Cast Your Vision, Know Your Identity

How are you? Well, happy Thursday. Come on in here. If it is Thursday, June 11th at 2 p.m. Well, it's probably not 2 p.m. yet, but if it's Thursday, June 11th at 2 p.m. Eastern, we're going to get together today.

That's awesome. I'll talk more about that in a second here. Today's program is all about your identity and about your vision. It is the Daily Boost. from motivation to move.com.

I'm going to boost today, give you some ideas, break you out of your funk. You know what I believe about being in a funk. A lot of people, they call Scott, man, I'm in such a funk. I said, well, let's get funky.

We can do that somehow. Good to have you. My name is Scott Smith. Thanks for stopping by. Yeah. June 11th at 2 p.m. a live program. It's an inner circle workshop.

Now kind of wigged out about doing this, but so give me some props, right? Cause an inner circle is small and I know people, I interact with them. That's what it's supposed to be. That's what makes it so special.

But this dude has decided to do it with a public call with people. I don't know. I'm sure I have a lot of people who show up that I do know, so that's going to make it easier. But nonetheless, I love the format so much, and you're going to see as it evolves throughout the program, it's just amazing.

So if you want to experience that, go to motivationtomove.com, all spelled out, and sign up for the workshop. Can't make it live? Then we will just send you the replay. That's fine.

But show up ready to prepare. Now, I do want to cover something here real quickly, and it's going to relate into this show very well, I think. A lot of times when I say, get excited every single day, so you pull yourself out of bed and like, yeah, let's go. Fire up that anticipation engine, which is kind of where it all begins because the more you anticipate good stuff in your life, the more excited you get, the better life is.

Right now, there's a really good chance that you're anticipating bad stuff. Right? Am I talking to you? You're anticipating bad stuff. There's something coming up.

You're kind of nervous about, oh my God, I've got to talk to my boss. What am I going to do? Well, that's cool. Anticipation works that way as well. We tend to like to focus on the other side of it.

But for those of you who are saying, Scott, don't give me that personal growth BS stuff that never works. I promise you I won't do that. I'm throwing stones at all those people who are just telling you the same old crap that you and I both know. You've studied.

You read the books. You go to the seminars. You tried. It didn't damn well work for you, did it? Because there is science behind it. But science is not sexy.

You guys don't want to do the sexy. You want to do the sexy, not the stuff that actually works. Well, this is about anticipation and excitement that actually works.

Now, you can do it. It really can happen. It's a little bit different road to get there. And we'll talk about that on tomorrow's show, not today's show.

But today, we'll lay a little bit of groundwork for you, okay? So I got on the call this morning. And one of the things that happens on an inner circle call is we do check in at the beginning of the call. I'll check in with a few people, if not all of them, depending on how many people are there.

And somewhere in what they tell me, we're going to reveal what we need to work on. Now, I have hundreds and hundreds of frameworks I can work with. And I can pull those pretty much randomly and go after them.

Today, I checked in with a guy. He said to me, I said, what are you working on? He said, well, I'm working on my identity and my vision. So I did what any good coach would do.

I said, okay, what's your identity? And I waited. And I got the answer I'm going to get about 90% of the time. We did joke about it this morning. But if you're the kind of person on this kind of podcast who's listening, very likely you have a propensity to lean this direction.

He said, I just want to help people. And I said, okay, that's good. We hear it all the time. It's kind of the one-on-one level of my vision. If you're on this call, it may be something else for you, right?

I just want to help people. And I went with that. I pushed back a little bit. I got into the, a little slight pushback to get a little bit more definition to it.

But at the same time, I turned around. I said, so what's your vision then? If we're talking about, you know, what you want to do for Mary Denny, identity, by the way, is inside your heart. It's who you are.

If that's what you want to do, you just want to help people, then what's your vision? If you're going to do the vision, what's the vision going to be?

He said, well, the vision is I want to help a million people. And I found that kind of interesting because a million people I've heard a thousand times before too. In fact, if you're in the business that I'm in all the time, you will very regularly get life coaches and get consultants and get all kinds of nice people out there. And very, very often, I just want to help people.

That's what I was born to do. Again, no, I'm not mocking. I'm just saying that's kind of where they start. And as soon as you talk about that and you say, what do you want to do?

They'll say, I want to help a million people. And to me, that's the marketing line I hear all the time. Now, maybe it started as an original line, but I hear so many people say it now. I'm like a million people.

Really? You want to do that? So here's where it began to break down a little bit. So let me explain to you where, what leads what. Now, a lot of people say, does vision lead identity or identity lead vision?

Well, your mind likes to dream, likes to come up with ideas. I lead in that all the time. So certainly you can have what you think is a vision, but is it your truly a vision about what you want to go after? Not likely.

Your vision actually is led by your identity. It makes sense. Your identity is who you are on the inside. So when you're up late at night, when you're thinking a little bit about what's going to be going on, you're going to tend to say, this is who I am.

I wish I could live like this. Whether you know it or not, you're casting a vision. You're putting it out there. Nine times out of 10, when I talk to anybody who's doing this, I will say, and again, going back a couple of minutes here where, again, not mocking, but just saying, I've been here in this chair a long time.

I have heard it. I have a smile on my face. And somebody says, I just want to help. I'm like, well, looking deeper than that, who do you want to help?

How do you want to help? Why do you want to help? And when somebody says, I want to help a million people, I'll say, what kind of people? Where are they?

Help them with what? And I just push back a little bit on some detail and suddenly it opens up. Now, here's the way there's going to be a little controversial. Now, can I jump into this?

We have a couple of different levels that we're working on here. So when we have an identity, identity comes from your experiences you have, you form belief systems, they become your values, and eventually your identity. It's very hardcore. That lives way down deep inside of you.

And on the surface of that, some people call that your core down below like that. Now, on the surface, up at the top of your brain, imagine that down your heart, top of your brain maybe, on the surface is a mask that you put on.

It's a mask that is the one you put on when you go out to play. Oh, this is what I believe in, but now I have to go to the office, so I'm going to do this one instead. It's like you put on a uniform, right? What touches the body changes the body.

What touches your thought changes your thought. So what happens is you're living, breathing as a certain person, and then you go to the office, you go to a friend's house, you go do something, whatever it happens to be, and you put on a new hat, a new mask, and you play that role. Well, here's the dangerous part of that.

Is that if you go out and put this role on, that you just pretend this core or this surface level thing that you're doing, this mask, if you put that on and you do it enough times, what's going to happen?

Well, if you put the mask on and you go play this role and that your being is... Eventually, you become that person. Sometimes quickly, sometimes years. But eventually, that will become who you are.

Well, I just told you. If you were to put on a surface-level role that is not who you are on the inside, but you do it because it's your job or your people or whatever it happens to be, and you do it day after day after day, that's the experience you're having. As you do it, whether you believe it or not, you're going to become... You're going to begin to believe it and that's going to become a value and eventually it's going to become who you are.

And very likely, depending on how old you are right now, if you've been at this for a bit of time and it can go very quickly, the mind is a funny thing.

Very likely you're wearing a surface level belief system that is your identity right now, but it's not who you are on the inside. Maybe you want to help people, but you don't know how to get there or how to define that. So we push into that a little bit. Does something make sense to you?

So one of the things that happened, this is where it got a little bit controversial. I don't have a lot of time to go all of this today. The science goes very, very deep. But it's been studied a lot.

If you dig a little bit deeper, you'll see that what I'm telling you is the absolute truth. And it's not the sexiest thing on the planet, but it is how it is.

What you do every single day dictates who you are. Bottom line. On the call, I... It was probably a 20-minute conversation. I'll do that sometimes. I'll work with one person, go on a deep coaching session.

The reality is when I do that and the beauty of any group coaching call, a lot of people forget this part, is that when I'm talking to one person and I'm going very deep, there's a whole bunch of people listening and they need to hear the same thing.

So I spend a lot of time with them. But one of the things that happened when I was going through this call here as we're working on this, I had to point out something that makes everybody really uncomfortable. We got to the concept of

Again, back to what they want to do. And one of my clients came back to me and said, well, I'm going to copy the other guy. I'm going to say, I just want to help people. I want to have an impact.

I said, great. Go ahead and copy them. Everybody copies something until you figure out what it is. Got to fake it till you make it. If you don't know where to start, you copy somebody else and you start.

That's cool. He said, yeah, I don't really want to get out there. I want to build my legacy and have an impact. I said, why? He said, and he went on to tell a story about his grandkids.

I said, well, is this for them or is it for you? He stopped. He paused. He said, well, It's for them. I'm doing this for them. I want to have a relationship.

I want to make it great. I want this to be my legacy. Well, your legacy is being built right now, my friend. You have no choice. You're already doing it.

Whatever you do today is going to be your legacy someday. He didn't believe me. I said, you know, would you hate me if I said this is purely ego-driven?

Now, when I say ego-driven, I want you to understand something. I'm not going to go real deep in this stuff. I'm not going to get all psycho on you. I'm just going to say it's just me.

It's just you. Because everything in your life, because you have to take a breath to stay alive, when you stop taking a breath on yourself, you die. Everything in your life is going to start with you. Are you okay with that?

I asked another friend on the call. I said, what's your identity? And I pulled him right away, and I paused. It took him about 10 seconds, maybe 15 seconds to get to the answer.

I said, what's your identity, man? He said, I'm a Christian. And he went on. I said, stop. Stop. He just went right to who he is. That's what he believes.

That's who he is. Not everybody will have that answer. That's okay. But he went right away. Everything bounces off of that. So as you're going through this process and understanding what your identity is, and you're working to cast your vision and get out there and do things, and you're trying to build your passion, your purpose, your meaning, and your legacy, and you're trying to get there, and you want to impact those grandchildren, or you want to impact the world in a greater way.

And I said to this guy today, is that your ego, ma'am? He said, no, it's not. That's for them. I said, uh-uh. It's what you want to do. He said, well, it's still for them.

I said, it's for you. You want to go do it for them. Can't you just accept that? And he finally did. Again, we have to kind of talk this through. I've just watched people do this.

I've tens of thousands of coaching hours, watching myself. Listen, my friends, I'll tell you what, there is nothing you do exclusively for somebody else. If you're doing it exclusively for somebody else, eventually you're going to get mad. You're going to get burnt out.

You're going to quit. You're not going to be happy. You're going to be the wretch you are right now. And then you've been taught that because you're going to focus on yourself a little bit, that that's bad.

And then you dress it up. You call it self-care and stuff like that. That's fine. Dress it up whatever you want to. I just understand something that if I get out of bed and something pops into my mind that I want to do, that's going to be coming from inside of me.

Nobody else gave me the idea. I'm doing it for me. I understand when I sit down and have too many French fries and a hamburger and that wasn't some legacy I want to leave. Oh, I'm making a legacy.

No, I decided to do it. Eventually we get to this call and we had a gentleman at the end of it. He said, you know, we visit this every, probably every three months or so. I think about the calls that I do and even these podcasts.

If you listen to the podcast, you'll hear me rotate through things. The reason I rotate through things, a lot of reasons, new people all the time. You have to hear things again to learn them again, be reminded.

But when we're doing personal growth work, identity work and vision work and stuff that will lead to firing up your anticipation engine, what happens is if I can grab your attention for just a few minutes and head you down a different road, you've changed.

You've changed. If I can move you down a path today, you're a different person than you were when you started this podcast. And so if I'm going to do my job right, I'm at some point in time going to check in on what your identity now.

I'm going to check out how your vision has changed because I can guarantee you it's going to change. We'll have maybe Croy will be on the call tomorrow. We'll know. Croy had a great conversation.

I'll share this and get out of here so I don't spend your time with you, but it's very motivating. But he was kind of drifting up until about six months ago.

This is the man that ran across America. He ran 100 marathons over 100 days from the East Coast to the West Coast. Had a TED Talk, had a book, had all kinds of things. He's a friend of mine.

He's in my inner circle. And he got a little bit off track for a couple of years, and he struggled trying to find his way, trying to find his identity. Happens to people when they're athletes and they get a little bit older. Wink, wink.

You know what I mean? And about six months ago, he showed up on a call and he surprised us all. He said, man, my identity is out of an adventurer. I'm going to go retake my record for running across Badwater in Death Valley.

He does it the first week of August this year. And he's the one that showed up and he said, man, we have to revisit this. But I can tell you this, when he made that decision five or six months ago, I guess, he went.

from kind of drifting and trying to find his happiness and finding who he was. He reverted to who he's always been. He accepted that he's an adventurer and he took on the challenge. And now he's running 30, 40, 50, even 60 miles a day training for this crossing, this bad water crossing.

He knows his identity is solid right now. He's an adventurer and his vision is to cross Death Valley. If I go further on this, his vision is to write a book and to sell 4 million copies and to get another TED talk.

Fired up beyond belief. That's firing up your anticipation engine. When we finally switched him into accepting his identity and we got him to start thinking that way, then he had to claw through it because it's not really hard. It gets messy, right?

He had to claw through it. We've been with him for months now, helping him through the process, even negotiating contracts with him to get this thing to happen for sponsors to help him do this thing.

You work through all that stuff and the vision gets more and more clear and suddenly you're on a roll. And then suddenly you're doing it. And suddenly you can't wait to get out of bed in the morning, even if you're sore from running 50 miles a day before.

That's firing up your anticipation engine. I told you it goes deeper. And tomorrow on the program, well, today, later on the program, I will, you'll probably hear some of this again today, but we're going to go a bunch deeper than that. The best part is you'll have a chance to talk with me and work this stuff out together.

It's a powerful experience. You need to be there. And if not, at least get registered so I can send you the replay. You will be blown away by what happens.

I hope. We'll see. MotivationToMove.com. I'll spell that. Go get that taken care of. I'll see you tomorrow. Bye.