Twenty Feet Down

Scattered focus yields scattered results.

Early in my life, that looked like trying to be proficient in many things to seek validation.

The reality is that the areas in which I was uniquely gifted and talented gave me the best results.  I just didn't WANT to focus on them.

For a long stretch of my life, I measured my worth by how hard I could go.

It was a badge of honor to work hard and fast.

There was no time to stop, think, or strategically evaluate the next best steps.

Ready. Fire. Aim was not only a credo of warfare but also a mentality that permeated life, where the days ended faster than the chores.

I carried that straight into my career. Consulting for dairy farms, early mornings, long drives, always pushing and charging to get results.  Results would validate me.  No results, then I would push harder, most often pushing the very people I worked for away.

I never said that question out loud. Am I worth anything if I stop?

In The Things We Hide, I describe four walls leaders build out of their fears and insecurities. Insensitivity. Isolation. Inactivity. And the loudest one of all, Intensity.

Intensity rarely looks like a problem. It looks like drive. It is the person who outworks the room, who never lets up, who wears the exhaustion like proof of something. Underneath it sits a quiet fear: if I stop, I might find out I am not enough without the output.

Beliefs drive thoughts. Thoughts drive actions. Actions drive results. The belief that my worth lived in my effort built a life that was always moving and never arriving. Most of the time, it takes getting knocked flat to see it finally.

The wall I thought was making me strong was the same one keeping me from ever feeling like enough.

Podcast

Christie Garcia is the founder of the Mindful Choice Leadership Academy, a Forbes Coaches Council contributor, and the author of Your Ego Is Showing. She spent years in high-pressure healthcare sales, on top of the world by every visible measure, until a twenty-foot fall forced her to stop long enough to see what she had been outrunning. Today she helps leaders at companies like Airbnb and Oakley manage the ego that quietly runs the show.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Christie.

1. Your Ego Was Built to Protect a Younger You

Christie’s core idea is that the ego is not arrogance. It is the survival system we built as kids, out of whatever we had to survive: a bully, a hard parent, a moment someone told us we were not enough. It worked. It got us here. The trouble is that the thing that protected the eight-year-old is still running the room decades later, long after the danger has passed. As she put it, “Now as a grown-up, it’s no longer protecting us; it’s hurting us. It’s pushing away the good people too.” She names three versions of it: the controller who has to win, the protector who has to be right, and the complier who has to be liked. Each one is chasing the same ghost, still trying to prove to someone long gone that it finally measures up.

2. Awareness Is Easy. Ownership Is the Work.

Most of us already know our patterns. We will happily admit we can be difficult, then move on without changing a thing. Christie says that gap is where the real work lives. “It’s the ownership part that we’re missing. We’re not owning the things we’re aware of.” Awareness lets you describe the wall. Ownership means you stop hiding behind it, even when that means facing the insecurity underneath. That is the part the ego fights hardest, because once you own it, you can no longer pretend you did not know.

3. You Can’t Lead the People You’re Competing With

The most expensive place the ego shows up, Christie says, is the jump from doing the work to leading the people who do it. The same drive that made you the best individual contributor turns on you the moment your job becomes making everyone else better. She watches executives cling to being the smartest person in the room because letting go feels like losing their worth. But as she told me, “You’re not being a leader if you can’t elevate yourself out of the daily task.” A leader who cannot hand off the work is not guarding their value. They are capping everyone under them, themselves included.

One Percent Better

Christie’s whole practice comes down to a single line: be one percent better every day. Small, deliberate, repeated. It is the same kind of quiet work that actually changes a life.

Leaving a review is one of those small things.

If you have read The Things We Hide, take two minutes and leave one on Amazon. It is a tiny act of ownership, and it decides whether the next leader who needs this book ever finds it.

And if you have not picked it up yet, let this be the nudge. The whole book is about the walls we build to feel safe and the beliefs holding them up. Christie would tell you that owning that is where it starts. So would I.

Leave a review or grab your copy: Amazon.com

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