Thoughts Unlocked – You Are Limited

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Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:15 – Why the idea of being limitless is actually hurting you
03:17 – The real reason you feel overwhelmed (and it’s not productivity)
04:26 – The illusion of control and how it adds unnecessary weight
05:46 – Why accepting limits leads to better decisions and stronger leadership
08:39 – Strategy isn’t doing more… it’s choosing what not to do
09:49 – Feeling overwhelmed? Here’s the mindset shift you need

Skot Waldron (00:05)
I’m Skot Waldron, and when I’m not hosting Unlocked, I’m speaking at events all over the globe, helping leaders and teams communicate better, build trust faster, and actually enjoy working together. I know, who would have thought? I’ve spoken for companies like The Home Depot, I’ve spoken at national architectural firms, at their sales trainings, off sites for major pharmaceutical companies, and industry associations.

A thousand of attendees who have read my sessions. With 99% of them saying they found the sessions valuable. 97% saying they’d actually attend again. I’ve had caterers come up to me afterwards and thank me because they actually got something they could use when they went home or when they went back to their own jobs. I mean, if every keynote delivered those types of numbers, nobody would secretly be refreshing their email under the table. And let’s be honest, that’s a little bit of my nightmare, maybe a little bit of yours. Yeah, something that keeps me up at night.

If you’re an event planner, looking for a speaker who’s easy to work with and delivers actual value that people can take away and use on Monday. Let’s make your event unforgettable.

Welcome back to Unlocked. Today we’re going to talk about something that most of us spend a lot of time and energy trying to avoid. And that is our own limitations.

I know some of you just got done listening to some kind of podcast or some kind of keynote or some kind of whatever self-help thing talking about how limitless you are. You are limitless. You can conquer the world. You just need the next productivity hack to do it. And then you’ll be good. You can make everything happen that you want in life. And so, we have this huge expectation of ourselves. Maybe of others. And we end up not being able to accomplish it all. Hmm. There’s a problem there with that mentality. And I don’t think it serves us well that well, that we think about us as this, these limitless beings.

I want to talk about limits because time limits, energy limits, attention limits, I want to talk about all those things because they’re real. The uncomfortable realization that you cannot do everything, fix everything or control what’s coming next. Strangely enough, that realization might be one of the most freeing things a leader can discover. Cause when all these people come out there and they just, you know, get the crowd riled up about how limitless you are. I just called it BS.

And maybe that thinking comes a little bit because I’ve been reading Oliver Burkeman a lot lately. A philosopher that talks about our finite, you know, our finite-ism, you know, whatever that is but I think I just made up that word. He writes, his books are fantastic by the way, Meditations for Mortals, Four Thousand Weeks. He has other ones out there too, but those are two that I hone in on quite a bit. His argument is simple and it’s also maybe a little bit unsettling for some of you.

The reason we feel overwhelmed isn’t because we haven’t figured out the right productivity hack yet. It’s because we keep pretending, we’re not finite. Did you hear me? We keep pretending we’re not finite. We try to act like we can control the future if we just plan hard enough. If we optimize our schedule, if we read the right book, if we download the right app, maybe we create the perfect five-year strategy. We’ll be able to control our destiny, everyone. And then life does what life does. Barcodes shift; a team member leaves. A project falls apart. A client fires us. Maybe somebody in our family, we have a passing of a loved one. Maybe that happens. Maybe something happens to a child. Maybe it’s just maybe a pandemic happens.

Somebody throws a curveball right in the middle of that calendar that you just color-coded last weekend because you know what, because you color coded, it’s supposed to happen that way, right? Wrong. Most stress in leadership comes from trying to manage things that are actually fundamentally unmanageable. The future is one of those things.

There’s a concept in psychology called the illusion of control. It’s the tendency we all have to believe that we have more influence over outcomes than we actually do, y’all. Okay? I know you like to think you can control it all, but you can’t. When things go well, we assume it was because we planned really, really well. When things fall apart, we assume that we are the ones who didn’t plan and we failed somehow.

It’s a lot of weight. I’m not saying I’m trying to remove responsibility from you and to take precautions and to do what you can because we still need to do that obviously. I’m not saying don’t plan. I’m saying you need to plan, but there’s a weight that comes off it when we let go of the fact that things may change, things may happen. Curve balls will be thrown, but a lot of us we sit outside of that equation somehow of the things that go well because we did it or things fail because we did them.

Accepting that reality, it doesn’t make us passive. I’m not trying to make you passive about life. It actually does the opposite of that. When you stop trying to control everything, you start focusing on what actually belongs to you. What’s actually important. So, your effort, your preparation, your character, your decisions that day, everything matters.

Burkeman makes the point that when you accept your limits, something interesting happens instead of trying to keep every option open. You begin to choose and choosing is where meaning shows up. Think about it. If you could do everything, nothing would actually matter very much, right? Cause you can do it all. But the fact that you can’t do everything means every decision carries a little bit of weight to it. Some more than others.

Every yes, you utter actually closes the door on a hundred other possibilities, other things you could do because you’re choosing that thing. And that’s not a flaw in the system. That’s actually what makes your work and your life matter. That’s what makes it matter is that you’re saying no to all those other things. You’re choosing that thing.

Leaders who resist limits, they end up living in a constant state of urgency. They chase every opportunity. They react to every competitor. They try to solve every problem. It looks like ambition. Sometimes they’re like, gosh, they’re hustlers. I hate that word so much. So, please don’t use it around me. But most of the time, it’s really just exhaustion wearing a blazer. If you wear a blazer, maybe you don’t wear, maybe you just wear polo, but it looks like exhaustion either way.

Leaders who accept limits start asking better questions instead of saying things like, “y’all, how do we fix everything? How do we do all the stuff that we want to do?” Rather say, “hold on, let’s focus in on what really deserves our attention right now.” And instead of saying things like, you know, let’s eliminate uncertainty. Let’s eliminate risk. How do we move forward? Even when things are uncertain is what they’re saying.

If you listened to my episode last time on Thoughts Unlocked about hope and optimism or what the difference between those were. Go back and listen to that episode. Again, it’s short and punchy just like this one. It’ll give you a little bit of a new perspective on the idea of optimism versus hope. I digress.

Here we go. There’s a quiet kind of resilience that comes from this mindset of limitations, right? Instead of trying to predict the future, you actually prepare yourself to meet it. Understanding that the future holds what the future holds and you are just moving through navigating that. You invest in relationships. You build strong teams, you clarify priorities, you strengthen that ability to respond because you’re going to need to respond. Things aren’t going to go the way you plan them to. Sometimes they will, but we need to be ready to respond, not react. Those are proactive moves.

Response is proactive. Reaction is reactive. Okay. Yeah. I just said it. Yeah. I just said that y’all. Even though they start with accepting that you can’t control everything. In leadership we often talk about strategy as if it’s about having the perfect plan, but strategy is often about choosing what not to pursue. How many of you in your strategic planning sessions focus on what not to pursue? Do you ever make out what we shouldn’t do list? That would actually be pretty helpful. So, try it out.

Accepting limits actually sharpens that discipline. Here’s the paradox. A little bit of a paradox for y’all. Yeah. Here we go. When you stop trying to master the future, you often become much better at navigating it, accepting it, moving through it, because your attention is finally where it belongs in the present moment, making the next right decision. Now this isn’t to poo poo on the future thinkers. It’s very important that we are thinking about what’s out there, where we’re going, what are we going to do, how are we going to win the war.

I get it. We need to be thinking about those things. In the present moment, we need to be focusing on the things that will end up hopefully getting us there. So, make a plan. Understand the plan may shift. It probably will shift. Right? Am I right y’all?

So, if you’re feeling overwhelmed right now, consider this little possibility that the problem might not be that you have too much to do. It might be that you’re trying to carry the impossible weight of controlling what hasn’t happened yet.

Let the future be the future. Focus on what’s in front of you. Choose what matters. Accept your time, energy and attention are limited. Those limits are not the enemy y’all. They’re the reason why your choices matter in the first place.

Thank you for listening to another episode of Unlocked. In this episode, I hope I made you rethink a little bit of how you approach control, productivity, and leadership. I try to do that often. Share it with somebody who might need that little reminder. And until next time, keep unlocking what’s possible, one deliberate choice at a time.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there’s going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I’m asking for a little bit of love, just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show. The algorithm is like that; it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. And until next time, stay on Unlocked.