E17 | Behaviors That Devalue Your Work, Your Legacy & Your Profession

Brett Bartholomew  0:01  

What’s going on everybody? Welcome back to another episode of The Art of coaching podcast. We’re gonna dive right into this one. This is something I’m pretty passionate about because of some of the things that I’ve gone through personally in the last three to four years, especially surrounding the topic of criticism. Now, this could be an episode that could easily go for two to three hours. But we’re going to keep this short. So no worries and don’t cancel out of it, if you think that’s where I’m going. But this is a topic that after a lot of debating internally, I think needs to be shared. Why a lot of people struggle with overcoming obstacles typically has more to do with themselves than anything else. 

Specifically, they are so scared to be criticize, that it almost kind of paralyzes any higher level thought or contribution. Now, let me be clear on an assertion, I think everybody has something valuable to share. Everybody, I don’t think that your value has to do with a title or position a certain number of years of experience, I think everybody has value the share. But through my interactions with other coaches, what keeps people from sharing their thoughts is this fear of don’t want to be seen as a know it all. I don’t want to be seen as a guru. I’ve tried doing this before. And I got in trouble with a colleague or co worker, or a boss who said that I came off this way, here’s the thing, what I’ve learned is, you’re never going to make anybody happy. 

And that’s not a novel thought. That’s not anything that somebody hasn’t expressed before. But it is something that humans have a hard time getting into their psyche, especially as it pertains to scaling a message. I know when I had written my book, when I had done the course, the first thing that I was concerned about is oh, boy, here it comes. Now I’ve opened myself, people are gonna think that I’m trying to say I have all the answers. And I’m going to do this and that and that I’m some guru. And nothing was farther than what I wanted to accomplish. That was never my goal. My goal has always just been to share thoughts and learnings. 

And let’s be honest about one thing in particular, coaches have a long way to go as it pertains to adapting and getting past their bias and this fear of criticism, and also just this idea that, you know, we have to be or we have to act a certain way in order to not threaten other people. I mean, I’ve said it before, if you do share, then you’re a know it all. If you don’t share, then you’re hiding. And then if you’re somewhere in between, well, you’re not really contributing and you’re lukewarm. Coaches have created an environment where it is this lose lose zero sum game, that no matter what you do, unless you’re just suffering in silence, or just kind of being the good soldier and not doing much of anything, you know, you’re never going to win. 

You know, what’s funny is I read a great book recently, and some of you may have read it, it’s going to be a contentious book, but it was the fountainhead and one of the quotes in the fountainhead and I love this quote, as they say, hell is said to be paved by good intentions. But could that be because we’ve never really learned to distinguish which intentions constitute the good. And there’s a valid point there, right? Where we’ve kind of determined as a field specifically strengthing conditioning, what is good and what is bad. If you’re just in the trenches, if you’re just working, if you’re just being silent, and quote, unquote, doing your job, that is good. 

If you have a product, if you’re speaking at clinics, if you have a podcast, if you’re doing anything, literally other than quote unquote, being in the trenches, that’s not good. Now, some of this is because and my friend Anthony Reynolds said it great on a previous podcast, because sometimes the integrity wasn’t really there within our young field when people were trying to scale a message in the past, but instead of kind of dealing with it, like every other profession does, and just knowing there’s inevitably going to be some shitheads. And there’s inevitably going to be some people that want to be helpful. We’ve just stuck with no, now everybody gets labeled into that bucket. 

And what’s even worse is we’ve tied happiness to guilt. We associate this self sacrifice with superior happiness and a divine purpose. You know, if you’re sacrificing and you’re just doing this and you’re keeping your head down, that’s happiness that’s being true to your craft. And why that’s scary is that’s the same kind of farce. It’s been going on for centuries and not just in certain vocations guys, but in certain types of government as well. And we’re not going to get political with this. But whenever people try to rule, a thinking man or somebody that wants to be innovative, or if they want to silence something, they typically do so by trying to appeal to a higher ideal. 

They say that this is no we’re selfless. We don’t want to put our ideas out there. And people consider things like money or notoriety evil, yet everybody’s got some sort of selfish desire to win. The approval or respect of others, that’s just a reality. I guarantee there’s very few of you even though I don’t know all of you listening, there’s very few of you who do not want to be respected, or who do not want to be known as somebody who’s competent and helpful in their field. Now, am I saying you have to scale something or create a product or do anything to do that? No, you can do your job and make a local impact. And that’s fine. But it also doesn’t mean the opposite. 

It doesn’t mean that if you do try to scale something, that now all of a sudden, it’s black and white. I’ve said it many times on this show nothing about coaching. And nothing about leadership is black and white. It’s all contexts. And I’ve written countless articles on this, we cannibalize our own in coaching. And it’s one of the biggest reasons our field is not taken seriously, as a leadership style vocation. Because there are so many people that would rather just criticize, and condemn others as opposed to collaborate, which is funny, because I’ve yet to find a dentist, I’ve yet to find a lawyer, I’ve yet to find a doctor, well, maybe a lawyer, a doctor, but let’s just encapsulate it like this. I have yet to find a successful professional, somebody who’s successful over the long term, who is creating a meaningful, lasting, and truly impactful career off of the criticism of other people. 

Are there people that have made successful careers in the short term? Sure, they get a lot of buzz, a lot of marketing hype, all these things. But who has created a truly lasting impact, a positive lasting impact out of just spewing venom, like, what’s the purpose of that is the dopamine hit worth it? What I’ve found to these conversations that I’ve had when I talk to other coaches is, the reality is that most of the people that do this are unhappy with their situation. They don’t know how to scale a message, they have trouble understanding kind of what their next move is, they feel like they want to expand their skill set. They feel like they want to help more people, they don’t know how to do it, or they’re scared to be judged. 

And here’s the thing, at some point, you just gotta get over it. You just got to get over it. You know, Ryan Holiday talks about it in his book, perennial seller, which I think we’ve had a great message. And I’ve never met Ryan, but you know, someday I’d hope to, one of the things he said is that you have a responsibility, and this wasn’t, you know, this isn’t Ryan Holiday saying either. I mean, you talk to any leader, anybody that’s created something that’s meant to help people. And though they’ll say it outright, you have a responsibility to share it. Now, here’s another thing. A lot of coaches if it isn’t nerves, they just think they don’t have anything to share. Well, nothing I have to share is that genius? 

Do you think that you know, even some of the most forward thinking people in the world truly think everything they have to say is genius? Or do you think every single artist or musician thinks every piece of artwork or song they have is, is game changing? A lot of musicians and a lot of artists actually detest some of what ended up being their most popular work, you know, and the point is, is you may think you have nothing to share. But some of the most banal, seemingly, just, I don’t know, seemingly just innocuous stuff that you think resides in your mind is actually what a lot of people need to hear. What you find is 99% of the population out there is struggling with stuff that is so simple, that, you know, if you just share a couple of tips, if you shared what helped you get through a hard time, if you shared one strategy, you don’t need to blow people’s minds. 

I don’t know why we think that for anything to be valuable. Now it has to blow somebody’s mind. It doesn’t need to be new. It doesn’t need to be new. It just needs to be yours. And it needs to be honest. Yeah. And so I just think that we’ve made this submission. Really an accolade of sorts. I literally got told by a former mentor of mine, and you know what, I hope he hears this, because we had a conversation about this. He said, Listen, I’m happy for some of the success you’ve had. But I don’t do conferences. I don’t do clinics. I don’t do podcasts. I don’t do any of this stuff. I live a quiet life. And when I asked him for clarity on that it was something that he had actually, it was almost like he was prideful and him saying this, like he thinks that that is what an honest man does and honest man doesn’t go out there. 

They just stay indoors almost like a recluse. And I don’t agree. And it’s great. I hope some of you have strong opinions about this because in life you have to have a flag that you plant and if that makes some of you guys mad, then you know so be it but I think that everybody’s got something to share truly. And we have to be really careful in our field. What we make seem like a virtue. If you think a virtue is always kind of just you know, suffocating an idea you have or muffling something you know of course on the other end is pride and hubris but that gets into this black And white mentality again, we act like there is no middle ground. Just be honest, and understand that some people are going to gravitate towards what you have to say, and some people aren’t, you will never please anybody. 

When I wrote conscious coaching, I remember my editor said, Listen, man, you can’t treat this like a textbook. You can’t treat this like it, only 1% of people will ever read it. So then we, you know, we made it a combination of science and stories. And you know, there’s a certain population of people that still thought it was too technical. There’s an entirely different population that thought, well, this doesn’t meet, you know, PhD standards. That book wasn’t made to be a submission for that. That book was a conversation starter. That’s why companies and individuals create ecosystems of education. 

Nobody jumps into a 101 course in university, and expects to all of a sudden be a contender for the Nobel Prize, because they’ve been exposed to such high level information that they could hardly fathom it. You know, for me, the book was step one, the field guide was step two, my online course Bought In was step three, and then the doctoral work and other things that I’m doing step four, step five, and that’s for those people that want to dive deeper. That’s for those people that want to interact. The key is, it’s not for everybody. And so my message is this. If you’re somebody that in the past has kind of struggled and you feel like you want to get involved in a conversation, you want to help more people, you have something you feel like you want to share, but you’re not sure if it would impress you’re not sure if it would get criticized. Just do it. Just do it. 

I mean, we’ve heard this Theodore Roosevelt Man in the Arena, quote, 1000s of times how many of you guys as coaches have these quotes about boldly stepping forward and not being scared of criticism, and making sure that you push through struggle and calamity and all these kinds of things yet, you kind of cower in silence because you’re scared that you won’t get the approval of others. It’s one big farce, guys, our field is subsisted on a certain impression management tactic for a long time, and it’s taken humility to the extreme. Coaches aren’t supposed to just sit and suffer in silence, share it, somebody, you’re supposed to be a prime mover as a coach. And what I mean by that is, you’re not just a problem solver. 

You’re a people mover, you’re somebody that makes action happen. So how can you do that? How can you do that when we create this divide, then going back to the fountainhead and Howard works, last speech, I love it. One of the things he said and I’m paraphrasing here, we can divide a meal amongst many men, but we cannot digest it through a collective stomach. No man can use his lungs to breathe for another man. We inherit products of thoughts from other men, we inherit the wheel, the wheel becomes the cart, the cart becomes an automobile, the automobile becomes an airplane. But through the process, we only receive the end product with somebody else’s thinking. The real moving force is the creative faculty which takes the preceding product as material and uses it to originate the next step. 

The creative faculty itself or what he referred to in the book as the life force, or Hein, Rand, the author of the lifeforce cannot be shared, given or borrowed, it belongs to single men who take action to advance an outcome. So guys, the point was, is that men can learn from one another. But learning is really just the exchange of material, whatever that material could be. It could be intellectual property, in terms of the written word, it could be anything, but no man can give another man and man’s a relative term, the capacity to think. And not only that the capacity to do and the capacity to think and do guys is our only means of survival.

So, you know, I could go on and on, but I just want you to be wary of some things. You know, dependence is not a virtue, you being dependent on the approval of others is not a virtue. It’s not, you know, and if you praise an act of charity, but then like scorn and act of achievement, that’s silly. You know, like, if we constantly just devalue our field, which is what we’re doing, by the way, not only through infighting, but through following this just coal miner ideology of it, it’s never enough and keep your head down. And, you know, work, you know, never create any external revenue source because that’s evil. Our field is really close to becoming some kind of weird religion. 

It is, and there is a difference between being spiritual and being religious. And that’s beyond the scope of this podcast, but it is like we’re getting very religious in an unhealthy way, about how we look at the ideology of what it means to be a strength and conditioning coach, how one should live their life, the things people should say the things people shouldn’t. Your job as a coach is to help people. Your job as a coach is to guide your job as a coach is to do whatever it takes to help people overcome the obstacles in their life. And you know what the biggest ask goal in people’s lives are themselves, themselves. 

It was true for me, it still is true for me, I’m a perfectionist, sometimes I’m almost a purist. And I’ve learned that to scale a message, you have got to accept the fact you will not make everybody happy, you are not going to get everybody’s approval, you are not going to be liked by everybody, the majority of which will never ever, ever meet you. But you do need to be independent in your thought. Because if you’re dependent on these things, guys, this whole idea of selflessness is just thrown out the window you’re trying to make you’re trying to create athletes that fight for or an athletes could be your clients. If you guys are personal trainers or teachers, this could be students, we’re trying to create people who can think for themselves and take on the world around them, whatever that is not to be dependent. 

But that might be part of the issue as too. Maybe coaches are scared to let go of things. Maybe we like power more than we think we do. Whatever that is, you have to understand that nobody has the right. Nobody has the right to sit there and think that being a coach only means one thing and can only be done one way. Because it’s how you perish. It’s how you dissolve a skill set. Honor the past, don’t be scared to build on top of it. And just you know, make it a point, make it a point to do something every day that allows you to advance a thought or a skill set or share something. And you know what, expose yourself to that criticism and I promise. It’s not as bad as your thing. You know, take this from a guy that’s gotten a one star Amazon reviews because somebody didn’t like the cover of my book.

And these are usually done by anonymous people who the only other thing they ever reviewed was a lamp and toilet paper. Those people are out there. Literally a critics job is to criticize. And these are people that usually want to be the adjective without doing the verb. So I’ll say it again, guys, you know, go out there and make sure you share something and understand that nobody’s ever going to fully agree but don’t let this field devolve into some kind of religious doctrine that makes you think you can only do this one way, and that you should be bullied into silence, you know, be responsible with your message, but try to mold the coaches of the future on new foundations, not antiquated principles. I’ll say that again, try to mold coaches of the future based on new foundations of seeking to understand being willing to share, not on these antiquated principles of self sacrifice, and all these other things that, you know, make people feel like they’re wrong for stepping out into the light and providing some unique thoughts about a construct or a topic. Do not devalue the field, do not devalue yourself. 

Guys, that’s all I have for this one. Listen, if you want to get involved in the discussion, go to artofcoaching.com/start. I am building a coalition of coaches that again want to respect the past, want to honor those who have laid the path for us, but also want to innovate by being more transparent, more open, more inclusive, so that we can show the world that strength coaches aren’t exercise people are drill sergeant people, we’re problem solvers. We’re problem solvers. We’re creators, we’re managers, we’re leaders, we’re CEOs. But if we can’t solve the problems within our own psyche, in our own insecurities, our own industry, we’re never going to be able to provide the utmost value to the rest of the world. Again, artofcoaching.com/start. Thanks for listening to my rant. I hope you guys have a great rest of the day and a great rest of the week.