Why You're Still Stuck Even After Doing All The Right Things (Personal Development Wisdom Snippets) | #631

What if the reason you're not moving forward has nothing to do with what you know or what you've done, but with who you are being?

A moment from the podcast archive that I felt deserved to be heard again.

Today, my guest Dr Ryan Gottfredson, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author and leading expert on mindsets and vertical development, shares one of the most clarifying distinctions I have ever heard in personal development: the difference between your doing side and your being side, and why focusing on the wrong one keeps so many high achievers permanently stuck.

Press play to discover why the next degree, certificate or course might not be what you need, and what to focus on instead.

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VALUABLE RESOURCES:

Listen to the full conversation with Dr Ryan Gottfredson in episode #512:

https://personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com/512

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Coaching with Agi: https://personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com/mentor

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🎙️ Want to be a guest on Personal Development Mastery?

Message Agi on PodMatch: https://www.podmatch.com/member/personaldevelopmentmastery

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Personal development podcast for midlife professionals, offering actionable insights for personal growth, mindset tips, self mastery and purposeful living.

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Transcript

[Agi Keramidas]
Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast, and this is another snippet of Wisdom, where I select my favorite, most insightful moments from previous episodes. Let's dive right in.

[Ryan Gottfredson]
What's really important for us to understand is there's two different sides of ourselves. And in fact, let me bring up some examples. So maybe some of these will ring a bell with some of our listeners.

So I'm thinking about people like Michael Jackson, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, Elizabeth Holmes, if you're in the leadership space. These are all people who have largely kind of been at the pinnacle of their profession. They are incredibly talented individuals.

They have great amount of knowledge, great amount of skills within the field in which they play within. And it's these talents and skills that have allowed them to reach the fame and the success that they've been able to reach. But I picked these people for a reason, is that while they're incredibly talented, there's also controversy surrounding each of these individuals.

And what's interesting about this is the controversy associated with these individuals doesn't have anything to do with their talent, knowledge, skills, and abilities. It has something to do with something else. And this helps us to understand that there are two different sides of ourselves.

There's our doing side, which is our talent, knowledge, skills, and abilities. And there's what I call our being side. And our being side is more closely akin to our character, our psyche, our mindsets, our level of consciousness, our emotional regulation.

And ultimately, it's how the quality by which our body's nervous system is wired for us to operate within our world. And so one of the things that I found, and I learned this the hard way, is that if we're feeling stuck or frustrated in our lives, it is usually we try to get out of it by focusing on improving our knowledge and our skills. But the reason why we're stuck and frustrated generally is not because of our knowledge, skills, and abilities.

It's usually because of something connected to our being side. And so I imagine for our listeners here today that at least at some point in your life, you're here listening to this because you have been stuck or frustrated about where you have been. And if that's the case, because I've been there, it probably is more connected to your being side than your doing side.

And ultimately, you're probably here because you want greater support and guidance to help you with your being side. And here's what I've learned, is that most people just don't really know about their being side and aren't really connected to it.

[Agi Keramidas]
I'm thinking of, you know, that person you mentioned earlier who might be feeling stuck in some way in their life. How can they recognize, okay, maybe it is not my doing that I'm feeling stuck, but something else. Is there any sign, anything that will help someone to see that for themselves?

[Ryan Gottfredson]
Yeah, well, let me give you an example of a lady that I did some coaching with not too long ago. So this lady is, it was actually her boss that came to me and he said, I'm kind of at my wits end with this lady, and not wits end, but just, I want to help this lady progress in her career, and I have been unable to help her progress. And so he said, would you be willing to coach her?

And I said, yeah. So he sent me over an email connecting us and she responded back saying, here's when I'm available. And at the bottom of her email, there are a bunch of letters after her name, signifying different degrees that she has, and there's also these different like certificate logos that are beneath her name.

And I'm thinking, man, this is an incredibly, she has invested a lot in her development. And so I was just thinking, seeing this email is, what value am I going to add to this lady as a coach? She's just done a lot of development work.

And so as I got on the call with her and I got to know her, what I learned is that she has been with this company for over 10 years. And every year, she has been passed up for promotion into what she wants. She wants to be a leader.

She wants to, you know, increase in her salary. She wants to move up in the organization and she has stayed stagnant. And so every year when she gets passed up for promotion, she goes and gets a different degree on a different certificate.

What she's doing is she's adding tools onto her tool belt. And that's good, right? There's nothing wrong with that.

But as I got to know her, what I came to realize is that she, her being side, has some fears and insecurities that are causing her to be more passive and reactive as opposed to proactive and intentional. And that's a big signal that kind of helps us to feel into our being side. Is our level of reactivity, are you familiar, Agi, with the term window of tolerance?

[Agi Keramidas]
Feel free to explain it for sure.

[Ryan Gottfredson]
So our window of tolerance is our band of cognitive and emotional control. And now when we're feeling in an environment where we feel safe, secure, we're going to operate at the highest levels of our cognitive and emotional control. But the more stress and pressure that we experience, the more our body's nervous system becomes a little bit more tense and we start to increasingly lose our cognitive and emotional control.

And so everybody, each of us, we all have a window of tolerance. Now some of us have a wider window of tolerance than others. And the wider our window of tolerance, our greater capacity to navigate change, pressure, stress, complexity, and uncertainty.

And what I just found with this lady is that she has a very narrow window of tolerance. Now all of her degrees and all of her certificates were great because it helped her gain more knowledge and more skills. But they didn't do anything to help her on her being side, widen her window of tolerance, help her to overcome her fears and insecurities so that she can be more intentional and proactive as opposed to this passive and reactive individual.

[Agi Keramidas]
If you enjoy listening and appreciate what we're doing here, the quick, simple favor I'm asking of you is to click the subscribe button. Until next time, stand out, don't fit in.