Holding Onto What We Learned in Fourth Grade

I was one of the smallest kids in my fourth-grade class.

Not only one of the smallest, but one of the slowest. Not unathletic, exactly. Just small and slow. In the rotation of picking teams on the playground, I was rarely near the front of the line. Unless the end was the front.

What I didn’t have in size or speed, I decided I would make up for in something else. I used my smarts. I had the answers. 

That was my worth. Rarely did it earn kudos from my peers, but it did from adults.

I carried that identity into my twenties, my thirties, my business, my marriage. Be the guy who knows. Be the guy who figures it out. Be the guy who makes himself valuable.

It worked until it didn’t.

One day, the room didn’t need the smartest kid holding all the answers. It needed a leader. And the smartest kid didn’t know how to be one.

That’s the trap of a playground identity. Swap out “being smart” for “being the most athletic,” and it still holds true.

It protects and provides for you when you’re ten. It runs you into the ground when you’re forty.

The Things We Hide — Moment

In The Things We Hide, I write about the belief cycle. Beliefs drive thoughts. Thoughts drive actions. Actions drive results. Most leaders try to work on the results. The work is underneath, in the belief.

Here is the belief that ran me for years: my value is decided by what I know.

That belief made me a good problem solver. It made me a brutal teammate to others, when everything I saw was a problem to fix. If my value was decided by what I knew, every answer I didn't have, every setback, every quiet room became evidence that I was slipping.

The belief had a second ring around it. If what I know is who I am, then anything that threatens what I know threatens who I am.

That is the wall. When someone walks into my office and tells me I got it wrong, I don’t hear feedback. I hear a threat to my identity. So I defend. I explain. I deflect. I find the book title I have already read.

The people around me learned fast. Don’t challenge him; he’ll make it an argument.

Letting that belief go is not a mindset trick. It is a reconstruction. Who am I if I am not solving all the problems? Who am I when I can’t figure it out? Who am I if I am not the smartest kid in the room?

The leader who can sit with that question is the one who can finally hear what the team has been trying to say.

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Podcast

Dr. Matt Paden is the president and managing partner of Great Days Leadership and, with his mentor Dr. Ken Jones, co-author of The Core, a new book on the eight principles of authentic leadership. He built his career in and around higher education, first as a college basketball coach, then as a university administrator thrown into leadership before he had language for it. He has spent the last fifteen years studying why the leaders who look the most successful are often the ones who have buried the most.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Matt.

1. You Are Still Who You Were in the Fourth Grade

Matt shared a line from his mentor, Bob Beale: “You are who you are in the fourth grade.” Go back to the playground. Notice who got picked first and who didn’t. Notice what you got celebrated for. That identity is still in the room when you walk into your next board meeting. The executive who was always the smartest kid is still trying to be the smartest kid at fifty-two. The athlete who always dominated is still trying to dominate. The kid who wasn’t picked is still trying to prove he belongs. Leadership growth is not about adding more tools. It is about seeing which old identities are still making decisions you did not authorize.

2. Level Two Truth Is the One Everyone Avoids

Matt breaks the truth into two levels. Level one is the data. Sales numbers. Survey results. The facts that sit on a dashboard. Level two is harder. It is the truth about you. The way you came across in that meeting. The thing your team has learned not to say to your face. He told me about an executive whose team got so tired of hearing “I already read that” that they started making up book titles just to watch him claim he had read those too. The fear underneath was simple. If I admit I don’t know, I lose what has always made me valuable. Matt’s answer is vulnerability. Not as sentiment. As a strategic necessity.

3. Purpose Is Deeper Than Position

Matt’s grandfather, a minister, used to tell him, “There are two great days in your life. The day you were born, and the day you realize why you were born.” Matt came back to that line again and again. Leadership gets confused with skills, titles, and communication ability. But a leader without a purpose beyond the job will cling to the job long past its usefulness, because the job is the only thing holding the identity together. The leaders who last are the ones who know what they are here for. They can let the role evolve without losing themselves in the transition.

Rewrite Your Story — The IDL Summit, May 7–8, Spokane

Matt’s conversation is exactly the kind of truth the IDL Summit was built to surface.

An intimate crowd of leaders will gather on May 7–8 in Spokane, WA, to tell the truth about identity, ego, purpose, and the quiet stories we have been running on since we were ten.

Nikki Barua spent years mimicking what success was supposed to look like until a single week stripped it all away. She knows what happens when the identity you have been performing finally collapses.

Joe Delagrave had the question of identity forced on him at eighteen. He will tell you what it costs to stop performing a version of yourself that was never really yours.

Dr. Abbie Maroñó studies the science of how we read each other and how we hide from being read. She will show you how the identity underlying the behavior shows up in every room you walk into.

Four perspectives. Two days. 120 leaders in a room where nothing gets hidden.

The Summit is 13 days away.

If you are ready to put down the identity you have been carrying since the playground, I would love to see you there.

General Admission is $499. Buy two for $900.

VIP is $999 and includes a private dinner with the speakers.

Only 50 tickets remain.

Get your tickets: idlsummit.com

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.