You’ll hear in this conversation why I expect to use this recording with Jim as an example for future guests and listeners probably like you who are signing up for personal challenges and do what happens to a lot of people. They say, “I can do it.” and then when you interface with the rest of your life sometimes you realize, “Oh, wait I didn’t realize this thing or that thing.” So you’ll hear how he solved the issue for himself. Instead of spending less time with his family, he ended up achieving his goals slightly different but spending more time with his family and creating projects to spend time with his kids and his wife. That’s creating community. If you are here for leadership, not just environment, you’ll hear how leading others often solves problems. As with lots of conversations when we talk about acting in the environment in this conversation you will hear us talking about values and living by them. So without further ado here’s the next conversation.

***

Joshua: Jim, how are you doing?

Jim: Good, Josh. How are you doing?

Joshua: I’m doing great. I want to start off by people knowing why we’re talking now and it’s not our second conversation. It’s like our one and a half. So you e-mailed me just to update me on how things were going.

Jim: Yeah.

Joshua: And part of the reason why I suggested to talk, not just you and me talking but to record it, is that what I’m seeing a lot of these people have faced challenges it’s not what they thought and I think there’s a lot of people out there and I don’t know what listeners, how this fits with them but like a lot of people, they hit the first snag and are like, “Oh, I can’t do that.” and I can say that was me for a lot of my life. I’d say “Look I’m going to take on a challenge” and I hit something unexpected and I give up. And I think in your case a lot of people here, “Oh, he made this mental shift and then he wrestled better.” But then see what happens in the moment is a totally other story.

Jim: Yeah, yeah.

Joshua: And so I wanted people to hear what’s going on with you.

Jim: So it’s interesting because you are talking about that mental shift when I was wrestling but it’s easy, we sit here and we can talk about the mental shift but really what it looked like was a grown young man who was very good at his craft and walking out of the wrestling room in tears some day, some days just feel like, “Why the hell can’t I get to that next level?”. It was a lot of doubt and lot of struggle so this certainly isn’t that level, sort of intensity, what we’re going to talk about today but it’s the same concept. It’s like there’s an ugly middle, there’s a nasty middle that I am going through right now in terms of this challenge to reduce my carbon footprint.

And so what I emailed you about as I said I’m struggling to fit the bus trips in my life and I said it an hour to my commute because of, sort of the schedule of the bus because I live in a suburban area, there’s not like a regular bus that serves this area or anything like that. So I’m outside of the city, so just like there’s one chance to get on in the morning or one chance to get home at night and so that adds an hour to my workday which a lot of people might say, “What’s the big deal?”. Well I work a job where you have about 60 hours a week [4:46], it’s a lot of weekends, a lot of Saturdays gone the family a lot and I got four kids so an hour less of them is a big deal. You know certainly one of my core values is family. And so I e-mailed him like, “Hey man, I’m just struggling to make these bus trips happen because it takes away from my family” so you know it’s kind of brainstorming, is kind of like put it out there and trying to think it through as I am typing to you.

And so one of the interesting things that’s come out of this, it’s forced me, not forced me but I chose to have a conversation with all my kids, my wife, the six of us sitting down at the table for dinner a couple of nights ago. I said, “Hey, listen, my friend Josh is challenging me to reduce our carbon footprint and my plan was to do the bus trips and I can’t do it. You know I choose not to do it because it would take away my time, my limited already time with you guys.” I’m actually, “What do you guys think? What are some ideas you have?”. My kids range from 4 through 12 so I’ve got varying levels of suggestion, and my 4 year old, she just turned 4 so she was basically 3 actually at the time when we had the conversation and…

Joshua: Happy birthday!

Jim: Thanks, yeah, yeah. And she just vehemently said, “No dad, you could take the bus, you can take the bus. It’s OK daddy, you can take the bus”. That was her solution. The other three suggested things like, “What if we cut our showers down to five minutes, so we’re using less hot water, less water to heat so it reduces the carbon footprint but also the amount of water we use. In fact we are using, we pack four lunches a day, four kid lunches a day, right, every day and that means we go through a lot of sandwich bags with snacks and stuff like that in it. And they said, “What if we get some kind of reusable packaging, reusable stuff for putting our snacks and for lunches.” I said, “OK that’s a good idea.”

So we started doing that, we started already, we’ve probably saved, I don’t know, 10 or 12 sandwich bags which isn’t a lot but when you start adding that up, of course of years to come, it’s going to be a big impact not necessarily carbon footprint but in terms of the plastic and pollution and whatnot. And I guess somewhat, if you think about the shipping costs and the shipping of stuff, reducing the amount of stuff that we’re buying from the store and the packaging et cetera. We also my wife suggested that she could carpool one day a week to my daughter’s gymnastics because there’s another family that goes, that lives really close to us. So once a week or twice a week they’re going to carpool on their trip to gymnastics, that’s going to save a at least one car trip a week if not two. And then we’re talking about going one day a week where we don’t eat any packaged foods – no prepackaged granola bars or things like that.

So certainly there’s this idea that we’re going to do, we are already doing these things right so we’re implementing these things and we’re doing them. But it also helped me engage for five other human beings who are also living on this planet with us into this conversation where it’s now part of their psyche, now part of their reality, it’s now part of their mindfulness, of their impact on the planet and they’re going to think about things that they can do so it’s interesting about how when you fail you learn, it forces you into a corner a little and it forced me into the corner like, “Hey guys, I need help” to my family and now this is more, we’re all going to be better off because of it, because now those part their psyche and we’ve come up with some other alternative ideas, etc.

Joshua: Now you said when you fail and this happens, some people when they fail this happens but some people when they fail they give up. What’s motivating you? First I was like, “Oh I hope he’s not doing this just for me” but now I would be totally flattering myself to think that I was having that kind of influence on you because this sounds like something, there’s a lot more motivating you than me. At least this is what I feel like.

Jim: Well, yeah. Absolutely. So it’s interesting. It’s a program that I teach, it’s called “Reveal Your Path”. There’s four steps, we start out with core values. That’s the first step, we do the work to discover people’s core values and then we build on top of those core values. We build goals that align with those core values. And the third step is we work on your environment of excellence, we help you create this high performance, peak performance environment where you can achieve your goals, your personal goals, your professional goals, your health goals etc., your wealth goals. And then the fourth piece is creating a plan for follow through.

So part one -   core values, the environment is important to me. You know I was an environmental science major in college, I consider myself an environmentalist. So this aligns with my core values. So when you have a goal that aligns with your core values it’s harder to quit when you were on the failure, right. So when I was a wrestler that was something that was very important to me, becoming this, becoming the person I wanted to become through wrestling, wherever I failed it was hard to quit because it was something that was deeply important to me. So it’s the same thing. So this is important to me at a level beyond just like, “Hey, I want to do this for fun”. What’s not for fun? This is something that’s important. So it aligns with my goals, that’s one.

Then the second reason why it was hard to give up on this is because I had, as part of my environment of excellence, you Josh and all the listeners who are listening, so this is this level of accountability, right. I put it out there. I told you that I was going to do this and ensure certainly I can say, “Josh hey I can’t do it. Sorry, I failed, I give up” but that would not feel good to me because I felt accountable to you. And whenever we have that level of accountability, we had that as part of our environment of excellence, then we’re just able to, we’re able to achieve more in push through failure and deal with failure and it more at a healthier level.

Joshua: And you chose to make me a tool for your accountability. Is that right?

Jim: Yeah.

Joshua: If you didn’t care about the environment in the first place you wouldn’t have done it. So it’s, I’m like a side thing. If I read you write, sure like there could have been someone else who you would have been accountable to.

Jim: But there’s also a bunch of listeners still. You know so it’s more than just one person, it’s you as a friend and as somebody who I support in sort of your mission in life. And then there’s also sort of other listeners, so this is a public thing.

Joshua: So you’re like, OK, the first plan of attack didn’t work. What did you think? I mean, what happened was you started, you brought in your family and started opening up with them and talking to them about it. But what was the…Can you walk me through your words. I wouldn’t put it this way but I think in your words you recognize something was failing but you didn’t want to fail.

Jim: Yeah. So subconsciously the sort of first reaction was, “I’m just going to give up on this. I can’t do this. This doesn’t fit my life” and you know that was sort of this knee jerk reaction and reaction was just like I don’t need to do this. I’ve got a lot of things on my plate, I’m working a lot of hours and I’ve got my own podcast and working weekends, my wife’s in full time grad school and four kids,  I don’t need to do this, I’m just going to go back to the way it was.

Then I said, “Wait a second, that’s failure, that’s quitting” and whenever you run into a challenge there’s always a way around it. And so here’s a recent example of sort of that really I think exemplifies this so it’s a busy house, busy home, four kids and my wife Allie is now doing full time grad school this semester and is on top of life. And up until this point there was, we would have both said there’s no time for her to find six or eight hours a week in the evenings and in addition to her day work that she does for grad school or an internship etc. to study. We found it because we committed to it.

And so I thought to myself when I couldn’t find a way to get to the bus trips I was like, “OK, what’s the next level of thinking that I can do around this challenge?” And it was simply find a way, find another way. And so I said, “OK what if you know, yes there’s a great way to sort of look at problems and go like so. What if? What if you could do it hypothetically you could succeed at this? What would that look like?”. And I said, “Oh OK, well hypothetically if I could succeed, I could just tell my wife and kids, ”Hey you know it’s one last hour week you’re going to get of daddy being around.” Or what are some alternative ways, so I started to think of some alternative things and I could think of the alternatives but maybe I can get my family in this.

So one of sort of either a goal setting worksheet and then I go through it with my clients. And one of the questions is: Who are the people or groups of people or organizations who can help you achieve this goal? It’s pretty simple on this one – my family. Let’s sit down and it was a great topic of conversation over a family dinner and they helped me find solutions. And they’re all sort of a level of accountability for me and we’re kind of on a team now doing this and we’re all accountable to each other so someone goes get a shower, it’s like, OK five minutes, set a timer. You know the sandwich bag thing, we’re reducing those. It’s like OK we’re going to make sure the Tupperware is clean so we can use less of those, use less of the sandwich bags and just kind of use the plastic stuff that we already have in the cabinet. So making sure that stuff’s clean and if it’s not, just make sure we wash it by hand or whatever before we’re packing kids lunches. So it seems like a trivial meaningless thing to talk about, just like packing kid’s lunches but it’s like, this is this, it’s a microcosm of everything else that we’re trying to do in terms of minimizing our impact on the environment.

Joshua: To me when you say you’re framing it in terms of impacting the environment, that’s one perspective which is to me valuable, there’s another perspective when you care about the level of detail that it’s integrity, like integrity what you do when no one pays attention and if you don’t care about the details of things that’s like difference between an artist and someone who’s just like a hack, well there’s many differences but one of them is that you know you pay attention to every little detail and once you get to care about the details, you can’t be satisfied with not caring about the details anymore. And that to me is a major element of effective leadership is integrity. If you’re going to practice to wrestle and no one’s around so you just take it easy and tell people that you did the full thing, like that’s not going to work very well. The opponent’s going to figure that one out.

Jim: Yep, and you’re going to figure out that too when you’re the one who deep down nose when you step on the [14L52] and you’re about to get a battle that you cut corners and the same thing for leadership, if you’re cutting corners and you have to stand up and face the team that you’re leading, knowing that you cut corners there’s just going to be different. You are going to have a different tone of voice, you are going to have a different stance, you’re going to say some different words and you are going to have a little bit of self-doubt is going to creep through and be visible when those listening to you kind of read between the lines it’s going to come through, leadership can be impacted just enough for those cutting the corners.

Joshua: And you can’t fake it and people can tell and if you don’t have it, you’re not part of that community, and if you do have it you can fail all the time in the overt stuff but the underneath people recognize it will get it. Like I talk to people sometimes they’re afraid to go to the gym because they think that if they’re not in shape and they’ll get made fun of but any time I’ve had any interaction with people at the gym that’s always been supportive. But I guess if you are there and you just go to the gym and you’re just taking selfies and checking your e-mail and not really exercising people might give you friction on that. But if you there work out I think people are always going to support it and I think that’s the same with leadership. It’s the same with anything, like people who exude it will see that you’re exuding it and trying if that’s all you have.

I’m curious, you’ve described what you did. So you took on a challenge, the challenge had unexpected consequences. Okay you said, all right, well, that’s, “Oh wait no, I’m not going to take that. What can I do? Oh my family, I can work with my family”. So you worked with the family. That’s the facts. How do you feel about it? What’s the meaning of it?

Jim: That’s an interesting question and how I feel about it is there is a level of satisfaction in knowledge reinforcing that I can’t overcome challenges. I can face failure and find a different way, find a better way, find a new way. I can engage other people and let them help me because there are other people out there in this world who can help me and are willing to help me and are willing to be my partners in facing these challenges. These people are out there for whatever challenge it is for the listener whatever challenge you’re facing in your life right now. There are people out there, there are groups of people, there are individuals, there are organizations that can help you. You just have to go talk to them. You got to pick up the phone and you got to show up at a meeting, you got to go on the website, you got to register for an event. Just do it. Just start engaging getting out there and meeting the people who are who rather they can help you. And so in terms of how I feel I feel like my system works. I feel like my system of knowing my core values. Second, having goals that align with those core values. And third, having an environment of excellence and then fourth having a plan for follow through. When you put all four of these things together you can deal with failure.

***

Joshua: So when you talked to your family how did you feel? Okay. You came to them with “I didn’t succeed”. Maybe even said that you failed. I’m not sure. Were you humble, were you vulnerable, were you proud? I mean because that to me is the challenge because once you get the family involved. Well I mean you have a family that you’ve raised so I presume the support and support you had people to go to maybe others don’t have that but still. Was it hard for you to talk to them, was it hard for you? Like did they know about this beforehand? Were you risking something? Were you…How did you feel? What got you there?

Jim: They did not know about the challenge beforehand. And what are you going to say something else? Go ahead.

Joshua: I’m trying to make all the stuff accessible to people and for people to say like, “Where’s the hard part? Where’s the part?”Among the many places it can be hard because I think going to others for help is hard.

Jim: Yeah. Good question. Here’s how I felt. Here’s the hard part. What I felt and I feel this way in other areas of my life with my mastermind group, with other people that I talk to and lean on for advice and suggestions and help, when I’m facing struggle, challenges, adversity failures and setbacks. I felt relieved. I felt relieved that I could go to people and say, ”Help me, help me think this through”. I need you and those people helping me. So how did I feel? I felt relieved, I didn’t feel embarrassed, I didn’t feel hesitant, none of those things. It was a feeling of relief, knowing that I could sit down with people who cared for me and cared about my success and maybe cared at some level about the same kind of things that I do because my kids care about the environment, my wife certainly does and so I felt relieved.

And so here’s the hard part. The whole the hard part in all of this is the first part is that moment where I talked about earlier where I said, “I failed. I can’t do this. Forget it. Let me just move on with my life”. That’s the hard part. You’ve got to catch yourself at the hard part and go, “OK, stop” because you drift through that pretty quickly. Especially if there’s no level of accountability. You know you drift through that pretty quickly and go, “Okay”.

Joshua: You mean you could wake up one morning and say, “Oh, I just let that go. Oh yeah I didn’t really want to do that.”

Jim: You really didn’t want to do it, “Forget it it’ll be okay. You know I’m ok. Life’s okay the way it is, I don’t have to lose the weight. I don’t have to get that job. I don’t need a degree, I don’t need to finish my degree anyway. I don’t need whatever it is”. It’s so easy to brush that under the rug and move on and live with that failure, right? The hard part is to catch yourself there, and say, “Wow, wow. What if? What if this was possible? What if I could do this? What if I could make change?” That’s the crux. That’s the hard part, if you catch yourself at that moment and ask yourself the right question and I defined this whole idea of stopping and pausing and zooming out from your life, define it as a productive positive. I can’t remember we talked about it in our first conversation or not, but yeah it’s a short period, I define it as a short period of focus reflection around specific questions that leads to clarity of action and peace of mind.

And that’s what we want is that clarity of action. Okay, so I failed and my clarity of action comes from going, “OK, I’m just kind of sweeping under the rug”. Okay that’s my clarity of action. That’s nice. If you lack of peace of mind but a little bit of peace of mind going, “Okay, I’m done with that and then move past it” as opposed to going, “Wait a second, let me look at this other direction which is a little foggier. It would be more rewarding if I can get through it but it’s a little more cloudy, I can’t see the path forward there”. So when you get to that point and go, “OK I can take the easy route and just give up and fail and live with the doubt in the failure” or I can look at the take the harder route and say, “What if? What if that was possible? What if hypothetically, what if we actually could do this? What would be my next step? What if I could do this? Who would be the people or the person that can help me with this? What if I could do this, who would be the first, what would be step one to getting, to taking action and getting things done, moving towards the direction of success in this?” That’s the crux, if you can catch yourself at that moment and ask yourself a hard question, the “What if?” question then success becomes much more attainable.

Joshua: I feel like what you’re catching there is the word impulse, is that, is that really catching?

Jim: Yeah, sure, yeah, it’s probably the right word. Yeah.

Joshua: Yeah. To catch that impulse before you act on it, which should be the opposite leadership, is like reactivity. Okay, you could have accepted the impulse, you could have given up but you wouldn’t call it giving up in that case, you could have said, “This isn’t working, I’m not going to do it” and instead you did what you described like the hard way of doing things but you knew that there was reward and that said what is on the other side and how would you compare what you’re doing now versus what you would have done before? What you would have done otherwise?

Jim: So what I would have done? So what happens when you give up and just fail it’s like that one more seed, just one more seed in that lawn of self-doubt that we all sort of plant for selves throughout our life, right. And so it’s one less seed that’s not in that lawn. It’s one more seed that’s on the other side of the fence, which is growing positivity and confidence and the ability to deal with failure. So that’s kind of the shift that happens, right. This is one little thing that convinces me a little bit more that I can succeed despite failure or even often times because of failure.

Joshua: Yeah you really should feel like that one seed is like a very important seed. And who is it, James Collins or… Does any Good to Great or maybe 7 habits where they talk about ropes. You know a rope is you know any one little fiber is not a big deal but all together that’s who you are.

Jim: Yeah. Yes this fabric of who you are that’s just weaved through all of these experiences and these failures. It’s like, I think about my wrestling career and all the failures that eventually led to success. And like I know that I can work really, really hard, harder than most people and I know that I can deal with pain and suffering and failure but still come out and find success. They know because others have had that experience at least once. And once you experience that depth of an emotional level and that’s much more deeper, more emotional than what we’re talking about here in terms of you know the environmental challenge here. But when you have that deep level that was a big one for me. But there’s also a hundred or a thousand little ones that also led to that. Whether it’s in practice or dealing with an injury or conversation with the coach etc., these are all part of that fabric that’s weaved of this fabric of our psyche that tells us whether or not we’re afraid of failure or we can deal successfully with failure.

Joshua: Now someone might be listening to this and saying, “Well he’s had that depth of experience. And so he can get through this but I have not had that depth of experience so I can’t do it”. Someone might think something like that they probably think it consciously, a lot of people like, the impulse happens and then they’re on the other side and they’ve already accepted but to someone who’s listening and thinking, “Should I do this or not? Well he’s got more ammunition, he’s got more experience. Of course he can do it I can’t”. But this could be one of the things that leads up to it for that person. Like you had all those things that built up to the ability to do the hard thing that enables you to take on this and think of what I thought of. When you said relief I was expecting it to be like something really difficult but for you to say, “I’m going to get help from others” is not embarrassment or humility or anything like that it’s like relief. I’m like, “Wow I didn’t expect that one”. So I’m really like, that opened my eyes, my heart as well. And if you want that, you get that from, well the middle step, or like going backward, it was the most recent thing was having had such a big experience from wrestling but those big deep experiences came from things just like this.

Jim: That’s right. And one thing that I should point out is that one 7-minute match that determined whether I was quote successful or not successful, becoming an all-American and non all-American, I won by two points. It was a close match and it could have very easily gone the other way and without a shift in my psyche and made me feel like more of a failure. I don’t know, I can’t answer. Obviously I can’t answer that. I would like to think no, there wouldn’t have, but it’s like we’re all so close. We’ve all had those close calls of close opportunities. We were a finalist for a job but we didn’t get it. We almost completed death. We almost succeeded. It’s like the fine line in the things that are out of your control, haven’t been sick that day, had the referee made a bad call, had a million other things outside of my control, impacted this and change the outcome. That doesn’t change who I am and who you are as the listener. You’re still born with all of the capabilities, all of the ability any of the most amazing people in history, you have that in you too. And so you can’t let one experience or even a multitude of experiences stop you. You got to look at other experiences like my experience and read books about Abraham Lincoln and Michael Jordan and their failures and their struggles and go, “Oh, OK, well, Gosh! I haven’t failed like that”. So I guess I can, I guess I can push through this and achieve this.

Joshua: Yeah I guess I can still fail. I have more failure to get and still without it keeping me from greatness or maybe I have more failure to give and that will help me get to greatness. So in the context of things, the fabric of something being built up by a thread by thread and a lawn seed by seed, I want to comment on one thing that might seem like a side thing but you said that maybe it’s not that big of a deal not to use a couple sandwich bags here and there, but when you look at it long term it all adds up. That may be the case and I don’t want to detract from that, but I think that, one of the things that I’m realizing in a show is that much more than one little act here and there is the mind shift that leads to, the person who cares about a little bag here and there will also figure out a way to make much bigger changes. But if you never get past the sandwich bags you won’t get to those other big things.

So yes it’s nice to save a bag here and there and I hope that people will save bags all over the place. But with the real value is that, then you’re also do the showers, then you also do fewer car rides, then you also do other things. And the next thing you know, you’re living a life and two things have happened: One – you made much bigger effect than you expected. And personally, internally you’re living more and more by your values and less and less of being like, “Oh, I just can’t do that”. And less eating. I call it like eating you up inside and feeling guilty and just feeling resigned and giving to feelings of futility.

Jim: Right. It’s not about the plastic bags, it’s about the mindset, it’s the…

 Joshua: Responsibility, the effect on others, the empathy, the compassion.

Jim: Yes. [29:07] anything, it’s in success, it’s in business, in relationships, in health. It’s not about like finishing your work out, if your personal trainer or whatever tells you to do 10 push-ups and you do 11. It’s like what’s not about doing the one extra push up. It’s about the mindset. Your goal, this is something that I learned, was longer, it’s like coach tells you to do 10 pushups you do 11. It’s not about the one more push up. It’s about the mindset of “I’m always going to do more and I’m training and practicing”. It’s like your SIDCHA – self-imposed daily challenging healthy activity. It’s about the idea of discipline and you discipline yourself to do more and one thing, then it carries over to doing more and you discipline yourself to do, to be smarter about packing my kids’ lunches and that discipline carries over to other areas in my life, like showering, like carpooling, like other things that we do the impact. So it’s the mind. It’s not about the plastic bag. There’s a quote that comes out of this podcast “It’s not about the plastic bags”

Joshua But it is, I mean the plastic bag is what, that’s the medium or that’s the catalyst.

Jim: It’s about the mindset. Yeah. Right. Right.

Joshua: And I have to say, to hear someone say, “Yeah, your SIDCHAs, the self-imposed daily challenging healthy activities,” how heartwarming that is, I have to indulge and like share it how good that feels.

Jim: Love that, everybody in my Facebook group, they know about the SIDCHAs, all my clients that I’ve ever worked with are in that Facebook group and, we do a new one every month so we can look refresh it, so we choose one thing that we’re going to do every day for the month and then the next month we choose a different one, that’s a little different than yours. You’re doing the same one but it’s still the concept of a daily challenging healthy activity. And people love it.

Joshua: I’m actually indifferent from my perspective, as long as it’s self-imposed daily change and healthy and active whether you switch it or not all the time, like if you have one that’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday and other one is Tuesday, Thursday, or if you do one for one month, another for another month, that’s all fine with me as long as it meets those criteria. I think that that makes it give me the value, it will make you the best in the world of anything. It’s a bedrock on which to build your success and so forth in life.

Jim: And again it’s not about the SIDCHA, it’s about the mindset.

Joshua: Yeah, that’s the access to it.

Jim: I mean that that builds the mind that’s the access to it, right.

Joshua: And now got to leave some for our next conversation. This has been quite revealing and I hope that people are like, “I think it’s amazing to hear someone who’s a championship wrestler, now is struggling with something it would seem on the surface easier” or maybe they think, “Oh he’s a coach. This is going to be trivial for him and it’s not”. But if they didn’t get the middle steps they might think, “What you did was OK, that worked or switched”. But it’s not so easy, except it is, once you decide that moment that you talked about, once you adopt the mindset of “Let’s figure this out”, it actually is easy again and it is fun again. It is a family thing. And as opposed to eating up inside me like, “Oh, God I don’t want to deal with that, Joshua’s thing is so annoying. Like I don’t want to, I’ve got other priorities”. For you it’s like, “No, I don’t hear guilt and shame in what you’re doing”.

Jim: Right. Yeah, like you said it was a relief to have people I can go to and work through the problem with them.

Joshua: Now, I want to ask you a different question, it’s a personal one, personal for me because I’m having as I do more and more of these interviews, I’m finding many different responses than I expected. And I’m evolving. I think listeners are going to hear that. You changed your podcast from, if I remember right, it was like “Wrestling with Success”, now it’s “Success Through Failure”. I think there’s a third name at some point.

Jim: Yeah, it sorted out it was “Wrestling with Greatness” and then moved to “Wrestling with Success” and now “Success through Failure”. Yeah.

Joshua: Was that rebranding for other people, for yourself?

Jim: It was more for other people, to be honest. It was about really figuring out what I was trying to teach. And in the end that is the method that is “Success through Failure”. I think the name says it all and it didn’t in the beginning. Now the name says I was actually talking to prospective guests while back I bumped into them at a conference and it was amazing individuals and it was like I said my podcast “Success through Failure” and I said it’s about and he said, “You don’t need to explain what it’s about. The name says it all.”

Joshua: Yeah and you’re like, “That’s it”.

Jim: Yeah. That’s it, I’m like OK yeah, they got the right thing.

Joshua: Okay cool. Yeah it’s just, I’m finding, it’s leading it’s spurring more introspection and change in myself than I expected which is, I’m very pleased to find out. And so I saw your change and was curious about that.

Jim: Yeah.

Joshua: So for the next conversation for the second conversation, should we keep it where it was and then tucked in it by doing different things?

Jim: Yeah, I think so, absolutely.

Joshua: OK sounds good. So let’s wrap up there and thank you for sharing the middle step both the e-mail that prompted this and then this.

Jim: Yeah. The messy medal.

Joshua: Great, so I’ll talk to you in a little bit and thank you again.

Jim: Awesome, thanks Josh!

Joshua: OK, bye.

Jim: Bye.

* * *

I love how Jim took a challenge that for a lot of people they might have said, “You know what, this is too hard or it’s too much conflict” and instead he said, “What resources do I have, what can I do here?” and he involves the people affected in the problem and in the solution. And now he’s spending more time with his kids, more time with his wife. And for that matter, more time with the families of his kids’ friends, carpooling and so forth, that’s creating community. Now some people might listen to this and think, “Well Jim did these big things in his past, he was an athlete. And those things that he learned, they apply here. I don’t have that”. Well if you don’t have that, this is your chance. That’s what I’m funding over and over again with people taking on these challenges with the environment. If you’re looking to develop experiences, reuse succeed over failure, the environment is a place we can do it because most of us want to. If you’re listening to this, you want to lead the world a better place than you found it. This is your chance to develop experiences like Jim had and then you can apply them in your life all over the place. I also love how when you act on your values you like accountability, you want responsibility. That’s what Jim did and he used it, he used all these different things. I recommend listening to this again just to hear all the different ways that Jim was able to make things work for him. I also know that there’s an episode 2 coming up. This is Episode 1.5 and that was after Jim and I met in person. So it’s even more friendly. So I look forward to seeing you there.

 

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