Welcome visionaries, creators, innovators, entrepreneurs, leaders and grow seekers of
all types to the passion struck podcast. Hi, I'm John Miles a peak performance coach, multi-industry
CEO, Navy veteran, and entrepreneur on a mission to make passion go viral for millions worldwide.
And each week I do so by sharing with you an inspirational message in interviewing high
achievers from all walks of life to unlock their secrets and lessons to becoming passion
struck. The purpose of our show is to serve you the listener by giving you the next tasks
and activities you can use to achieve peak performance and pursue a passion driven life
you have always wanted to have. Now Let's become passion strong.
Welcome to momentum Friday and Episode 51 of the passion struck podcast. And I wanted
to thank all of you so much for continuing to watch and listen to the passion struck
podcast and helping us make our goal of bringing passion to the world around it. If there's
a certain topic or guest you would like us to interview please DM me on Instagram at
John R Miles. Now let's get on with today's episode, which starts with a quote from Thomas
Horton who said "the danger is this when we are being taught to be highly sensitive to
others identities, we are also implicitly being told to take pride in our own identity.
This is where the problem lies. Pride is a vise regardless of your own self identity."
We all have a vision of ourself that is far different than the world pictures us. In most
cases, the way we see ourselves is glamorized into someone who is more liked, more intelligent,
and more decisive than who we really are. And that very reasoning is why humility is
so vital to your very success. We all want to feel self important. And there's nothing
wrong with that. It is great to have self confidence. I would even say it's vital if
you want to have a passion struck life. But the problem with self-inflated self-worth
is that it can cause a huge ego problem. And that becomes a massive liability. Now, let
me illustrate this through a personal story. A few years ago, I was working as a consultant
to a company. My client's son had recently gotten a job with one of the up and coming
scooter companies when he found in this new job that he was in charge of new market development.
The father thought that landing the Tampa Bay market, which is the 12th largest market
in the country would be an incredible start for his son's future. And he knew that I had
connections with both the mayors of St. Petersburg Rick Kriesman and Tampa Bob Buckhorn at the
time. And not only did I have connections with them, I had deep connections with both
their respective staffs. He asked me if I would use those connections to help his son
out and I reluctantly said yes, you see the rumors about his son were that although he
was highly astute, and was Ivy League educated, he had a vision of himself and his self worth
that was larger than the state of Texas. And coupled with that he had just come from working
a stent in the Trump administration. However, I had never met him. So I decided to give
him the benefit of the doubt. I used my personal contacts and set up meetings. And as we approached
that first meeting with Bob Buckhorn, the mayor of Tampa, I reached out to the son to
finalize not only the agenda, but also discuss what attire we were going to wear to make
sure that we were in unison on both. And I suggested to him that we dress formally, or
at least have a sport jacket on. And I received zero responses.
And then I tried again on the eve of the meeting and I received a response in text that I will
never forget it said "I got both your messages. I ignored the first because I thought it was
demeaning. You realize I am a Princeton grad and an attorney and I just left working in
the White House where I briefed the President on a regular basis. You must be either inept
or inexperienced, if you don't think I know how to handle a meeting and what to wear,
especially for a third rate mayor, like the one we're going to see in Tampa."
I looked at my cell phone with disgust and anger. My first reaction as I'm sure yours
would have been, was immediately type a very pointed and direct response. Instead, I thought
the better of it. And I thought the way to handle this was with tact. And so I showed
his father the text and what surprised me the most was that it was very apparent to
me that this was not the first occasion. That's something like that. It happened. That said,
the father reassured me that this was just a misunderstanding and pleaded with me to
go to the meeting. I should have trusted my instincts and called the mayor and canceled
it. The next morning, I met up with my friend from a local public relations company, a lobbyist,
and one of the most prominent city council members. We were all dressed in suits for
sport coats, which was the protocol that you had when you met with Mayor buck horn. We
were all standing there when that young man wrote up on his scooter wearing Converse sneakers,
blue jeans, and a T shirt. All of them at that point looked at me with a stare of bewilderment.
However, there was nothing we could do at that point. We were literally minutes away
from meeting the mayor. And so we went forward with our plans. I will never forget this.
Mayor Bob Buckhorn entered his private meeting room and was very gracious and shaking all
of our hands. And then he turned to the young man and said
something I will never forget "Sonny my time as mayor is coming to an end. And in those
eight years I have been in meetings with literally 1000s of people. You are the only person who
has ever met with me wearing a T shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. I hope and expect that
your presentation will be far more astute than your choice of attire today."
Sadly, it did not because the son had done little to no research on the mayor, the City
Council, the politics of what was going on, and ended up using a canned pitch deck from
his employer, the mayor, to his credit, listened intently asked very pertinent questions, and
even did a photo op standing on the son's scooter. But we all knew that the meeting
was a colossal failure. I had not left the meeting, when Five minutes later, my friend
called me on my phone and rip me a new one. That is because the mayor had already called
him and given him his feedback and warned him never again to waste his time like he
did in that meeting. Why did this happen? You could say that there were various reasons
for it. But I believe the biggest one is that the young man let his ego get the best of
him and failed to demonstrate humility. Did you know that Forbes magazine recently
cited that 70% of individuals do personal development, masterminds and one on one coaching
benefited from better work performance, increased communication skills in overall better relationships.
And we at passion struck are obsessed with self development, coaching and mentorship.
That is why we've created a free resource to help you unlock your hidden potential.
Because people doing great things in business in life are just like you only they've had
a coach along the way. And we've got that covered to let us show you the systems and
frameworks that we teach growth minded individuals to help them step into their sharp edges,
execute on their passion journeys and get predictable results. Time and time again.
Go to passionstruck.com/coaching right now. And let's get igniting.
Why is it so challenging to foster humility. Through my long career, I've learned just
how difficult it is to foster humility and more importantly, intellectual humility. For
my study of it, I have learned that there are three main challenges on the path to acquiring
humility. The first is learning that we all possess blind spots to act with more intellectual
humility. We all, even the smartest among us, need to appreciate that we have mental
blind spots. Our cognitive capabilities are more imperfect and imprecise than we'd often
like to admit, and our ignorance can be imperceptible. Second is being able to admit when you were
wrong, I remember working in that same company with another gentleman who would take on so
much work, that he never got any of it done. And the one thing he would never do is take
any personal responsibility for any of it. It used to anger all of us so much, because
not only was he not getting his work done, his ego was getting in the way of all of our
advancement and what we were trying to do in the company and even if we can overcome
a blind spot, like my per did and figure out our errors. We need to remember that it's
not only Okay, it actually shows strength to say I was wrong, and we need to be braver
about admitting it we need to create a culture that celebrates those words, I am wrong. The
third is learning the art of tact and diplomacy. No matter how hard we can possibly try. It
is impossible to achieve perfect humility. So we need to ensure that our convictions
are well placed and packed With tact and diplomacy when interacting with others, and I'll talk
more about this later on in the segment. So if you're not familiar with it, you may be
wondering what is intellectual humility. Intellectual humility is admitting that your ideas and
beliefs may not be accurate. But don't confuse it with the idea of being bashful. It's not
at all about being weak. And it's not about self-esteem, or low self worth. Those who
practice intellectual humility, don't run in the face of danger, or when their thoughts
are being challenged, or questioned. Instead, it's a method of rationalizing the situation
and listening to the other person or persons. It is actually having that self confidence
to actually realize that you could be wrong. And then having the willingness to learn from
other people's experiences. How often have you experienced friends or peers who take
a hard and unwavering stance on an idea or a topic, they become so self righteous about
their own personal viewpoint that they fail to hear anyone else's view and instead, just
argue their side and fail to seek or acknowledge anyone else's opinion. In fact, if you just
plain give it and tell them your opinion, you were just plain wrong in their mind.
So why then is intellectual humility so important for you in your life, and in your career,
I find humbleness is one of the most underrated and undervalued virtues, but one that most
of the outstanding leaders that I have met and work for in my career possess intellectual
humility is actually vital. Because no one is absolutely all no one. No single person
can be right about every single topic, and therefore, our perspectives are always going
to be limited to what we know that recognition leads us to elicit as much information feedback
and expertise as we possibly can possess intellectual humility doesn't necessarily necessitate high
intellect. However, it requires us to challenge our internal beliefs, our thoughts, when that
can be very painful to do when we have humility, we can become so much more potent than without
possessing it. That is because we can strengthen our own self confidence and in turn, our position
after all, we are actively seeking out the opinions of others. So how do you practice
intellectual humility, I'm going to give you four different ways that I have found success
practicing it in my own life. Many of these are previous podcasts that I've done, or articles
that I've written, so you can refer to them in the show notes, and I will put all of them
in there. But first, as I referred to earlier in the podcast is by practicing the art of
diplomacy, one of the most critical aspects of humility is learning to value others and
listening to what they have to say, in order to do that it's vitally important to understand
the emotional state of that other person. This starts by observing their behavior and
listening to the intent and tone of their words. By doing so we can draw out their values
and feelings, and that enables them to provide us with very valuable feedback. It is a very
potent skill to possess, and one that will help you preserve relationships and both your
career and in your personal life. To understand why it is so vital, it is essential for you
to realize that this is not about you always having your way or that your opinion has to
be correct. Just listen and react to them as you would hope they would do to you and
do it with kindness. Second, be tactful, and focus on being in the moment, a critical part
of humility is being able to deliver sensitive or difficult information in a way that preserves
the relationship rather than judging or disrupting them. A key element of being humble is knowing
how to actually talk to other people and doing it in a way that promotes honest communication.
When we use tact. We are preserving relationships, and also fostering dialogue. This doesn't
mean you should be deterred from delivering sensitive or hard information. But doing it
in a way that focuses on the outcome you want to achieve and not on yourself is so important.
The third practice is to use the power of vulnerability by being vulnerable. We're letting
go of that fear of what other people may think of us and it also allows that other person
to see your true self. This is perhaps one of the hardest things for us to do. But one
of the most important if we're going to ask with humility, often those who lack humbleness,
do so because internally they lack esteem and self-confidence. They try to show other
people up because they lack self-awareness and feel threatened. The fourth activity that
you can do is play big and let go of that ego. When we play small in our life, we are
coming from a place of pride and arrogance. And I realize it can be hard sometimes to
avoid a feeling of fear or doubt or uncertainty, but it is just reckless to cover it up with
vanity because you don't want others to see your self limiting beliefs. When we play big
we are living our life with confidence and unlocking our full capabilities. We've learned
to confront those attributes of smugness, snobbery and arrogance that cause us to have
the big ego, we learn to embrace humility by being more open to critique and self growth.
Now, let me wrap all of today's episode up for you. By sharing my final thoughts, I have
found that you can never go wrong by looking for ways to improve yourself. And that starts
by listening to feedback from your partner, a friend or up here. When we lack humility,
we end up focusing inward pride consumes us and we end up with a massive ego problem when
a person's mentality like the young man's in the story I told at the beginning of the
podcast of self and self preservation. First, it's a sure sign of immaturity. Instead, we
should strive to understand that every human is equally valuable that recognition should
lead us to living our life in a way that we are worth no more or less than anyone else.
Thank you for listening to today's podcast. And I hope it was able to bring some insight
on humility and ways that you can practice it and perfect it in your own life. Thank
you so much for joining us. The purpose of our show is to make passion go viral. And
we do that by sharing with you the knowledge and skills that you need to unlock your hidden
potential. If you want to hear more, please subscribe to the passion struck podcast on
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make a choice, work hard and step into your sharp edges. Thank you again for joining us.