that. And when you think about trading places with these people, you don't really want that level of struggle. You're not ready to make that level of sacrifice. AJ, the reason we don't want that level of struggle is we think that it's not supposed to be that way. That does not match our definition of a successful life. Correct. Right? Our definition of a successful life is things are going my way. Thank you very much. Versus my definition of a successful life is I go look for difficult stuff to do, right? And I find a way to challenge and make myself uncomfortable pretty much every day. My question, and I'm so far removed from mainstream culture just because I feel it's quite vapid and empty anymore. But when I grew up, movies like Rocky or the Karate Kid or the Bad News Bears, I'm 46. And these movies showed the struggle. They showed all the work that was put in to build the self-esteem of these characters. And it normalized and celebrated those achievements and the work that was put in. And when I think about a mainstream culture now, and it's a lot of superhero movies and comic book heroes, I tend to wonder if that sort of storyline has been taken out of the culture for these young people. My kids are now in their mid-20s. But when we were growing up on the street we're on, there was a kid on the street who couldn't ride a bicycle. And the other kids were riding a bicycle, right? And so as you can imagine, the kid who couldn't ride a bicycle, he didn't feel too good about himself. It was my opinion then and my opinion now that until he learned to ride that bicycle, he was left out and he knew he was left out. He literally could not do the things the other kids did to keep up because he couldn't ride his bike. And so I basically explained to him is that the only way that you're going to be able to feel good about yourself is learn to ride this bicycle. And I can teach you how to do it in about 15 minutes. And so the first thing I did is I took those damn training wheels off the bike, which is the worst idea that somebody ever came up with, right? Because then once you put training wheels on the bike, what you do is you give the kid the illusion of being able to ride the bike. Okay? So now I'm over there. So now I've convinced the kid that he can ride the bike, but you got to take the training wheels off. So I'm sitting over there taking the training wheels off the kid's bike. And here comes the mom and she's letting me have it, right? He's going to fall. He's going to get hurt. And I said, I'll be responsible. So I had this kid riding this bike in 15 minutes. So then I got the, then I got the training wheels off the bike. Okay. And then sure enough, now the kids ride the bike. But the only thing that was going to change how he felt about himself was being able to ride the bike. You see what I'm saying? So, so there was a time in this country that people's self-esteem or how they felt about themselves was primarily tied into what they did and what they didn't do and what they could do or couldn't do, right? And now what we're trying to do is we're trying to separate that, right? And so you're trying to tell the kid who can't ride a bike or a kid who can't read that they're okay and it's okay anyway. And the kids don't buy it because they know it's bullshit, right? I mean, teach the kid to read, teach the kid to ride the bike, and then they're going to feel good about themselves and not until. And then, you know, there's a whole host of things, you know, people my age, I mean, there are people who are married and now they're not. And so they're single and they're going to be miserable until they find a partner, right? Because they've convinced themselves that the only way that they can be happy is if they find someone that they can't be happy alone or until they acquire a certain amount of wealth. And so, you know, we just have all these false beliefs that get propagated about, you know, you know, what's really going on here. But I do think that it has to start with helping kids understand at a young age that developing competency and mastery, the ability to do something is really important. Because then what happens is, you know, like I've got a son and he's really good at the languages. So he's, by the time he got a college, he was fluent in Spanish. And so now he's telling me he's like, dad, I got Spanish and, you know, Italian is pretty close to Spanish. So now I'm going to get fluent in Italian, right? And so he'll get fluent in Italian. And then he'll figure out kind of what's the next easy one, you know, maybe it's, you know, Portuguese or whatever. And he'll do that, but he'll get the next language because he got the first one, right? So this whole concept of competency or excellence or performance is based upon a series of successful, you know, achievements, if you will, which is behavior based, which is doing it. And part of what's critical to that is that when you're trying to do something at a high level, when it becomes difficult and it will, what you have to say to yourself is, this is exactly how it's supposed to be, right? Versus the kid who says it wasn't supposed to be this hard. Well, that's the problem. Yes. That's the lie we have to change. That's the problem with things that are handed to us. We don't appreciate them. We don't value them. It makes sense as an adult, but unfortunately, many of us as parents try to coddle our children to avoid the struggle and the pain and the suffering that we had to go through. But guess what? Learning that skill, mastering that skill, unlocks the ability to master other skills. If you are constantly seeking to avoid the suffering, the failure that comes with mastering a skill, well, you are not going to learn the lesson that's required of you to master any other skill in your life. And much like learning that first language, of course there were failures. Of course, he didn't have the dialect, the accents right. But once he figured out, okay, there's a pattern to it. I have to change a few things. That unlocked the ability to learn other languages at a faster clip. But you got to put in the hard work. You got to put in the effort to gain that skill. Now, there's a belief that I think a lot of people in our audience may have around confidence that I want to unpack with you, because I think it's really empowering. And it's the belief that confidence is a feeling. Like if I could just feel confident, I would be X, Y, Z. And in fact, on closer examination, it's really just a thought. You think you're confident, you think you're capable, you think you can do it and therefore you have confidence. It's not a feeling that we're chasing. It's something that's really under our control in the fact that it is a thought and we can either think it or we could choose not to think it. Could you expand on that for our listeners? Yeah, I think it's really important to realize that this thing that we call confidence is not a feeling. You're right, it is a thought. I talk about that in the book and I talk about that with people I work with. The other thing that's really important to understand about confidence, which is essentially what you believe about yourself, right? So the confident person says, I can. And the person with low or no confidence says I can't, right? And that's a belief. That's not an emotion. There's an emotion that's associated with I can and there's an emotion associated with I can't. The other thing that's important to understand about confidence is confidence is dynamic. It's not static, okay? So in other words, on Monday, you may believe that you can do some difficult tasks and by Thursday, you believe that you can't do that difficult task, right? And it's always going to be that way. It's going to be that way your whole life and I don't care who you are or what level you are. That's going to change. I'll give you a real life example. So I work with some professional golfers. There's a woman golfer I've been working with for some years now and she's at the top of the game and I was working with her. This was about two years ago and she was basically saying I can't make a putt anymore, which all golfers go through, by the way, right? So when you deal with, you know, the golfers at the highest level, the putting is the thing and the putting is a confidence because when you stand over that ball, you either believe that you're going to knock the ball in the hole or you're not. That's it. And so when you're confident, you think it's going in and when you're not confident, you don't think it is. So anyway, so we're talking about and she's really struggling with that and just basically saying, you know, I'm not putting well right now. I just can't seem to make a putt. And so then what happens is you start changing, right? You get a different putter. I mean, all professional golfers have a closet full of putters. Okay. And so what happens is you say, well, I'll just try another putter. And so you go through this series, then they start changing the grip, right? So they do all these things because the fundamental thing is their beliefs that they can't make the putt. And so what I did with her is I said, you know, there was a time when you believed that you were a really good putter. I said, do you remember that? And she said, yeah, she goes, I used to believe I was the best putter. And I said, so when did that belief change? And she said, what are you talking about? I said, there was an event in your life, okay, or series events. When you went from believing I'm a great putter to I'm a terrible putter. And I want you to tell me when that happened. Okay. And she was able to go back to a very specific tournament to a very specific hole. Okay. Where she three putted from about eight feet. Okay. And in that moment that belief began to change. And so what I said to her is I said, that the truth of the matter is you're a very good putter, and you're wrong about yourself. So the belief that you say what you're saying yourself is I can't putt anymore, you're wrong. And so what you've got to do is go back and reestablish the truth, right, which is I can putt. And so I, well, I spent a couple hours and we did, I won't go into detail, but basically an exercise that I did where, you know, she, she restored that belief in herself. The thing though that's important for people to understand is, is that you may be confident in your ability to do a certain thing at one point in your life, you're going to, that's going to change. And the reason that's going to change is some events are going to change it. Okay. But you can also get it back. It can change back the other way. And most people don't understand that when this happened to me, you know, when I got fired from my job, when my wife divorced me, when my child died, when I had the car wreck, they felt understand that in that moment, their belief about themselves shifted. But in reality, you were that, you're the same person you were before. It's just that something really unfortunate happened to you, which is going to happen to all of us. And that's what people have to understand, right, is that I changed my belief about myself after this event happened to me. It takes such a long time to build, but it takes a second to destroy. And your confidence is no different. You work all these years to build up your confidence, to learn about yourself, to push yourself into the unknown and the gain new skills. But as you mentioned, losing your job, or a child passing away, or whatever these things might be, that is enough to just wreck everything that you have been working on for so long. And the point that you made is remembering that is, and you can rebuild. And it will take some time, but you're going to have to apply yourself. But it is easier to destroy than it is to build and to keep that in mind. Now, there's a common phrase that you recommend we replace, doing better with being our best. And many of our listeners probably wondering, why is language so important? Why is that such a big deal? I don't really see the difference doing better, doing our best. Come on, guys, we're arguing semantics here. Why is that important? We live in a culture that's obsessed with better. And so part of the mantra is you have to constantly be trying to get better, right? You should never be satisfied. You should always strive for more. And only the people who really continue to try to get better are the ones that are really growing. And if you're not trying to get better, well, then shame on you because you've given up and you really see this in sport. The other thing to notice about the concept of better is there's judgment applied to better, right? If I say to you, AJ, you could have done better, right? Then what I'm also saying is you didn't do it well enough, right? And then you would feel I'm passing a judgment on you. And then if you respected me, you might feel troubled by that. And so that's the chasing better. And I think the other thing is, is it leads people to feel like they're not enough. So my belief is what we should do is we should do the best that we can. And we should ask other people, whether it's your employee or your child or whoever, we should ask other people to do their best. In other words, the reason that I want you to do your best is because that's what you're capable of doing. That's you and your full self, right? And so when you do all that you're capable of doing, that is enough. There is no more than that. There is no better than your best. I'm either doing the best that I can or I'm not. And what I have found, especially like in employment situations, if you have an employee and you ask the person, they say they turn in a work project. They said they're doing report. And so you take the report and you read it. And I say, let me ask you a question. Would you say that this report is an example of your very best work? Frequently, people say, no, it's not my best. Or I could say to you, I could read the report and say, you know, you could do better. But if you ask the person, is this their best, they'll likely say, no, it's not my best. Okay. And so then you have the conversation of why did you not do your best? Well, I had a time crunch or I had to hurry. And sometimes you're like, if you asked me to write a report and you need it in an hour, it's going to be the best that I've could have done in an hour, right? But it's not going to be the best that I could have done in a day or a week. So the concept of best has some stipulations, right? Like doing the best that I can do right now may not be the best that I could do tomorrow. You follow me? Right. So when we ask people to do their best, all we're saying is, it's not so much that I want you to do your best if I'm your employer so I can make more money off of it. The reality is, I want you to do the best that you can, because I want you to have that experience of yourself at your best. Okay. I want you to pursue finding out if you become your full, complete whole self. Okay. What that looks like. And that's what best is. Best is your full, complete self. What's interesting, though, is the word perfect that we have, right? And, you know, we talked earlier about perfect. The word perfect that shows up in our language really through the Bible, right? Where Jesus says, be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. The word perfect came from the Greek word telius, but the word telius meant to be whole or complete. It didn't mean to not mess up. So the commandment was to be your full, complete self, right? And I think really that should be the striving is not to improve or to constantly feel like you're not there yet. That the striving should be is, if I become a full, whole, complete person, what would that look like? That's your best self. And that's what we should pursue. The better just has a lot of neurotic stuff, you know, crammed around it and a lot of judgment around it. And I just don't find it to be a very effective path. I've had people get very mad at me about this. I mean, I've had arguments, you know, with people about, oh, you have to constantly strive to do better. And I said, well, I think you should strive to do your best. I probably explained that a little more eloquently in the book, but I do think it's a really critical piece. Well, I think the pursuit of your best over time will lead to you getting better. So if you are constantly pursuing your best, then naturally through the experience of going at it with full effort, full of your capability, the more you do it over time, much like other skills gained in our life, we will improve and we will continue to do it better. So the question is, as human beings, are we designed to continue to grow and develop? Or do we grow and develop based upon our desire to grow and develop? In other words, when I was young, I had a brother still having who's two years older than me. So I always wanted to be bigger. I wanted to be as big as him. I wanted to be faster. The reality is I continue to grow when I got bigger. Did I grow physically grow because I wanted to get bigger? Or did I physically grow because it was in my DNA and I was designed to grow and become 6'2". And you know, the answer is I grew because it was in me. It was in my DNA. That's what I was destined to do. So the concept of better is almost kind of a confusion of the growth thing. Do we grow because, in other words, do you get better because you want to get better? Or do you get better because your body is designed to continue to grow and develop? My opinion is I believe that if you take a healthy person and you put that healthy person in a healthy environment, they can't not continue to grow and develop or get better, whatever terminology you want to use. That's what happens, right? You take a healthy seed, you put it in good soil, you give it sunlight and water, it's going to grow. It can't not grow because it's designed to do that. And I think this is what we failed to understand about ourselves. You're designed to grow until a full, complete cell. So it's not that you have to want to get better. The reality is you just have to stop doing the things that you're doing to sabotage yourself, right? I mean, that's really what we need to be less obsessed with getting better, and we need to spend more time thinking about what are the things that I do on a daily basis to sabotage myself or to limit my own growth and capacity? To understand what a healthy, growing environment looks like and create that for yourself, that takes effort, that takes work. That doesn't happen naturally. You have to get rid of the negative influences and the unsupportive and the naysayers. I mean, all of that works against you. Well, there's one point you made that I think many of us feel that does work against us, and that is this urge to compare ourselves to others. And you talked about it. Having that brother, we all have these people in our lives, and we are on this constant treadmill of looking around and not, as I said earlier, not seeing anyone else's struggle, just seeing their well-defined success from our vantage point, and that leads to us feeling worse about ourselves at times and judging ourselves so harshly around what we can do better, what we can't do better. How can we overcome or at least deal with this urge to compare ourselves to others? My brother and I, we just had this family discussion around this, and he said it's inevitable and we have to do that, and we should do it because it helps promote growth. My belief is that I should compare myself today to the person I was a month, three months, six months, 12 months ago. Because generally when you're in a really good place, you're not comparing yourself to other people. It's like I say, people who are really happy, they don't sit around and think about being happy. People who are really happy, they think about, okay, what does I need to do next? People who are unhappy, they sit around and think about being happy a lot. So when you're in a good place, you're not going to be thinking about how am I doing compared to my peers, because you're obsessed with doing whatever it is you're doing. So generally when we start comparing ourselves, it's when we're not sure or we're not feeling good about ourselves, right? So that's the first thing to point out is what's the state of mind we're in when we generally do that? And it's usually when we don't feel like we're enough, we're good enough, we've done enough. But I do think if you're really trying to grow into your full, complete self, then you do need to go back and look at it and say, okay, where am I compared to I was a year ago? I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that when I quit doing that, comparing myself to others, right, or trying to be somebody else, that's really when I started being myself and doing really well. The more success I have, the less I pursue success. You follow me? What I'm trying to do right now is find things that are difficult and challenging and do that and get outside of my comfort zone. I mean, my fear at 58 is I don't want to repeat years. I don't want 58 to look like 57, right? I don't want 57 to look like 56. Because I can tell you right now, most people my age, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, they all look the same, okay? They're just, you know, wash, rinse, repeat. They're just doing the same thing and over. They're not changing anything. They're not doing things different. And so what I think about is, is how am I living my life differently? What am I going to change? And for right now, most of it is taking things away. So I'm living a very simple kind of minimalist life. How much can I give up from a physical material standpoint and be happy? And of course, what I'm finding from my own experience is, is that the more I simplify my life, the less stuff I have, the more enjoyment I have, which I don't hear anybody saying a whole lot about that, which is interesting. Yeah, it's sort of counterintuitive because mass media tells us we need more stuff to feel successful, happy, more possessions, when in reality, essentialism and minimalism, pairing things down actually lead to that increased level of happiness. There's no question about that. We love asking all of our guests what your personal X factor is. And Johnny and I define this as the mindset unlocking a skill set in you that makes you unique and impactful in your life. What would you define as your X factor? I would answer the question by saying this is what people have told me about myself over and over again. And it comes out in a couple of ways. Some of the ways they'll come out is, is Stan, you're really direct or you're really blunt. Or, wow, you just really say what you think to which I say, yes, I do. In my mind, that's what being honest is. Okay. And so I would say my, my X factor is just that is that I've decided that I'm willing to take the risk and tell you what I really think. Not because I'm trying to be mean or not because I'm trying to be nice. But what I have come to learn is that honesty is the most important thing. And, and so I tell people that I work with the leaders, I said, you know, if you could, if, if you could be either kind or be honest, you only could be one, which one would you be? Like really think about that. Okay. Because, because here's what I think. There are a lot of people and they don't tell you the truth, right? They file the edges off. And what they say is, well, I wanted to be nice. All right. Or just be nice. But really what, what I think is going on much of the time is what we call being kind is really being dishonest. In other words, I can tell you something that I think you'll want to hear whether I believe it or not. And then being kind and then winning you over. So that whole intention of doing that is so that you'll like me back, right? You're reciprocated. But, but don't mishear me. I'm not saying don't be kind. I am absolutely saying be kind. I'm saying be honest first. Okay. Kind second. And so sometimes there are things that you don't say that that's your honest opinion, but you don't say it because there's nothing the good that would come out of that, that would just be hurtful. But when I, but when I talk about my work with athletes and with business people, right? I think this concept of learning to be honest with ourselves to call BS on ourselves. And then if you're a coach or if you're someone's boss or parent, you have to really find a way of how do you speak truth or honesty, right? And transparency, right? So honesty and transparency are two different things. I can, I can not tell you something. And I'm not lying to you. I'm just not being transparent, right? But this, this, this concept of coupling honesty with transparency, I think is really important, especially in performance environments, right? Because there's so much that we don't talk about. We're not lying. We just don't talk about it. But we have to find a way to talk about these things, right? But do it in such a way that it's helpful. But I would say that the X factor is starting with yourself and say, I'm going to be honest with myself. And I'm going to get good enough of that so that I can then do that with other people. I think that really is an act of love when you do that. And that's truly where the growth happens. It doesn't happen in the kind feedback, the dishonest feedback, the lack of transparency in the feedback. You are doing yourself a disservice by not being honest with yourself. And, and if you really care about the people around you, you're not being honest with them. You're doing them a disservice, as we talked about earlier. And I tell people, I said, you know, I'm not trying to be kind. I'm not trying to be mean. My intention is to be honest with you. And I hope that you understand that. I'm trying to be loving. I'm trying to be supportive of you. So we got, I think this whole thing about being nice and playing nice, it's a little bit tricky. We need to be careful of it. Because I think it does a lot of harm to people. Thank you for joining us. Where can our listeners find out more about you and your work? So, yeah, my website, drstanbeacham.com, beacham-b-e-e-c-h-a-m, I think, you know, that's kind of, I don't put a whole lot out there anymore, but that's where it's at. My book, Elite Minds, you can get that on Amazon or, I think that's probably where everybody buys books now, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on if you're an Amazon fan. But, yeah, that's the best way to track me down. We love leaving our listeners with a challenge for the week so that they can grow and start implementing some of your concepts. What would you leave our audience as a challenge for the upcoming week? Identify one thing that you've been avoiding. And it can be a little thing and bring that into your life. It might be something as simple as adding a food or taking a food from your diet or walking. Everybody's got their iPhones now, right, so you can count your steps. Maybe it's walking 5,000 steps a day or 10,000, whatever it is. Just put a challenge yourself, but to do something that's difficult, right? Do something that has a chance of failure. And if you fail, that's okay, but then try harder tomorrow. But again, just finding something that's really going to push you a little bit and it go after it because that's where you're going to really find out who you are, right, is getting outside of your comfort zone. I agree. Love that. Thank you so much for being on the show, Dr. Beecham. Thank you. All right. Enjoy it, guys.