Why Smart People Stay Stuck
How many opportunities have you talked yourself out of this year?
Not opportunities the world took from you. Ones you took from yourself.
The smarter you are, the more you see what can go wrong.
The more you see what can go wrong, the more you hesitate.
And the more you hesitate, the more you convince yourself that hesitation is strategy.
It is not strategy. It is fear wearing a very convincing disguise.
In this talk I unpack why brilliant, capable, experienced professionals
keep getting in their own way.
You will learn why smart people stay stuck.
And the one shift that changes everything.
Watch below.
Transcript available underneath for on-the-go reading.
Transcript
Why Smart People Stay Stuck
How many opportunities have you talked yourself out of?
This year.
Not opportunities the world took from you.
Opportunities you took from yourself
The price you almost charged, the post you almost published,
the offer you almost launched, the podcast you almost pitched
Almost
But here's what I know if you are here, now, listening.
You're not here because you lack ideas.
You're not here because you lack ti- talent or wisdom or experience.
You've earned all that.
You're here because something keeps getting in the way
between the idea and the action.
And today, I'm gonna name that thing. It's nothing I made up.
It's what I read about and was inspired by, and it's called The Intelligence Trap And the smarter you are, the harder it hits
Here's how it works The more you know, the more you can see what can go wrong. The more you see what can go wrong, we hesitate. The more we hesitate, the more we convince ourselves that hesitation is the strategy.
But it's not strategy, it's fear wearing a very convincing disguise
For example…a story.
I thought of this special offer a few years ago.
Times were tough, and I was just gonna throw it out there.
I even had it, you know, the little flyer, just for a brand assessment, $397.
Like I needed some cash. Do you hear those words?
But I stalled I didn't do that thing But damn if somebody else didn't.
And it was somebody I'd had a phone call with as a colleague not too long before. She wasn't a brand strategist.
She wasn't even a copywriter for that matter.
She was a ghostwriter, a book writer, an author for, children's books
And I looked on LinkedIn and she was offering brand audits
Go look at your website
I was so mad.
Less experience, less knowledge, far less awareness of the risk.
And she did the thing
She launched the messy version. You should have seen the flyer, the meme.
She moved. She took action.
And we look at people and we're like, "How'd they get there so fast?
Wow, I was just following her three years ago, and look at her go.
Good for her. Uh-huh."
They weren't smarter, they weren't more ready.
They were just simply less afraid of looking stupid
That's the brutal irony of the intelligence trap I learned.
It's called this Dunning-Kruger effect, and it's in real time.
The least qualified people feel the most confident, and the most capable, we just stay quiet as a mouse, you know?
We're the most quiet
But you know what the hard truth is?
Visibility is rewarded in this world, not potential.
Potential is not marketable. We can't wrap a revenue stream around potential. if revenue is what you're after.
The market rewards motions, not the whiteboard.
That comes from a regulated nervous system and
being in alignment with who you are and
what you stand for in your outward business
Here’s another example:
I scheduled a master class …out of urgency. I just had to do it.
Just get it done. Just put it on there, yeah. Five weeks is good.
I hadn't written it, hadn't done the front, hadn't done nothing.
I just was like, "Gotta do it. I'll do it. I'll pull it off. God'll help me."
Well, it was pretty clumsy. It wasn't good.
But I did it And the second version was clumsy too.
But that's their job. That's their job.
You can only get toversion 10 by going through one through nine
But perfectionism is procrastination that's wearing expensive clothes.
You know, it cloaks itself in reasonableness.
You see? It's so important.
So there's a discernment that needs to happen.
Every time we act while we're afraid, our nervous system logs it.
I was afraid to put on that master class, and I could have used the excuse, but I committed, and I made the intention
that I was not gonna distort my own natural resources,
that good was gonna be good, and that I would just have people in the room.
I wasn't not fearless.
I've just failed so many times
That it stopped having so much meaning in marketing
The secret isn't really just the gumption to get out there and do it at all costs,
it's also the repetition.
Just knowing, not putting the expectation on the thing, on the post, on the email. It's not the tiger our nervous system has to save us from.
Then We expand. Our capacity and expansion grows, and
that discomfort fades
We don’t allow these things don't have meaning
So this is how confidence is built. Now that we have the roots,
this is how confidence is built.
Update the website. It’s not written in stone.
You're gonna update it again. Just go ahead. Do the homepage.
And the nervous system connection,
this is what I want you to bring to your heart,
because this is what makes this room different from every other marketing program you've ever encountered.
We don't just talk about action.
I'm speaking to the state that you take your action from
The difference between panicked motion and inspired action is huge.
But inspired action produces results.
All of a sudden, that appointment canceled and now I can refine the slides.
But I was okay with it if they weren't. I just go with it.
I just wanna get out there now.
So the difference is your nervous system.
When your body's in threat mode, we analyze things,
we overanalyze, and we find every reason to wait,
every flaw in the plan,
every possible way that it could go wrong, and
that's not wisdom.
We have earned wisdom.Let's not let our nervous system diminish it. It's a memory, not reality.
Your nervous system is trying to protect you from a danger that doesn't exist, and this is how we reassure it.
We expand and expand our capacity little by little.
Not gonna do the whole website this week.
It's unreasonable. It distorts our resources.
We're gonna give ourselves a reasonable timeframe.
We're gonna sit and we're gonna breathe, and
we're gonna say, "What is a reasonable timeframe?"
And see what intuitively number comes up then put it through the cognitive.
When your body is regulated, we have access.
Something different happens. Our prefrontal cortex literally comes back online.
We can see clearly, and we can feel the, the next right move
This is why we regulate before we create, before we post, before we do the video scripts and make the plan, and then before we go out and make that video, we regulate.
Then I can rest in it. Then I can move.
Move with peace, from truth, from life, from love
The intelligent trap catches smart people.
Why? Because they live in their heads
The antidote isn't to think less, but it's to arrive in your body first, get grounded, and then move Inspired action with gumption.
Divine inspired action with gumption.
It takes gumption for me, but that's it.
That's it. It's that simple.
Because everything else unfolds, everything else loses its meaning.
I don't have to get my panties in a wad over something that already happened.
Like, "God, why did I do it like that?
Why didn't I make that webinar?
Why didn't I do that slide? What are you..."
I used to do that.
So today, what I want you to do, I want you to think of one thing you've been sitting on, some uncomfortable stretch.
Maybe you've been calling it strategy
But let's just breathe into this.
I'm gonna give you a few seconds
And I want you to name it to yourself
Probably came right up, didn't it?
Now, I want you to make a commitment to yourself and your business that you'll do it this week
Not try, not plan it. Do it.
Because the truth is, you're not stuck 'cause you're not smart enough, because you're not ready.
You're stuck because you're waiting for
a feeling actually that's never coming
If you get stuck, that's the first thing that I look for.
What is my expectation? 'Cause that is tangling me up
So the people who are where you wanna be didn't wait to be perfect.
In fact, they went through their own version of fear.
They've moved through fear, okay?
And so we just get to choose it, and that's what I'll leave you with.
I wanna hear about that one thing that you pushed and expanded through with the regulated nervous system.
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