TEN Episode 116 – Duo Episode: When Your Strength Becomes a Liability
00:00:00 Gino Wickman
I took great pride in saving someone, fixing someone, helping someone, and I'd end the day, "Yes, look what I did," and it burnt me out.
00:00:25 Rob Dube
Hello everyone, my name is Rob Dube, and I am here with Gino Wickman. Gino, how are you?
00:00:31 Gino Wickman
I'm leaning in for this one. I am ready to roll, baby.
00:00:35 Rob Dube
Get the camera on that face.
00:00:37 Gino Wickman
I cannot wait to roll about the topic.
00:00:38 Rob Dube
Get the camera on that beautiful face of yours. All right, so when does your strength, being the strong one in your life, actually become a liability?
00:00:48 Rob Dube
So I'm going to refer to our book Shine, Discovery Number Three, "You Can Be Driven and Have Peace." This book, as you know, if you've been listening, is for driven, high performers of this world. And Gino, you and I work with these kinds of people, and they're often seen as the strong ones in their lives, the ones who seem to take it all on. And I'm not going to — I don't want you to answer this, but what I'm wondering is if any way this resonates with you. Don't answer yet. Now, I describe the strong ones as people who carry a lot of.
00:01:24 Gino Wickman
Do Morse code since I'm not allowed to talk.
00:01:28 Rob Dube
That's good. That's good. So I describe the strong ones as people who carry responsibility easily, and they rarely complain. But over time, I've noticed the strength becomes part of their identity. There's a great, actually real-life story in the book Shine. So if you have the book, you can check it out on page 155 of the revised version, and it's page 44 of the original version.
00:01:56 Rob Dube
Now, with this identity comes an emotional and energetic weight, which is what we're going to discuss. It isn't necessarily as obvious as one might think. That's why I call it subtle. Burnout and exhaustion can really come about without you even noticing it, and then you become disconnected from your own needs.
00:02:16 Rob Dube
And this is a way that high performers keep themselves going, that disconnection, without realizing how much weight they're really carrying. So most of the time, it isn't actually a conscious choice. It just seems to be happening. So what's coming up, Mr. Morse code?
00:02:35 Gino Wickman
Ego. So can you refresh my memory on the question, or was that rhetorical?
00:02:41 Rob Dube
There's no question.
00:02:42 Gino Wickman
There's no question.
00:02:43 Rob Dube
Yeah. Oh, the rhetorical question that I asked you? I'll come back to it. No, but you just say what's coming up for you.
00:02:52 Gino Wickman
Here's what's coming up for me. Ego. So I'm going to share where I am in my life, which will, I think, be fun. And for those of you out there, see if you can relate with this. But I spent a lifetime being the savior, the hero, and I took great pride in saving someone, fixing someone, helping someone. And I'd end the day, "Yes, look what I did," and it burnt me out. And I'm reminded of just when I think about my clients, how invested I would be in my clients and how badly I would need that August sabbatical to decompress, to clear all that energy.
00:03:44 Gino Wickman
And I can also remember every year, my trip to Boulder with my friends, those four days, I would be so burnt out going there, and I would come back so peacefully because, again, I would decompress. The world would be on my shoulders. That's just clients. Then you add to that friends and family. And so I just loved being the savior. Now, let's talk about where I am now because I've had some big ahas around this, and I have let go of that probably fully just in the last year. This is very recent, but steadily over the last five years.
00:04:20 Gino Wickman
Once I saw that I was holding it all up and thinking everybody's problems were my problems, oh my God, it was so exhausting. And so it's gradual. And it started out with the lowest hanging fruit, you know, the people that — this isn't going to be — this is going to be terrible to say, but were less important. And so it's like the closer it got to the epicenter of my most immediate family or friends or clients. So it was gradual. But the short answer is I let go, and I shifted it because I still want to help, but the help is so different now because the help is listening. I will listen, and I will give advice.
00:05:02 Gino Wickman
I will not take on the problem. I will not cut a check to solve the problem, which is like the easiest thing to do, especially when you have money. But I think the biggest aha in all of it, with all of this hero stuff I just shared with you and what was filling up my ego at the end of every day and killing me internally, what I realized is, you know, so using the example of cutting the check or, again, solving the problem for them, the problem is their lesson. And I'm like, I'm literally — I don't know why I want to use the word castrate. That's not the right word, but that's the word that came up. So let's put it out there. We already talked about words in the past.
00:05:43 Gino Wickman
But you're stunting their growth. You're depriving them of learning their lesson. And so it's like, not only was it unhealthy for me to be the hero and the savior, it's unhealthy for them for me to be the hero and the savior because I'm robbing them of life's experience by cutting a check to solve their problem, by getting involved in solving their problem.
00:06:08 Gino Wickman
So I will help. I will make a phone call where it might help. I will listen. So I'm a really good listener, and I think I offer good advice. I call it navigation now. I will do that.
00:06:19 Gino Wickman
That's heaven. But that's because they're coming to me for my advice, not to solve their problem. And it was always to solve their problem. And even when it was healthy and they came for my advice, I would still solve their problem because my ego needed to be the savior. So that's what comes up first.
00:06:36 Rob Dube
Yeah. There's so much good in there. So in the book, Discovery Number One, "You Are Driven," I wondered, are the strong ones or whatever you want to call it, the people who take it all on, are they the driven? Is that kind of a common theme amongst the driven?
00:06:55 Gino Wickman
Yes. But I'll say this because there's two things, right? What comes first, the chicken or the egg? So are driven people driven because they're so fucked up from their trauma in the past, or do we come into this world driven and we fuck things up in the past, right? So who knows which came first, you know, we fucked it up or they fucked us up? So that I don't know.
00:07:19 Gino Wickman
And I don't even think it's necessary to try and figure that out. My belief for what it's worth is we're born driven. We're driven souls. And there's so many of us on this planet, and these driven souls find these bodies and go do driven things in the world.
00:07:33 Gino Wickman
But nonetheless, shoot forward in time, we are traumatized. And so our ego, again, is trying to solve the pain from the past. We felt unloved. And a hypothetical example, the driven person felt unloved for whatever reason in their childhood. At 35, they're still seeking that love.
00:08:01 Gino Wickman
They're still trying to fill that hole. And they realize, if I solve your problem, you're going to love me. It ain't true. It ain't real. Now, that's where you get people that are like beggars and hangers-on that they will love you, but for all the wrong reasons. You know, what's the word? Real friends and deal friends, right? So we're seeking that love. And so we're trying to solve the pain by being that thing that we weren't.
00:08:28 Rob Dube
And I think, too, just kind of going down that path, it becomes part of your identity. And we've talked about identity on other podcasts, but I think bringing awareness to this, why am I involved with this? Why am I trying to solve this right now?
00:08:44 Rob Dube
The most painful thing I've learned is in my family life, my non-work life, especially with kids. I have my wife, my kids, seeing them in any sort of pain. I want to fix it right now.
00:08:58 Rob Dube
And back to your point earlier around letting them have their experience in this life, which is also a lesson for me to have the experience of watching them have the experience. That's part of my lesson in life. Okay.
00:09:18 Gino Wickman
I'm having a visual. I got to share my visual.
00:09:20 Rob Dube
Yeah, please.
00:09:20 Gino Wickman
Okay. And so here we are, the driven, at the end of the day on our fucking deathbed. It's like we're fucking exhausted, right? And we're laying there half-dead. We've taken two years off of our life, and we're laying there, and it's like this, "Yes, but I saved three people today. But I helped three of them. But I solved three problems." So anyway, I hope that visual helps.
00:09:44 Rob Dube
That's great. We have to get that on camera. I hope we did. We did. Oh, that's so good. And Gino, for whatever it's worth, what might somebody actually say on their deathbed?
00:09:59 Gino Wickman
Whoa. I wasn't expecting that one. What might somebody say? But give me two scenarios. The one that didn't figure it out and kept trying to save the world until the day they died, or the one that figured it out and stopped trying to save the world?
00:10:14 Rob Dube
Well, I don't really know, but maybe there's someone in your life that had something to say.
00:10:22 Gino Wickman
You know, in every variation of what people say on their deathbed, it's like, you know, I would have worked less and played more, or I would have stopped worrying about the small stuff. So, you know, I think what most of us driven would say is, "I wish I didn't worry so much and work so hard, and I wish I would have enjoyed life more." So some variation of those words.
00:10:53 Rob Dube
Okay. Let me say this about high performers carrying around this emotional weight, this energetic weight, oftentimes without realizing it. So in Discovery Number Two from the book, "Decisions Are Made Out of Love or Fear," what I notice is often the strong ones, these high performers and driven people, are oftentimes holding space for others. They're not taking care of themselves first.
00:11:20 Rob Dube
I notice what they're doing is they're constantly managing outcomes. They're managing people and their emotions, and it can take such a toll on you. Also, rarely noticing or admitting their own fatigue mentally or even physically, just trying to keep it all together. It's fear. It's masked as love, but it's fear.
00:11:42 Rob Dube
I'll give you an example. Maybe one of my kids has a problem, and I could easily solve it like you were talking about earlier by writing a check. Does that take care of me? No, it goes much deeper than that. It's momentary. It takes care of me for a second, but it doesn't take care of me in the way that I really need to take care of myself. So is anything coming up for you on that, Gino?
00:12:06 Gino Wickman
Yeah. So your question gives me pause, and I'm trying to clarify what the pause is, okay? And I think I've got it. So it's like I feel like you've bridged from these driven people, like the two of us, that are the saviors and the heroes, to self-care. And there's absolutely a bridge there. But for me, it's like I can't get my head out of the point of this podcast episode if we accomplish nothing else in this episode.
00:12:37 Gino Wickman
But for you out there, because right now I'm incapable of talking about self-care, and so I need you to carry the heavy lifting on this one to say, "Here's one or two or three ways you can do self-care." I feel like there's Google it, and there's 7,000 ideas for self-care. For me, the message is this. Stop it. Stop it. The message is if you can see that you're being a savior, and if you can see that it's not healthy, and if you can see how you're stunting people's growth by doing it, and if you can flip that, when I say stop it, stop it just means stop solving their problems, stop cutting the check.
00:13:19 Gino Wickman
Just listen and advise. The greatest thing you can do is be a mentor to them. Be a navigator in their life. Listen and advise. And so that's step one. It's just like an awareness that says, "Holy crap, my ego wants me to be a savior, and that's what's artificially filling me up." Like that's the aha, voilà moment. I hope for many of you out there, back to Rob Dube with self-care.
00:13:47 Rob Dube
I think you've said it all, to be honest with you. I'm not going to even go there. I think you've said it all. So, you know, because ultimately, Discovery Number Three is you can be driven and have peace. You could still be the strong one, but you can have that with peace. So I think we're going to wrap it up with that, Gino.
00:14:04 Gino Wickman
Cool.
00:14:05 Rob Dube
Yeah. Good job. Thanks to all of you for joining us, as always, and we'll see you next time. In the meantime, stay focused and much love.
00:14:16 Gino Wickman
Thank you for listening in today. We truly appreciate you taking the time to spend with us. And please tune in for the next episode. Until then, we wish you all the best in freeing your True Self. Stay focused and much love.
