Ep26.aimingproblem.fin
===
[00:00:00]
Introduction and Show Overview
---
This show is powered by Others Over Self®. Hit that subscribe button to keep training your brain.
Shelly Rood: freedom from something isn't the same as freedom for something. When you aim at collecting credentials like escaping the grind or hitting arbitrary numbers, even when you succeed, that void is still going to remain.
From Others Over Self®, it's Hardcore and At Ease™. A show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge.
I am host Shelly Rood. Have you ever looked at someone else's credentials and thought if I only had what they have? Well, that kind of thinking throws off your aim, [00:01:00] and then you end up hitting the wrong targets. So today we're talking about how to recognize what you already have so that you can stop chasing what you think you, and finally, we're building the life that you actually want.
This is Hardcore and At Ease™.
Today we're talking about recognizing what you already have so that you can stop chasing what you think you lack, and finally build out the life that you actually want.
The Illusion of Success Metrics
---
Shelly Rood: Let me tell you what success looks like, according to the internet: 10,000 followers, blue check mark, website traffic. How about your email list size or your LinkedIn engagement rate? Well, real success can look very different from that. There are thriving businesses right now that don't even have a website.
It's hard to believe, isn't it? They're impactful, profitable, and sustainable businesses. I know [00:02:00] it sounds ridiculous in 2025, but it's true. Somewhere along the way, we started measuring success by checking boxes that someone else printed and we became blind to what we actually have.
Tim Ferris wrote a book called The Four Hour Work Week. It's a phenomenal book and we've talked about it before on the show, and when you read that book, you might. Discover a dream of your own to escape the nine to five. Now, what's interesting is that the author in his own recent podcast episodes has been talking about something that has really caught my attention.
He says that if he could rewrite any chapter, it would be the one about what to do with all that free time, because here's what he's discovered. When you're not filling the void of existence with making a living, you still have to fill the void. Most people have no idea what they're actually aiming for
once survival isn't the [00:03:00] target anymore. You spend your whole life shooting at, make enough money to be free, but then you get there and you realize free to do what? Exactly. Now, Jane Austen understood this centuries ago in Pride and Prejudice. Her character, Elizabeth Bennett, says that she can find her own faults faster than anyone else could
point them out. We are experts at seeing our own deficiencies. I'm sure that you can list out every credential that you're missing, every milestone that you haven't hit at this point in your life yet, maybe even every gap in your resume, and you can do it super fast.
But are you blind to what you actually do have? We're talking today about the gifts that we dismiss, the credentials that we don't even think about, the earned wisdom that someone else would treasure and that blindness, well, it might be keeping you from aiming at targets that actually matter. It might be [00:04:00] keeping you from appreciating the worth of yourself and of others. When we can't see our own value, we tend to inflate others to these impossible standards, or the opposite. We can diminish them to make ourselves feel better, and neither one of those builds anything real.
Recognizing Your Own Value
---
Shelly Rood: So let me tell you today about five moments when someone saw something that I couldn't see and why those moments taught me what I'm actually aiming for.
A few years back, I was sitting across from a young woman. She was maybe 24, 25 years old, and she had a master of divinity degree. She got it fresh out of undergrad, and I was just sitting there looking at her thinking. She is wasting her life. It wasn't because she wasn't smart, obviously she was, and it wasn't because that particular degree didn't hold weight because it absolutely did, but she was just sitting on it.[00:05:00]
And she was telling me how she's not sure what she's gonna do next. You see, she had graduated a full year prior and she was happy just to have graduated. She was doing part-time work as an admin and really just sitting on life. It was really hard for me to have that conversation because that credential.
It could have opened massive doors and it was just sitting in her pocket, like spare change. Meanwhile, I'm over here with my bachelor's back from 2005, and it was years, years before my master's. And I was thinking in the moment, gosh, if I only had what she has, does she realize the impact that she could be making?
Does she even realize what that degree represents? But here's what I wasn't able to see in that moment. I was so focused on what she was wasting, that I really was blind to what I had. You see, she [00:06:00] didn't wanna be a military chaplain. She was probably looking at my leadership experience, my time in the corporate settings and my military background thinking, well, if I had only her earned wisdom, it's not knowledge that AI can regenerate.
It's earned wisdom. It's the kind that comes from living through things, making mistakes, learning what works when theory meets reality. I had that and she's the one that had the credential. You see, I needed a Masters of Divinity to become a military chaplain. She had that credential, but in that moment, we were both blind to our own gifts while perfectly able to see the other persons. What if other people look at us and see value that we are completely blind to? Not the false markers, not the follower count or the website traffic, but the real value. This lived [00:07:00] experience, the hard earned wisdom. Today we're talking about the gifts that we've been given, that we treat like it's nothing special.
Well, a fellow veteran one time said to me, "you're such an accomplished woman," and my actual response out loud to her was, "am I?" I wasn't being humble in a false modesty type of way. I genuinely didn't know, because I don't think that much about my own credentials. They're just part of my story. My bachelor's was back in 2005 and it was just another step along the way.
It seems like a really long time ago. My master's came in 2022 and that took forever to finish and even my military service, yeah, it's there, but I was never sent to combat and even building this business, we're still a small business and we're still figuring things out, so I'm gonna pause on that last one.
We are still small. [00:08:00] Well, my friend, do you know the actual definition of a small business? According to the small business association, depending on your industry, you can have 500 employees or even make millions in revenue and still be classified as small. ~But here I was using small, like it meant not enough yet, like it carried~
~shame. ~Being shameful and being humble are not the same thing. Humility recognizes gifts that have been received while shame dismisses value earned. Now, I was operating from shame and not humility, and it was making me blind to what we had actually built as a business and what I had actually built with lived experience.
Now, she, my veteran friend, was looking at me, seeing something that I couldn't see. She was seeing the compound effect of all of these things put together the military service, the civilian leadership time, even a graduate education, eventually building something from scratch and helping other [00:09:00] women veterans.
Now she could see the bullseye of that incredible life, but I was too busy looking at each one of those data points thinking, well, that one's not impressive enough. That one took too long, and that one's not even finished yet. Carl Rogers a figure. a key figure in humanistic psychology believed "what is most personal, is most universal." And that's why I share some of my deep personal stories on this podcast because our deepest, most specific inner experiences that involve fear, love, even grief, this feeling of never being enough.
Well, these are actually shared human truths that connect us all, and the credentials that I dismissed is not that special. They were exactly the ones that made my work resonate because they were personal. They were specific to my path. They were evidence of earned wisdom, not just accumulated [00:10:00] knowledge.
Stories of Hidden Gifts
---
Shelly Rood: Now allow me to share with you another story that's even more personal than those two. My husband has a GED, a general education degree, and usually you get a GED because you did not graduate high school. Well, my husband did not drop out, and it wasn't that he couldn't handle high school. You see, he was homeschooled by his mother and his mother as the approving authority.
Well, she just didn't do the paperwork for him to get that high school diploma. Now, this truth is a fact that he. Really, really dislikes. I mean, he hates the fact that he has a GED instead of a high school diploma. He sees it as less than, it's the backup credential to him. It's the thing that you get when you mess up the normal path, but I don't see it that way.
Because when I look at someone who has a GED, I [00:11:00] see someone who learned differently. Someone who had to own an education in different ways than traditional students, might never do it. I see someone, especially my husband. Someone who developed self-direction, discipline, and independent thinking, because I know that he didn't have the structure of conventional school, so that GED, it represents gifts that he's not able to see.
It's earned wisdom. That he freely dismisses it's value that he's blind to because he measures himself against someone else's printed checklist. And I, as his wife can tell him all day long that his GED represents valuable skills. But until he can see it, until he stops measuring it against
traditional diplomas and starts seeing it as evidence of different gifts. Well, he'll keep aiming [00:12:00] at the wrong target and he, we may not know how others view our accomplishments or our milestones because what looks like a deficit to us might look like strength to someone else. And what looks like a delay might look like perfect timing.
What looks like the wrong path might indeed be exactly the path that develops the gifts that we actually need.
Equal Worth, Different Expression
---
Shelly Rood: Here's another story we're gonna talk about my mother. I was raised by both of my parents and my mother was a stay-at-home mom. Now, her only desired life path was to be exactly that, a stay-at-home mom who raises babies.
For some women, being in that position is absolutely everything that they want out of life, and for other women, being in that position can be a necessity that comes from income constraints. For her, it [00:13:00] was a way of life that was worth living. It was her calling and her joy. It was my mother's chosen target, so now I'm older and I have my own kids.
And I need her. It's not because I can't afford other childcare. My kids are definitely in childcare, but I need her specifically as a caregiver to provide the daily nurturing to my children that I just can't. That I don't want to, it's not my calling. I'm a different type of mother. I'm 10,000 times more comfortable in a boardroom than in a childcare room.
And don't hear this wrong. I love my own kids very fiercely, but I don't like managing children in general. That's the difference that drains me. It's not where my gifts shine, whereas my mother has a gift that I don't have. She is blessed with the ability to pour into children day [00:14:00] after day, to find joy in the repetitive tasks of caregiving.
She creates stability just by her presence. That's incredible. And for years, I couldn't see that as valuable. Because I measured value by corporate metrics, right? I was a young woman of the nineties. I looked at income generation, visible achievement. But as I've grown and matured, I really have finally understood that her gift.
Makes my work possible. Her calling enables my calling. Neither one is worth more than the other. They're just different gifts being stewarded differently. When I couldn't see my own value in the business world, I couldn't appreciate her value in the nurturing world either. My blindness went in both directions, and this is what appreciation of others truly looks like recognizing their [00:15:00] gifts without needing to diminish yours and recognizing your gifts without needing to diminish theirs.
I don't need to be a better mother by her standards and she doesn't need to be a better business woman. By my standards. We both have gifts and we both steward them. Neither one is less than, and that right there, that's the aiming clarity that we are after equal worth and different expression. Now here's one more example, and this one tugs on my heartstrings a little bit.
We are currently rebranding our women veteran program at Mission Ambition. You know, that, um, we have tried in years past to combine women veterans with women who are working in non-traditional fields like manufacturing, trades, tech, um, just these fields where women tend to be underrepresented. Now in our [00:16:00] heads, this combination of women made perfect sense.
Both groups face similar challenges. Both groups can learn from each other. Isn't the military a non-traditional field for a woman? Both groups are breaking barriers in these male dominated spaces. And we tried this for years, but it just hasn't been scaling. So we ran a couple of focus groups this past year and we discovered something that we couldn't see.
The women in non-traditional fields by large were intimidated by the women. Veterans not inspired, not excited to connect, necessarily intimidated. The veterans looked at the tradeswomen thinking, you are building things, you're creating tangible value. You've got skills that I don't have. And the Tradeswomen were looking at the veterans thinking, you served your country, you survived military culture.
You've got this [00:17:00] identity that I can never claim. Both groups could see their value, their own, and the others. But they weren't holding them equal to each other. Isn't that interesting? The Tradeswomen would say, yes, I have skills, but veterans served holding the other higher, which was doing themselves a disservice.
And the veterans would say, yes, I served. But the tradeswomen, they're building things, holding the other higher, creating isolation amongst themselves that doesn't need to exist. They could both see the gifts. They just couldn't see them as equally valuable, but differently expressed. Now that is the gap that we're learning to bridge.
We're not convincing anyone that their gifts matter less, but we're gonna help everyone to see different targets [00:18:00] equal worth. Now here's the pattern that we're seeing across all five stories today. ~The young chaplain that I was, I couldn't see the impact potential,~
~the young woman with that master's degree. ~The young woman with that Master's of Divinity, she wasn't using well. She couldn't see the impact of potential of her degree, and I couldn't see the compound value of my own credentials at that point in my life. My husband, well, he can't see the unique strengths that his non-traditional path created.
My mother and I both, we have valuable gifts, hers and nurturing, and mine and boardrooms. But for years I couldn't see hers as equal because I was measuring everything by my own rude young woman metrics. The trades women and the veterans, they both have critical skills, but they're holding each other higher than themselves.
Instead of recognizing equal worth with different expression, we are all blind to our own bullseye, while perfectly able to see [00:19:00] everyone else's. So let's talk about why this happens and what ancient wisdom says about it.
Ancient Wisdom on True Success
---
Shelly Rood: Marcus Aurelius wrote, ~when you Arise in the Morning.~
~We are going back to Marcus Aurelius. He wrote, when you arise in the morning, think of what a privilege " ~when you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive, to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love." Notice that he didn't say what a precious achievement. He said privilege gift.
The stoics understood something that we forget. Your capabilities, opportunities, your education, and your credentials. These aren't things that you earned. These are gifts that you've been given.
Epictetus is another philosopher, and he was born a slave. He became one of the most influential in history, and here's what he taught us. There's only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will. You know what Epictetus could see that his enslaved [00:20:00] background, the credential that he might have been ashamed of, it gave him perspective that no freeborn philosopher could have.
His limitation was actually his unique value. His earned wisdom came from his circumstances, not despite them. The stoics weren't talking about lowering standards or accepting mediocrity. They were talking about the precision that's required to aim at your actual bullseye instead of being distracted by the one that everyone else can see.
You see, we measure success by metrics that miss the point. Yes, 10,000 followers, how wonderful, but how are you leading them? What are you actually creating in their lives? Maybe you did go to high school, college, graduate degree, even got a doctorate right on schedule. [00:21:00] Are you able to see the value of the possibilities before you as a result of checking each of those boxes?
Tim Ferris optimized his entire life to create the four hour work week, and then he discovered that he had no idea what to do with all of that freedom, and he's still pondering on this. Because he was aiming at escape instead of purpose. He was collecting free time, not recognizing what the free time was actually for.
When you're aiming at collecting credentials, checking boxes, hitting these arbitrary numbers, even when you succeed, that void remains when you aim at stewarding gifts that you've been given. That void fills itself with purpose. So how do we do this?
Practical Steps for Recognition
---
Shelly Rood: How do we move from blindness to recognition?
I'm gonna share with [00:22:00] you three practices that make this very real.
These are the three core practices that will help you see what you are blind to. I'm going to walk you through each one and then we'll talk about how to apply your future year planning.
So first up, recognition over collection. We're going to stop accumulating credentials just to fill in the gaps, and we're going to start recognizing the gifts that you've already been given.
We call these small victories every day. Every day you're checking thousands of boxes. Most of these are even invisible. You show up when you're exhausted, check. You make a decision that's. Serves the mission over your ego check. You learn something new, even though it was really frustrating. Check you helped someone even though it cost you your time.
Check. Great job. Those are all small victories
and they're not about being good enough. They're about recognizing that you're [00:23:00] doing things, you're building things, you're checking boxes that matter when nobody's watching. Small victories are amazing. The problem isn't that you're not achieving enough. You are racking up all those small victories, my friend.
The problem is that you're not recognizing it when you do. So here's your first action before December 31st. If you're watching this in real time, that's the end of the month. It's about two weeks away. I want you to contact three people who know you in different contexts. Someone from work, someone from personal life, and someone maybe from your past.
And I want you to ask them this exact question. What do you see in me that you think I undervalue or don't fully recognize? And here's the critical rule. You are not allowed to explain. You're not allowed to justify, dismiss or even think about the answers that they [00:24:00] give you. I just want you to write them down.
Why does this work? Because you can't actually see your own bullseye, but other people can. It's how we're made. And once you do that, I want you to make a list of every credential, every skill, opportunity, or experience that you've had, and I hope it takes you forever. I want it to be really, really long.
For each one of those, I want you to write out an even longer list. You're going to write out the gifts. That made each one of those credentials, skills, or opportunities possible. So here's an example.
My checkbox is having a master's degree. What goes next to that are the parents who highly valued my education.
17 years of life experience. That taught me why it mattered. Employers that were flexible, who knew that I wanted to make that [00:25:00] happen. Professors that provided the guidance, a support system that made room for the work to happen. Financial resources, A brain that could process complex material health. That allowed me to complete the program.
There was a baby in there even. Now, this is not about me being accomplished. That's me receiving thousands of gifts and stewarding them by completing that degree. I want every item on your resume to be evidence of gifts received and not just achievements earned. So that's the first thing that I really need you to dig into.
The second core practice to help you see what you're blind to is value. Your earned wisdom. Your lived experience is your actual currency, not your credentials, not your titles, but your earned wisdom. This is knowledge that cannot be regenerated. [00:26:00] AI might be able to give you the theory and the frameworks and the best practices, but earned wisdom well that only comes through living through things.
Making mistakes, learning what works. When the theory actually meets reality, we develop judgment that can't be taught. That young woman with her Master's of Divinity, she had the knowledge, the theological training, she had the counseling frameworks, but I had the earned wisdom, the 17 years between my degrees, the military service, the corporate experience, the mistakes that taught me what really matters when we go into leadership, which one of those creates a chaplain that the troops trust in their darkest moments.
Both of them matter, but one without the other is very incomplete. As we look ahead to the next calendar year, and I know you're setting goals you already have, because you're an ambitious person for every [00:27:00] goal, I want you to ask this question. If I achieved this right now.
Versus achieving this after significant life experience, which version would create more impact? That credential is just going to open a door. That's all it is. That earned wisdom though? Well, that's what determines what you build once you're inside that door. Think about what you have lived through that taught you something that AI is not going to be able to generate.
What mistakes have you made that have developed your judgment? Well, that right there, that's your earned wisdom and it's worth. Infinitely more than the credentials that got you in the room. Now, you may have heard me talk before about a CE accredited course for nurses and social workers that I teach on intimate partner violence and domestic violence.
I teach that as a person with lived experience. In fact, that's one of [00:28:00] the requirements for these continued education credits. The instructor has to be someone with lived experience. There's tangible value in your experience. My master's degree in 2022, it was 17 years later. That's not a late degree.
That's a credential plus earned wisdom. Now those young chaplains with their M Div fresh outta undergrad, man, they have a hard life ahead of them. Because that right there is knowledge Without context, there's a lot that has to be learned. And in the military, if you come in with a degree without a lot of experience, (in the army) you typically would come in as a second lieutenant and you would have a yellow, bar on your rank.
I'll put a picture of it here for you. And we actually call that the butter bar. And the joke is that a butter bar doesn't actually know anything. They don't know anything. [00:29:00] Um, we like to think that we do, but without that lived experience, how much do you actually know? Right? Where is that earned knowledge?
Contrast that with my husband's GED after homeschooling. That right there is evidence of self-directed learning. It's independent thinking, non-traditional problem solving. You see what I'm going with here?
All right. The third core practice to help you see what you've been blind to is equal worth different expression. Gifts are stewarded differently. When they aren't ranked hierarchically, here's what I mean by that. They're valued equally for their different expressions.
I am 10,000 times more comfortable in a boardroom than in a childcare room.
My mother is the opposite. And for years, I truly could not see her gifts [00:30:00] as being equal to mine because I was measuring everything by corporate metrics. But her gift makes my work possible without her stewarding her calling. I was not able to steward mine.
This core practice can also be seen in the example with the tradeswomen. Both the Tradeswomen and the veterans have those tangible skills. The two groups kept holding the other group higher than themselves, and that's not humility that's actually blindness to equal worth.
My question for you today, as an ambitious leader, where in your life are you holding someone else's gifts higher than your own? Your colleague who's really good at strategy, but you're really good at execution. How about your peer, finished their degree on schedule that yours is taking a lot longer.
They're just different [00:31:00] expressions. They're equal worth. I would encourage you to stop ranking and start recognizing. And when you do that, watch what becomes possible because now we're collaborating from that foundation.
Now, let's take a moment and talk about what to do with this in the next two weeks as we're planning out our year to come.
First, I want you to make a list of every metric that you currently use to measure success. Seriously. If you own a business, then you know you're doing this already, right? Uh, follower count for marketing.
How about your revenue numbers, your credential, timeline comparisons, your industry benchmarks? Whatever those measures are, I want you to look at them and then cross out anything that measures collection rather than stewardship. You got that? Cross out anything that measures collection rather than stewardship.
Here's the [00:32:00] test. Does this metric tell me how well I'm using what I've been given? Or does it tell me how much I've accumulated compared to others? You can have a hundred thousand followers and still be leading nobody. You can have 500 followers and be changing 50 lives. Yeah, the number doesn't tell you what matters.
So think about that and then rewrite those goals that you have for the upcoming year through this new lens of recognition. So instead of get 10,000 email subscribers, try build a system that serves 1000 people with the earned wisdom that I've been given. Or instead of finish my certification on this schedule, try complete my certification when I am ready to appreciate the possibilities that it creates.
Now, [00:33:00] instead of proving that your business is successful, I want you to steward your business gifts, and I want you to do that by serving clients at the highest level that you're capable of. It's the same goal, it's just a completely different aim because one is checking boxes to make sure that we feel adequate and pretty good about ourselves.
And the other one is recognizing those small victories and building on them. Now here is what turns theory into practice.
Make recognition a daily discipline. In the morning, think to yourself, what gifts am I stewarding today when you're making decisions? Is this from recognition of what I have or from a fear of what I lack in the evening, do a check around dinner.
What small victories did I check today that nobody else saw? [00:34:00] And finally, ask yourself before you go to bed at night, where am I holding someone else's gifts higher than my own? And how is that preventing collaboration?
A very real example of this was when we had some good friends that chose to purchase a home.
They were very, very excited about their new house. What we saw was that one of the two marital partners was forced to take a job that she didn't like and didn't think she could last in in order to make the mortgage payment. It was a really difficult situation to watch because we knew that it would be unsustainable, and yet we didn't want to take away their joy of the new home.
So just throwing that out there as an example of how it really genuinely is possible for you to just go, go, go, go, go, check, check, check, check, check. Without stopping and pausing and thinking, [00:35:00] can you actually afford that house? What's your life going to look like On the other side of it? Because when it comes to you and your upcoming year. You can't collaborate with people or payments that intimidate you, and you certainly can't build with things that you're trying to out achieve. So let's start with recognition and then move towards collaboration always in that order.
Conclusion and Next Steps
---
Shelly Rood: Now as we wrap things up today, let's think about what we've talked about. A young woman who had her credential but couldn't see her value. I had the compound experience, but I needed someone else to point it out. My husband has unique strengths from his non-traditional path, but he measures that against traditional standards.
My mother and I both serve from our callings, hers in nurturing, and mine in boardrooms, but for [00:36:00] years I wasn't able to see hers as equally valuable. The trades women and the veterans, they both see each other's value, but they hold it higher than their own. Creating isolation that doesn't need to exist.
Every single one of us can be blind to our own bullseye while being perfectly able to see everyone else's. You're about to plan your next year, and I know that you're setting goals. So before you write down a single target, I want you to ask yourself, am I aiming at just collecting credentials to check more of those boxes, or am I aiming at stewarding gifts that I've been given?
Because those two are completely different targets. Recognition over collection. See what you have instead of chasing what you'd lack. Value your earned wisdom. Your lived experience is your actual [00:37:00] currency. My 17 year gap between my degrees, that's not delay. That's depth. Equal worth different expression.
Stop ranking and start recognizing what gifts are. Bless his heart, Tim Ferris created the four Hour Work Week and he discovered that he had no idea what to do with all the freedom, because freedom from something isn't the same as freedom for something. When you aim at collecting credentials like escaping the grind or hitting arbitrary numbers, even when you succeed, that void is still going to remain.
But when we aim at stewarding the gifts that we've been given and doing goodness on behalf of everyone who made those gifts possible, well, the void tends to fill itself with something called purpose. "You're such an accomplished woman." Am I? [00:38:00] Here's what I'm still learning. The question isn't, am I accomplished?
The question is, have I been given gifts and what am I doing with them? Every credential, every opportunity, every small victory that you check, it's evidence of thousands of people who have invested in you. You didn't earn those things alone. You were given them. And now you have a responsibility in that stewardship to do goodness to the world
on behalf of the gift. You can aim over at that collection target like more followers and more credentials on your schedule, more proof that you're keeping up with the Joneses, or you can shift, you can pick that different target of stewardship. What have I been given? How do I use it for maximum impact?
It's the same ambition 'cause that's deep inside of you, my ambitious friend. The question is, what are you going to do with it? I want to encourage you to pick that different target. [00:39:00] The solution is not working harder, it's seeing clearer. I want you to ask those three people, "what do you see in me that maybe I'm undervaluing?" And listen
because they can see your bullseye. Maybe you're just a little too close to it. Once you can see what you've been given, though, once you can actually recognize your earned wisdom, all of your small victories and the gifts that are equally valuable, through all those differently expressed ways, well then you'll finally know what the target looks like that you're aiming for.
Now that is what Hardcore and At Ease™ is all about. You stay hardcore, intensely focused on excellence, checking the boxes that matter, building something that compounds, but you become at ease, confident in the gifts that you've been given. Clear on what it is. You're stewarding free [00:40:00] from the need to collect credentials that mean nothing.
You are not trying to prove that you're good enough anymore. You're recognizing the thousands of small victories that prove you're already building something meaningful. So here's your target. This is your new target, and it's only two weeks out. I want you to ask three people what do they see in you that you might be undervaluing?
Write down every answer without explanation, and then look at your goals for the upcoming year and for each one, " am I aiming at this to collect a credential or to steward a gift I've been given?" That's it. Three conversations and one honest assessment.
Now, before you plan anything else for the year, hit that target.
Now this closing segment is your favorite, so you say it's called Get the Gear, and we talked about Tim Ferris and the four Hour Work Week, specifically his honest reflections [00:41:00] about what he would rewrite if he had to do it again, the chapter towards the end.
On the void problem and what to do with all that freedom once you create it and become part of the new rich. Well, I promise you that it is definitely worth the read just for the questions that it raises about what you're actually aiming for. I encourage you to grab the book and I've got a link to that in the show notes.
Also in the show notes, is a way to access a document to help guide your conversation around the exercise that you're going to do after listening to today's episode. That document is called the "Gift Recognition Audit". It's a worksheet that walks you through identifying what others see that you can't.
It's uploaded right now in our online community at join.othersoverself.com. If you pop in there and you don't see it at the top of your feed, I want you to just search "Gift Recognition Audit", [00:42:00] and I promise you'll find it. It's three questions, 15 minutes, and you're going to start seeing your bullseye more clearly than maybe you have in years.
Now, if you're ready to join other leaders who are learning to steward their gifts rather than collect credentials, then I want you to connect with us at join.othersoverself.com.
That's it for today. I'm host Shelly Rood, and I want to thank you, my ambitious friend for taking time out of your jam packed day, maybe you're just driving or sitting in the massage chair at the gym, thank you for taking time out of your day to fit in just a little bit of personal development. The world needs the best version of you, and you are well on your way.
I'll see you again next Tuesday, and until then, stay hardcore, be at ease and trust the process.
Speaker 2: You are listening to Hardcore and At Ease™. Keep the conversation going at join [00:43:00] dot Others Over Self®.com.