Transcript
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I was the kid growing up where the game didn't get to end until I won.
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You know that would mean that we're playing long after the sun went down.
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Communication is not communication.
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If it's one way, it has to be two ways.
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It's not about perfection, it's about direction.
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You will always have way more reasons not to than you will to do something, and in order to pursue your optimal self, you have to focus on the one reason why and find a reason to push away the four or five reasons.
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And that is my promise to anyone and everyone that I interact with through my life.
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What is going on L&M family family.
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If you have any interest, curiosity, and especially if you have a passion for human performance and human potential, I got a special nugget for you.
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I had the opportunity of spending some time with our guest previously, maybe a month or so back, and he has granted us the gift of coming on the Learnings and missteps podcast, mr steve meller, who you might notice his accent, you might be able to tell he's from louisiana, maybe, maybe not.
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He's an executive coach.
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He is the founder of growth ready and he also has a podcast.
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Like I said, I had the opportunity to play there, so clearly he is very accepting of weirdos because he let me be on his podcast.
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And not only is he a devoted husband and father, he's also a professional speaker and an author.
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There's all kinds of stuff that I'm going to try to contain myself and dive into so that the family out there can get some value out of it and dive into so that the family out there can get some value out of it.
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And folks, if you're new, this is the Learnings and Missteps podcast, where you get to see how real people just like you are sharing their gifts and talents to leave this world better than they found it.
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I'm Jesse, and now you are going to get to know Mr Steve, mr.
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Steve, how are you?
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Sir Jesse?
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I'm doing wonderful, brother.
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Any hour I get to spend in my day with your energy is an hour well spent, so I just appreciate the opportunity.
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I am so well-versed in lessons and making the incorrect step that I could not be in a better place to talk, I think, right now.
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Oh, good, good, so we're going to have some fun.
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So I did a little bit of stalking on the interwebs, on the socials, and you are a world-class competitor, right Like, you've been at the highest levels, and so the L&M family wants to know what advice do you have for hyper-competitive people, managing their pursuit of excellence and staying connected with the human beings that are most important to them?
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So much in one question.
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You know the connection that you finish the question there, this idea of remaining connected to the people around you.
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I think hyper-competitiveness it can be a superpower.
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It can also be an absolute kryptonite in terms of just how you truly handle this thing that we call life.
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And when I think about my background, you know the sport we'll probably get into it, but my sport growing up was swimming, swam at a very high level, became a top 50 world-class athlete in my respective event, coached at an even higher level, and for me that competitiveness is as pure today as it was back then.
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The difference between the 39-year-old Steve that's talking to you now versus that 18, 19-year-old version of Steve that used to be able to rock a Speedo and look good in it, as opposed to is that that 18, 19 year old competitiveness was at all costs.
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If I look back to that time, when it came to the costs themselves, in the grand scheme of life they were pretty insignificant.
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I'm talking about I had to maybe lose a few friendships, or I had to maybe say no to this party on a Friday night, or whatever it was.
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And then, as life evolves, the stakes get greater.
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Right, the stakes continue to grow.
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We find a spouse, maybe we have a child, we have a house.
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So adamant about achieving that, it becomes easy to become disconnected to the things that truly matter, because you get too focused on that one thing that matters in your mind, for whatever reason, it matters most.
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When life has this way of teaching us that, can we, just as we pursue this excellence and as life grows around us, can we find that alignment between the two and you'll notice I didn't say the word balance Alignment Can we find that alignment between pursuing high performance but then holding ourselves to the same standards when it comes to the relationships that we have in our lives too, those things that truly matter?
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Are we able to shift that alignment at times towards what matters most?
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So for me, man, it's an evolution.
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It never ends.
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I'm 39.
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I'm referencing the 18, 19-year-old version of myself.
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There'll be a day where I'm 59.
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And I look back on this 39-year-old version of myself and I'm like man.
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That kid learned a lot in the last 20 years.
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The same way that kid back in 19,.
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He's learned a lot too.
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But man, it's all about that alignment right, and I think when we get that alignment, everything else seems to fall into place.
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Yeah, yeah, good.
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I love your answer for a lot of reasons and I hope what the listener gets out of this is like there's no silver bullet, particularly this alignment versus I shouldn't say versus, but alignment or balance.
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And I have a perspective on intensity which maybe we'll get into a little bit down the road.
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But, being a competitor at the level that you've been at and I'm sure you still bring the same intensity to the way you serve your clients today how early did you discover that your appetite to compete and grow and learn and improve was different than your peers?
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When did that become aware?
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obvious I mean early, early, early early.
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I was man.
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I was a kid growing up where the game didn't get to end until I won you know it was and that that would mean that we're playing long after the sun went down.
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Man, man Like again.
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I was always the young I don't know why it was or how it happened but pretty much from the age of about eight until 16, 17, I was always around kids two, three, four years older than me, and you know you talk about dog, eat dog, be competitive.
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It's like, hey, if I don't show up and keep my chest out and hold my head high, I'm going to get eaten alive around these bigger, stronger, faster guys in all these different sports that I was playing, and what that really showed me, though, was that I was never deterred and that's kind of where I'm going to here is like even in those moments where I maybe lost 20 times, but I won the 21st time, for the lesson that came out of that every time was that you didn't get deterred.
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In those defeats, you found ways to say hey, on to the next one, on to the next one, and that's where I really noticed the difference growing up was that, when you're around sport.
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One of the stories that rarely gets told is the majority of people that compete in sport give up at some point.
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Every single age group you go.
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Another few kids drop out, their commitments go elsewhere.
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And I use the term give up lightly because at the end of the day sometimes it's just a matter of hey, my attention has moved elsewhere, my commitments are elsewhere, whatever it may be.
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And so at a certain point you get to that 17, 18 years old and you're moving into a senior level of sport and you have decisions to make about your entire life, nevermind the sport.
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Like, hey, am I, am I in on this sport?
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Am I, should I be more in on this part of my education now and all this kind of stuff.
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And suddenly now it's like, hey, everybody at this point has not been deterred, everybody at this point has kept going.
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So now that you're at this level, the senior level, the international level, as I eventually got to, then it becomes about okay, in this really small vacuum of performance, can you still remain focused and create and maintain that momentum in your work and in your results where you still don't get deterred?
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And that's to really fast forward.
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Now to what I'm doing with executives and business owners and emerging leaders.
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That is what I get to do now with them.
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They'll tell me at some point this is what I want to achieve and as we go through the adversities and the rollercoaster that is their business and life, my goal is to ensure that we don't get deterred.
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We stay on it, man.
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We keep going, because that thing that you wanted to do three months ago, it's still the case today.
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Maybe the adversity is getting the better of you today, but we cannot allow ourselves to get deterred on whatever that end goal, whatever that end vision is that we have in mind.
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Yeah, there's so much there, right?
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Sometimes it's really just a matter of keeping on, just keep going.
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For me, the reason it's hard to keep going is because it's so easy to stop, like, I mean, you've got a podcast right?
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Did you have a million downloads on your first episode?
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I still don't have a million downloads after 240 episodes.
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So it would be easy to just stop.
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But no, I don't know about you, but I know for me.
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Anytime, you know, when I start kind of losing the wind in my sails and I'm like, man, this is a whole lot of effort, you got to schedule, you got to edit, you got to blah, blah, blah, right around that time somebody will send me a text and say, man, I listened to such and such episode and it's exactly what I needed.
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The thing I got from it is going to help me.
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I'm like okay, I got juice for another year, let's go, is that the same?
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Oh, my goodness, okay, good.
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So, folks, if you didn't catch it, let me say it one more time Keep on keeping on, especially when it gets hard.
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Now there's probably some well, let's get into that here in a bit around.
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What are the signals or maybe criteria that somebody should use to decide that this is not the direction I need to go and maybe it's time for a shift in direction.
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But we'll come back to that.
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You started super competitive.
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If anybody was going to play a game with you Monopoly basketball, it didn't matter.
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They were going to play until you won, which I think is freaking fantastic.
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Then you got into swimming.
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Then you're a coach, professional speaker and advisor to amazing careers.
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Did you have it planned out and has it happened in the timeline that you expected?
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the skill of not being deterred was through the lessons and through the missteps.
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And so to this question too.
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It's like if you're trying to paint this perfect picture and we were joking before we got recording how growth and progress and improvement and success is not linear and I kind of joke with you I don't think there's even a line.
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I don't think there's even.
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Let's just stop trying to paint a line period, Like why don't we just say, hey, this thing, it's just a process in itself.
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Let's not define the law, let's not give it a line, let's not give it a path, let's just accept that this is an experience that we're all going through and we have the opportunity to own it.
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And I think that's the biggest part for me.
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I speak about this on stage all the time when I talk about growth.
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Growth is when you actually look at the dictionary definition.
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It's an incredibly vague term.
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It's not.
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People think when I say, hey, Jesse, man, we should focus on growth, and you're like heck, yeah, man, let's do it.
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We both think we understand what one another's saying, but if we then get pulled aside by someone else and say, hey, Jesse, define growth, Steve, define growth, we're going to have two different answers.
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We're going to have two different answers, and I'm sure every listener on this call is going to have a different answer for how they define growth.
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Now, that's okay, as long as you give it a strong enough definition where you're actually owning it, Because when we keep it vague, we keep it at an arm's length, we don't actually own it in that moment.
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And so when we talk about these ideas of our lives and this direction that we want to go on, that's all well and good.
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If you don't want to own it, then good luck with actually bringing any of that to fruition.
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And you can't then have the audacity to complain about where you're at if you're not willing to take ownership for the direction you're going in.
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And that's hard for people to accept.
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Man, it's really hard for people to accept.
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But for me, when I go back and look at my lifespan, you could never have convinced me I would have gone into swim coaching.
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I did it for 10 years.
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You could never have convinced me that I was going to be an entrepreneur here I am three years into it now.
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You could never have told me that I was going to be on stage speaking about a story of how I took an Olympic swimmer to an Olympic gold.
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That had no right, even considering that that was a possibility.
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But here I am telling these stories today because what I've allowed myself to do is simply own the experience that is my life and own what it is I want to get out of it, Outside of that man I give it up to the guy upstairs.
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He has a huge influence on that but at the same time I'm also being comfortable enough that this experience that we're all going through it's evolving as we go through it.
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We just have to be comfortable enough and own that part of it.
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Why is it ownership?
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You said the word multiple times.
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I'm not disagreeing, but can you fill in the blanks for the listener out there?
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I hear you say own.
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Why is that important and what does that look like?
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So I'll actually do it the other way around.
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So what it looks like, and then why it's important.
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So what it looks like, is you really putting your stamp on what it is you want and why it is you want it?
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And then there's this third piece that we rarely do why is it that you're the one that should make it happen?
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So it's not just what do I want and why do I want it, but why you?
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Why are you called to do this?
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Why are you the one that should do this?
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Because when we get to the heart of that third part of this, jesse, that's when the ownership happens.
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That's when we actually we see ourself owning it.
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It's not just this concept anymore, it's not this idea anymore.
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It's something and this is the other word I like to use around ownership.
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It's something we possess.
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We possess it.
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It's our vision, it's our dream, it's our legacy.
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However, you want to look at it, because we see us being the one bringing it to fruition, because we've defined why.
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We've defined why we are the one that can make it happen.
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As opposed to, this seems like a great idea, and this is why I want to do it.
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No, no, no.
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Go one step further, go one step further.
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Why are you the one that's going to make this happen?
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And answering that question and getting better about the way you answer that question, brother.
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That's how we develop ownership over time.
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Man, I'm going to have to rewrite that and maybe get a tattoo of it.
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You wouldn't be the first person that is considered a tattoo based on something that I said.
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So I appreciate that.
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Well, it's clearly like 100% evidence of why you're a professional speaker.
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And so we got a lot of people that are listening, that have big dreams, hopes that maybe are terrified.
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Like man, I can't motivate people to get tattoos of my words, yet Maybe I shouldn't be a public speaker.
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And so did you take a class?
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What was the journey in your head, the evolution for you to come to terms with being on stage and then saying, yeah, I'm a professional speaker.
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Yeah, I love the question.
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But first I want to give the L&M family member shout out.
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I got this awesome comment on the LinkedIn from Mr Edmund.
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Edmund says Jesse, your raw and real approach in an error where so much is camouflaged is rare and admirable.
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Keep it going.
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I respect your authenticity, edmund.
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Thank you, bro.
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Cause that that really makes me feel good.
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Cause sometimes I'm worried that I'm offending people or I might be losing credibility, but the truth is, if you don't have credibility, there's nothing to lose.
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So I think I'm okay there.
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I think it's such an important question because I think there's probably going to be people listening here that will try to discourage themselves and discourage themselves, but even try to justify why they should not speak.
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I actually have a number of my clients that I don't coach people on speaking, but now and again when I'm doing my executive coaching, it will come up and like, hey, I've got this opportunity to go speak or hey, I'm going to go on this podcast.
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I just don't know why I should be doing it and a lot of that.
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It's an opportunity for a person to really explore the value that they're bringing and the impact that they can provide.
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I think the more we make it about the external benefit, the less the more we get out of our own way.
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For me, I learned early on in my life I was one of these interesting kids growing up man where I was both the athlete and the actor.
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So usually in school it's like there's the sports people and there's the drama people.
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I was bouncing between the two.
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I was a little hybrid, and so up until as far as I went with my sport up until about 18, I I was actually quite committed to my acting too, performing, and so I did that all the way through the age of 18.
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And that was one of my biggest crossroads in life.
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Was I chose sports over that?
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But once I committed to going to college in the US at 20, I decided to do my degree in communication media, because I just felt as though part of my calling in life was to just communicate to people.
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I didn't know how I was going to do it, going back to that question earlier, like I didn't have that perfect, hey, this is what it's going to bring me to.
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I just knew where my passion and where my talents lay and I wanted to make sure that I was fine tuned in those to the best of my ability.
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And lo and behold, I went 15 years after getting that degree until I started considering getting on stages.
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Oh wow.
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So, the passion never went away.
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The talent also never went away.
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And here's something I really want to suggest to you and just make clear to your listeners, because I'm assuming you've got a lot of people on that listen to this who are leaders, people that are at some point in their day or their week.
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They are the voice in the room, not a voice in the room.
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They are the voice in the room.
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If you have an issue about being on stage, forget it, because you're already on stage.
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You're already on a stage.
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You're just not above people on a stage.
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You're not scheduled to be on a stage.
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That's the only thing that's different, because those people are giving you their undivided attention and you're doing the work around yourself to gain their respect and to demand their undivided attention.
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That is no different than anything that I'm doing on a stage.
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The only difference is I'm scheduled to get on the stage at a certain time.
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The speech is a little bit more worked out, there's probably a few more people in the audience, that's it.
00:19:14.509 --> 00:19:15.805
That's the only difference.
00:19:15.805 --> 00:19:17.567
The game itself is the same.
00:19:24.099 --> 00:19:25.042
The field is only the field, that's it.
00:19:25.042 --> 00:19:25.664
That's the only difference.
00:19:25.664 --> 00:19:27.210
The game itself is the same the field, it's only the field that's different.
00:19:27.210 --> 00:19:29.497
Oh yeah, One of my favorite things of speaking up on stage is that I'm too far to see people rolling their eyes.
00:19:29.497 --> 00:19:32.824
I can't see them roll their eyes when I'm in the office.
00:19:32.824 --> 00:19:35.067
I can see them roll their eyes.
00:19:37.090 --> 00:19:38.432
When I speak here in Louisiana.
00:19:38.432 --> 00:19:44.807
I mean you made that joke at the front end, but I think that's everyone in the audience is probably thinking man, he's a Louisiana British dude.
00:19:44.807 --> 00:19:52.721
And it's just like whenever I'm speaking in Louisiana, the response in the back is always hilarious because most people are just like what is this guy saying?
00:19:52.721 --> 00:19:53.101
You know?
00:19:53.101 --> 00:19:53.602
Like what is he?
00:19:53.821 --> 00:19:57.444
I think I know what he's saying it sounds really, he sounds really intelligent.
00:19:57.444 --> 00:20:00.846
He might not be intelligent, but he sounds intelligent just because of his accent.
00:20:00.846 --> 00:20:02.989
But yeah, it is funny.
00:20:02.989 --> 00:20:09.513
But like you said that, that close proximity, yeah, you got to, you got to deal with those, that body language a little bit more in your face, man.
00:20:10.434 --> 00:20:13.537
Yeah, exactly, and that feedback loop is instant.
00:20:13.537 --> 00:20:22.872
And just to reinforce what you said, you're leading meetings, you're having these crucial conversations as a leader where you've got responsibility within an organization.
00:20:22.872 --> 00:20:30.093
You already have the skillset and you have reps and reps of doing the speaking.
00:20:30.093 --> 00:20:32.565
It's just like you said, just a different field.
00:20:32.565 --> 00:20:35.181
I think that's a phenomenal framework to help people get through it.
00:20:35.181 --> 00:20:36.144
So thank you for that.
00:20:36.144 --> 00:20:38.431
Now, Shock the World.
00:20:38.431 --> 00:20:41.609
You wrote a book, Shock the World.
00:20:41.609 --> 00:20:46.690
Where did that happen and what was the experience of production like?
00:20:46.839 --> 00:20:49.608
Yeah, it's about to turn two years old.
00:20:49.608 --> 00:21:00.141
The book as we record this today and the story itself came from what ended up being pretty much my last act as a swim coach.
00:21:00.141 --> 00:21:06.794
So I, in 2019, I had a young, up and coming talent called Brooks Curry come to LSU.
00:21:06.794 --> 00:21:16.580
So I used to be the associate head coach for swimming at LSU and he was very unrecruited but highly talented, highly motivated, but for whatever reason, people just didn't take an interest in him.
00:21:16.580 --> 00:21:19.887
I took an interest in him because I saw what he was capable of.
00:21:19.887 --> 00:21:25.989
And in 2019, he came into my office and he said listen, coach, I'm feeling pretty good about my development.
00:21:25.989 --> 00:21:34.583
I know this might sound crazy, but I feel as though, if we do things right, I could be in with a shot to qualify for the US Olympic team.
00:21:34.583 --> 00:21:43.508
Now, if he'd walked into just about any other office in the world of college swimming and swimming period, not a lot of coaches would have taken him seriously.
00:21:43.508 --> 00:21:48.924
I heard him and I'm like listen, if that's where you want to go, I want to go there with you.
00:21:48.924 --> 00:21:52.368
Just know this If we pull it off, brother, we're going to shock the world.
00:21:52.368 --> 00:21:54.201
We're going to shock the world.
00:21:54.721 --> 00:21:56.222
And it became Jesse.
00:21:56.222 --> 00:21:59.965
It became our mantra for the whole journey we went on.
