Break Out of Your Loving Cage

This is the Daily Boost Podcast with Scott Smith. How are you? Come on in. So happy to have you here today. I'm in Death Valley, California right now kicking off the Badwater Crossing.

My buddy Croy is doing the running. I'm doing the watching. I'm in the car. I'm producing the videos. I'm having the crew run and gun and pick up all the stuff we need.

That's what I'm doing today. But I'm here for you today. And we're going to talk about the old Loving Cage, a concept that you need to know about We'll talk about it today.

Good to have you. My name is Scott. Thank you for stopping by. Yeah, out in Death Valley. We'll be there like 55 hours, I think. If he goes all the way, he'll do it.

I think his goal is 57 hours. He's 55 years old. So if he doesn't, I want him to do it in 55 hours. I said, talk about the marketing thing, man. Oldest guy to ever do this and breaking the record in 55 hours.

I think it's a great hook, right? So we'll see what happens. And if he doesn't make it, we'll scrape him up off the road and we'll spend a couple of extra days in Vegas by the bull.

That's all I'm going to say. My wife is just going to know. I just went to the pool. That was it. You can't say anything else because I'm not going to tell you.

All right, so I've done this a long time. I've done this show here almost 20 years, and I've been in this business probably 35 years-ish, helping people, figuring out life along the way. And make no mistake, that's what this is all about is figuring out life. That's it.

But there are three things that I have stumbled upon. in my search to figure out what works because I'm like everybody else. When I started out, I went through all the stuff. If you listen to the, uh, the many, most of the early years of the daily news podcast, you know, habits and goals and procrastination and communication and all that kind of stuff, the top kind of the top 10 or top 20 and self-help.

I was learning all those skill sets myself and kind of mastering that stuff, kind of a virtuoso of those things. But eventually you get to the point where you say, man, that doesn't work. And the reason it doesn't work, it actually does work, by the way. It's just a tool you use and play, but there's so much else that wraps around it.

And if you mature and you grow like I've done, and if you've been with me for a long time, you can tell me doing that. You can see I'm not really interested in teaching you how to set a goal anymore. There's plenty of people to do that, and you get that from ChatGPT.

I'm more about why doesn't it work and how do we get it to work? And why does life keep getting in the way no matter what? And that's been my entire focus my entire career. There are three things that I have birthed out of my brain the past three years after doing this for many, many years.

The wisdom of doing it. Of tens of thousands of conversations. Three things have popped up and they are the three things that run everything I do right now. Every single thing.

Number one. your level of awareness, you think you are dialed into who you are and you know who you are. And maybe you are. Maybe you're one of those people who actually has done all the thinking, all the hard interpersonal work, and you know exactly what's going on in your life.

I would still say, no, you don't. And most of you, I just call you a liar. Why? In a kind, loving way, by the way, I am. I'm a nice guy. A little bit of a renegade too, but I'm a nice guy.

I just, most people are just not really truly aware of what's going on. That's why I created the Daily Awareness Diary about three years ago. It's boring. Boring as hell.

It's 10 questions. You answer the same questions for like three weeks. Life changes underneath you. The answers change. You forget you're writing the answers.

And after about three weeks, you expose yourself. It is like standing in front of a mirror and seeing yourself butt naked and not liking what you see because you're over 40.

What do you see? I look pretty good over 40. Okay, over 60. Yeah, so number one is awareness. If you're not aware of everything going on in your life, you're missing it.

And so that's number one thing we have to do. We need to get you aware. Again, it's kind of boring, but it's also very truthful and very grounding. Number two, what we'll talk about today, the loving cage.

This is arguably, I think, the most important thing that I have ever come up with, honestly. And it's something I use every single day. It is the only thing that I, is it true? Probably not exactly true, but it's pretty close.

It's the only thing I consciously use every single day. Consciously, every single day, I pull up what I'm going to teach you today and it grounds me in such cool ways. It's amazing. And I've seen it with my clients too.

So we'll share that today. I've already done it on a couple of other podcasts, so you may already know this. And finally, the peaceful base. I coined this term about two years ago on a coaching call.

It simply is based on the concept that you can't build a hot life, a cool life on a hot mess. Most people come into my world for coaching and their life is just a mess. And what they want to do is add stuff to it and fix it right away. I'm like, well, okay, wait a second.

How's your marriage? Well, that sucks, man. That's okay. Let's work on that first. Well, I'll make money and the marriage will be okay. No, I won't. What if your client broke and yet you got a guy's relationship?

Why do you just need to work hard, hard, hard? Well, then you're going to screw up your relationship. So what we do is we want to balance out the base. We have about five, six different levels of the base.

And all my clients will tell you across the board, I hear this about 20 times a week. Scott, I'm just working on my peaceful base. I have a problem here this week with my boss. What do I do?

So we build a peaceful base. Well, let's get back to the loving cage. Let's get into this concept. This is a... It's not taught in personal growth very often.

It's minimalized way down there. And the reason is there's really actually no great solution for it. Although I think it's the best solution in the world because to me, when you can capture the nuance of it, when you become aware of what's happening here, I told you awareness is number one, right? When we become aware of what's actually happening here, we actually do get a solution.

Most people can't teach this because they don't have a solution for you. I have a solution for it. And it starts with the awareness part of it. Okay. It's built on the concept of psychological concept, fairly high level stuff called the curse of competency.

Okay. And if you're a confident person, you might already know what that means, that you're very good at what you do, therefore trapped. Don't be good at your job because if you're really good at your job, you'll never get a raise or a promotion, right?

Some people know what I mean by that. Let's get into the loving cage right now and see if you can grasp this right away. So nobody will warn you this is a trap.

It's not from failure. I call it the loving cage because it's built from love. Every bar of this cage you built around, just imagine you have a cage around you. Every bar was built on a good decision, not a bad decision.

At the time you made a decision, you thought it was in your best interest. You didn't know it was going to be bad or trap you. The mortgage that was too big.

The title at the office that took too many hours. The reputation you built. Being the reliable one. You built everything one reasonable choice at a time.

That's why you can't see it. That's why you can't see you're trapped in it because you did the right thing, guys. And yet it trapped you. That's why successful people like you, you kind of go flat, right?

It's not burnout. It's not laziness. It's kind of your confidence in a holding pattern. It's like when you take a job, you walk in and you look around and you say, oh, I'm going to open this door and walk through this new door.

What you don't realize is when you close the door, that door is locked because now you've got to unwind everything. If it goes bad, you've got to get out, right?

Or you walk in and say, man, there's a lot of opportunity here. You look up and you see the ceiling. And the ceiling looks like it's nice and tall. And you think, well, I can grow into this.

And what happens is you grow into it and then you get stuck in the ceiling. You can't get out of it because now you're stuck in competency. In a cage.

Now, motorcycle riders like me, we call you guys that drive cars, cagers. We call your car a cage. That's exactly it. You're comfortable. You're climate controlled.

You are safe. You can't feel the road underneath you because you got a nice air ride vehicle or something like that. I'm on a motorcycle. I'm in a helmet and a jacket and some boots maybe, man.

I can feel everything. I have no cage. Your career, your relationship, everything else could be the cage you're in. Now, most people that you love and who love you helped you build this cage, by the way.

Your boss helped you do it. His best intentions. Boss loves what you do. They put you in the cage. You're good at this. We need you here. Might have given you some incentives, some golden handcuffs to do that.

Your family members, they love you for what you're doing, but they don't want you to quit your job, do they? Walking out feels like betraying everybody around you. And yet, you know, it's really good.

I did this. I made all the right decisions. What the hell's going on? So here's the thing about a loving cage that a lot of people want to do. And I'm really good at burning things down.

That's why I call myself the nicest renegade you'll ever meet. I'm a nice guy. Top to bottom, good nice guy. You can count on me. At the same time, if I have to have an impact, if I have to print on the renegade side of me, you can guarantee I'm going to turn right into it and I can say, let's go hold my freaking beer.

But you don't escape the loving cage by burning it down. You don't do that. And you may feel like you want to. You escape it by becoming aware of it, by recognizing it.

This is seeing the door to get out of your cage that you're in. When you recognize it's there, you can get out. Man, I've seen it so many times. In my career, I've been here.

I get beat up a lot because I do things differently. I could care less about the other motivational. I'm not even in that category anymore. But man, they yell at me, Scott, be more positive.

I am positive, but I'm real. I'm sorry. Some of the things I've done on this podcast have put me in a cage, and you guys who have been around a long time can hear me tearing down those freaking bars.

Tired of being trapped. Algorithms do that to you more and more these days. I'm telling you, every good decision I made got me where I am right now. It continues to propel me wherever I want to go, but it will also be the thing we look at in the future and say, man, why did I make that decision?

This is a restriction problem, isn't it? So we're looking for us to figure out how the bars got there. We recognize they are there, but what's the big takeaway to this?

Well, now you can see it. You can see where you are. And now you know, we're going to have to make an exit. We're going to have to move on to something else.

But now we know we didn't build this problem ourselves. It just kind of happened. We made good decisions and we arrived here, which would tell you that the very next decision you make carries a lot more weight than maybe it used to.

And that's a good thing because that's exactly how you start to get exactly what you want in your life. Well, all right, tomorrow. I took a vacation and I skipped it tomorrow.