Mindset: Why Fixing Your Habits Won't Fix Your Self-Trust with Lester Clowes

Sometimes the hardest part of focus work is not the work. It's getting your brain to agree that you're going to start working now. Brain FM is functional music designed to support focus sessions. It's not magic, it just lowers the friction to the on ramp of focus. And if you go to BeyondTheToDoList.com/BrainFM you can get 20% off with my link. Again, go to BeyondTheToDoList.com/BrainFM get 20% off your gunna love it. Or go click the link in the show notes to get that 20% off. I've been using it for years. Trust me. This is a game changer. Again, BeyondTheToDoList.com/BrainFM for 20% off. Hello and welcome back to BeyondTheToDoList, a podcast about productivity. I'm your host, Eric Fisher. My guest today spent more than 9,000 hours across the coaching table and a decade before that running a school system. And he's built an entire practice arguing against the exact motivational content that he used to be hooked on himself. I know that he used to listen to this show or still does. So let's hopefully not count that into the stuff he used to listen to or was hooked on, but still is hooked on. Anyway, so his new book is Stop Lying to Yourself. And it's about the quiet lies that capable, organized people tell themselves right up until nothing changes. Lester Klaus, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Yeah, absolutely. And I still consider your show part of the good guys. Oh good. Good. Glad to be in the fold. So here's what made me want to have this conversation. So back in January, and I know you know this, I did a solo episode on agency versus the illusion of control, how to be on top of things. How how trying to be on top of things quietly turns into your self worth and your your purpose. And then we all know what happens, a disruptive week starts to feel like a personal failure. And you emailed me and basically you said, look, the failure is almost never the system. It's it's identity, which is your whole book. But the thing that got me is that your version of that also started in January. And that was when an executive team announced they'd filled a VP role that you'd been promised. So on camera in front of your peers, I could list even more how like sucky that probably felt. But I want to start with the frameworks. I want to start I don't want to start with the frameworks. I want to start in the garage before any of that existed. So take me back to that garage. You've been passed over. You spent two and a half years as what you'd call a zombie, collecting those accolades. And what exactly happened the night you sat there in the dark? What do you say the thing is that finally moved you that wasn't a book or a video? It was your wife telling you the truth. Yeah. My wife kicked my butter. That's how I ended up where I am today. So but even before that, it was January 2015. And we came back from winter break, I was with schools. You know, so we do get a winter break. We were coming back from that. And we're on the national leadership call. And to even backtrack, just one little micro step, you know, further, I moved my family across the country. We love California, you know, but I moved my family across the country to Texas to open some schools. And there have been a promise that, hey, get to Texas, get the schools up and running. And we're going to have the VP of Texas role. And you'll get first shot. So move my family across the country and do the thing, open the schools. We come back from winter break. And they announced the VP role. So I get the emotional spike. Hey, here we are. You know, I'm going to get the opportunity. And they announced they had filled it. And so everything kind of came crashing down for me. And I became Eric, one of the most dangerous, we'll call it an identity, one of the most dangerous identities there is, which is the justified victim. I had every reason to be angry. And but what happened, Eric is I wasn't a victim, you know, for a week or two. I was a justified victim for months. And so, but you know, the thing about being a victim is that power follows blame. And I didn't understand that to the time when I was given all my power away. And I also became a half functioning victim. And so I was still really good at being busy. During this period, Eric, I even defended my dissertation and got nominated for dissertation of the year all while just spiraling internally and being that justified victim. And so eventually after about 18 months of filen, sorry, for myself, my wife, she did kick my butt. And she told me, hey, you can keep being what you claim to to lose, which is a victim, or you can pull yourself together and bet on yourself, I'm willing to bet on you, but you have to be willing to bet on yourself first. And I'd, you know, I'd love to say I went to the garage for enlightenment, but I really went to flee. And continue being that coward. But while I was sitting in the dark, I would never claim I came up with promise dead in that moment. But I was doing a little introspection. And I noticed it every weekend, I would redesign this huge lester that's building this coaching practice. He's going to launch one day and he's also going to work out every morning at 5 a.m. And he's going to do all these things. And, you know, in the book, I joke every Sunday night, I was a bald Tony Robbins. But by Monday night, I was a disaster again. And that was the pattern I was following. And I did realize I needed to break that pattern. And the most important role to me at the time was dad. And so I just started there, Eric. And I was like, you know what, it's more morning, I'm going to cook breakfast for the girls before I leave for work. And I'm going to have dinner with them. And I'm even going to try and get home early enough to cook. And I just started there and I just started keeping that commitment to myself. One of the things that the book kind of is anchored in is this line in there that you don't get the outcome and then become the person. You become someone different first and then the outcome follows. So for someone that is hearing that for the first time, why is it that the other way around, get the promotion, then grow into the leader, is that thing that keeps people in that stuck mode? Yeah. And so when we think about outcomes, you know, some of the ones I run into in my coaching practice is someone will say, if I get the promotion, then I'll become a great leader. And so whenever they're focusing on the outcome, they're always measuring themselves up against this ultimate version of themselves. Right. So one of my favorite books is the gap in the game, highly recommend it, you know, for for anyone listening. And so whenever you're focused on that gap, you're you're going to constantly be making these huge commandments to yourselves yourself. And those are those are the commandments that lead to promise that Eric. And instead of we just focus on, hey, who do I have to become to achieve that outcome? Then we can reverse engineer that process. And whenever we start reverse engineer in that process, then we usually start always tell people start embarrassingly small. And because what we want to do is we want to start stacking evidence that that outcome is inevitable. And you know, it's funny when we read our books after we write them, we're always like, oh, we should have said this or I wish I'd said this. And you know, I wish I'd really emphasize inevitability more and more. I do it a lot of my coaching practice. And we want to start embarrassingly small and stacking evidence to the point because confidence, right? Like confidence is a consequence, Eric. And I think people get that wrong often. So we just want to stack evidence. Okay. So here's the thing you almost kind of by research or having found a research back up or reinforce the some people don't like this phrase, the fake it till you make it. But in a way, it's true because and this surprised me when I was in the book, it says that basically researchers took a respected depression treatment down to only the behavioral part of it. They cut out all the stuff they had to do with thoughts entirely, which goes counter to what a lot of people say, no, get your thinking right. And then your actions will follow. But the behavior only version worked just as well. So you're taking that to mean that, you know, you're not just here to fix someone's thinking so that they can finally act, which that's a former procrastination. You change what they do. And then the thinking has no choice but to catch up. I think this really speaks true to how strong of a how our habits are and how that kind of muscle memory it works. But I'm curious, how is this working across the board? Where does that just change the behavior? Maybe not work. Yeah. So Eric, if you're okay, I want to dig into two elements you're actually brought up. And I think they deserve their own conversation, their own separate conversations. So the problem is the fake it to you make it and we should definitely tease that out. And the other one is the concept of habits. And I think your listeners, you know, I've been one of your long-term listeners. I think really digging into that habit piece could serve everyone. So the first one, the fake it to you make it piece, a love that you brought this up. And so I'm a proponent of act as if not fake it to you make it. And so, and I want to offer, you know, the, I want to dig into that duality if you would between those two for your listeners. And so fake it to you make it, there's a performing element to it. And fake it to you make it is can be good as long as there's an off ramp, right? And so we, if anyone spends any amount of time on social media and you've ever googled a book about self-help and they tracked you and now they're following you around, you know, we're, we found on social media that they often sell people's identities, not the bad kind, sorry, not the dark web. But the kind of, it's like fake it to you make it, right? Here's this person and here's their system and this is what they do and, you know, the common guru, right? And so all learning begins by mimicry. That's why we have apprentices, apprenticeships and things like that. But we have to have that off ramp at some point. And to me, that's the difference between fake it to you make it and act as if, act as if is about your identity, fake it to you make it is copying someone else's identity. And when the, when we lean into the act as if and that's the framework, my book is offering, is you first think about who you have to become to have the things that you want or to achieve the outcome that you're searching for. And then we start thinking about what does that person believe? How do they make tough decisions? What does their daily protocol look like? And then we have to act as if we are that person. So to me, the big difference there is that fake it to you make it is mimicry is performing someone else's identity, someone else's stick. And the act is if is entirely driven by your identity, your efforts at designing your identity. So one's performance and the other one's architecture. That makes sense. It almost feels like performance is what you're doing when you think people are watching. But the other is, is practice. You're rehearsing your, your work, you're working it out yourself in order to perform your best. Yeah. And you, you actually touch on some critical, which is the feedback loops. So people will often ask me about failure and, you know, and for your listeners who are driving, I hope I didn't make them veer off the road. Like we hear the word failure and we're like, like we flinch, you know. But failure is evidence too. And my whole framework is around the concept of evidence, Eric. We're just constantly accumulating it. And, you know, messing something up can still be good evidence. The problem becomes when we fell or we messed something up and we ignore it. We don't want to lean into it and we don't want to learn from it. Success leaves clues, failure leaves clues. It's all good evidence that we can feed that identity in general. Okay. So then that covers the kind of fake it till you make it or it debunks that being what's happening in that behavior leading thought and thought catching up. But the other piece was habits. Yeah. So, habits are really important. I don't want to undermine them. But I believe there's some certain narratives where habits have almost become confused with identity. And I just want to offer to everyone that habits are an outcome actually. They're not part of the identity itself. So when we think about identity work, we think about beliefs and we think about values and we think about what I call protocol. So habits are a behavior. You can fix a bad habit, Eric, and still not trust your own word, right? So, and I'm not trying to dig up too much here, but bringing back that element or promise that. So you can break a bad habit and still not believe your own word and still not trust you're going to say what you're going to do tomorrow. But when we focus on the elements of identity, we could start building that evidence. Whenever we start building that evidence to our protocol, what we're designing our actions we're doing every day, answering the question what a good day means. When we focus on that and we accumulate the evidence, then the beliefs catch up downstream and we start shifting our beliefs and we start shifting how we're making decisions. Now, ultimately, a great protocol, Eric, ends up becoming a whole suite of good habits later. And so when we're focusing on those feedback loops, right, like, okay, I think this is what a good day means when we do it and we reflect on it. And we're like, okay, that was a good day and we do it again and we do it again. Or it wasn't a good day and we adjust, right, and collect, focusing on collecting that evidence every day, inevitably leads to good outcomes and leads to good habits. Well, and this is different than setting up a system first and trying to adhere to it kind of like I was talking about earlier with the agency over versus control thing. Because we have agency. We can choose things. We can choose to do things. We don't have control. Control is always out of our hands. We think we have it and we are pretty much deceived by ourselves as well as other people to tell us. You have control. Well, again, you have choice. You have agency. Things can happen that are like something that happened right now, boom, like my internet could cut out or something like that, hoping I'm not jinxing it. But anyways, I don't have control over that. I can try to fix it. I have agency to choose to try to fix it. But I don't have the ability to, with certainty, 100% control, make sure that that doesn't happen. Even if I have contingency, second and third internet streams ready to switch over to. So you talk a lot about this with people that have their systems and their things in place. But then they're still the same person four years later. So I'm curious, what are those people doing when they build that system? What is all that planning doing for them? Eric, they're focusing on the system in lieu of, like, their focusing on the system instead of the inner work, that didn't even work. At the cost of it, right? And so the way of framelessly people is you can put a phenomenal system on layer it on top of someone who hasn't done that didn't even work. And all you end up with is a more efficient form of stuck. There's better at being busy. And so that's where you run into the situation four years later. There's still the same person. There's just better at being busy. Yeah. And you even say this. You say that the smarter you are, the more vulnerable you are to this trap because smart people, honestly, we often, I just said we, like I'm in there. And anyways, smart people love complexity and they love nuance. And I know I definitely love that feeling of understanding something deeply. And I think that also describes a lot of people listening right now. So the uncomfortable thing is this, how does being thoughtful and well-read become that very thing that keeps you from moving and doing that inner work? So you know what Eric, I'm going to talk about myself as if I'm smart too. And so we'll just, you know, I, what I found is this element and I say this as confession, not critique. It's what I call motivation porn. And I am a recovering addict and can still relapse at times into motivation porn. Smart people are the most susceptible to motivation porn. The reason being is smart people are really good at rationalizing. And whenever they rationalize, they create sophisticated hiding places. And the thing is Eric learning is so respectable. But in turn, it also becomes a really respectable form of hiding. And the way that I try and frame this for people is you got to set thresholds of action. And when you pick up a new book or you pick up a new course, you should absolutely pick up books. I just published one, right? So I'm not into a book, I'm not into a course, but you should have a threshold of action. Often times you should be acting while you're learning and experimenting and applying. The problem becomes when you reach that threshold of action. action, and you pick up another book instead of committing to the action. So I'm anti-consumption, pro-action, and, you know, it's that ability to learn and act at the same time and applaud the learning at the same time. That's the difference. And so smart people are very susceptible and motivation porn, but when you can flip that switch for them, they can become a force of nature. Well, in this gets to a term that you've mentioned a couple times now, we haven't exactly called it out and named it or defined it is promised debt. And I think that's where this comes in is that in a sense, there's this debt that you have, and I want you to explain it first, but it almost comes across as we dig ourselves deeper into debt, thinking we're going the right direction, but we're digging deeper instead of filling in the hole. So there's three terms, and you know, Eric, I'll talk about these all day every day. And sometimes I can even slip, and I'll just use them interchangeably, but the three really key words here is, want to self-trust which is the feeling. Self-reputation is the truth, it's the record. And so promise debt is whenever we have accumulated this big history of broken commitments to ourselves, broken promises to ourselves. And now that balance is negative, and that's promised debt. Okay. So then in terms of where people are at here, like they've got all these, I think I guess what I'm getting at here is that they create the system, like they think, oh my gosh, I've got all this debt. You know what I need? I need to get productive. Then they come to listen to a show like this, and they learn things, and they apply it, and they apply it in terms of creating systems. And one of the things that I'm really glad I have is episodes that aren't system driven only. There's some system stuff too. But a lot of it, I think, has to do with the inner work that you were talking about. And it gets to, hey, you've got to make change, you got to act different, you got to be different, you got to, you know, and you're worth, as well as your identity, aren't tied to your productivity or what you produce. And so I really feel, you know, I feel reconfirmed in a lot of what we talk about on this show based on that. So, and I think you also go ahead. So you kind of draw a distinction that I hadn't heard put this way before. There's self-reputation, but there's also self-trust, and you've called these out as well. And I think one, if you can define these a little bit more, you know, my take was once how you feel, and then the other's actually what's true. So walk me through why that gap, what the gap between those two matters so much, and why you say that the feelings always snap back to match the record or what's true no matter how good the motivation or the pep talk was. Yeah. Well, there's a few key variables here that we can really highlight Eric, and then I want to offer a ray of hope to your listeners, you know, because you brought up some really good points about the topics you guys dove into in systems and such. So when we think about self-trust, it's the feeling you get when you make a new commitment. So when we say to ourselves, okay, I'm going to get up tomorrow at 4.30 and I'm going to go to the gym. If you get a sinking fill in in your gut, it's because that we all have this internal observer. It's called self-perception theory. It's been around for decades, and if you imagine you have an internal observer, it determines your identity the same way a stranger would, but just watching what you do. So when you say to yourself, okay, I'm going to get up at 4.30 and go to the gym tomorrow. Do you get a sinking fill in in your gut? That is a lack of self-trust, right? But if you've done it for weeks and weeks and weeks, or you have a history of doing it, maybe you took a couple of weeks off from the gym. Whenever you say, okay, I'm going to get up at 4.30 tomorrow. Your self-trust is like, yeah, we got this, right? Is that feeling that you get? The self-reputation is the record itself. Do you have a history of getting up at 4.30 every morning and go into the gym or not? The promised debt would be, okay, you've been saying for two years, you're going to get up and go to the gym at 4.30 in the morning for you to work. But all you're doing is beating snooze, like beating your alarm clock like it owes you money, man. Like this, this is, you're in promised debt. You have a negative balance, right? So that's how all three of those play together. And I love, love. Eric, did you brought up your record of shows and the conversation that you guys have had? And, you know, what I would offer everyone right now is, I hope that when we're talking about promised debt and self-reputation, I don't want you to feel bad. You know, some of you might feel some shame and some guilt. Guilt is a feeling about the past, right? But the hope I would offer you is that you can pay your balance down. To me, that's what's most hopeful about this whole conversation is like debt has repayment mechanism, which is just start embarrassingly small right now, right? Like if you're driving, not literally right now, but if you're not driving, like you can pause, me and Eric will still be here in a few minutes and just do something. Think about it, commitment you made to yourself in the last day or two, an embarrassingly small one and just start there. That embarrassingly small means you're on the right track. And Eric, you brought this up a moment ago, where people go wrong is there, they commit to this huge amount of change right off the bat and I'll call that promised debt on steroids. They imagine this huge change and they're self-trust the whole time is like, no, no, don't do this again, this is really bad, but they make this they commit to this huge change effort and it falls apart and now they're even deeper in promise debt. That's why I encourage people start embarrassingly small because to that internal observer we were just talking about seven days of keeping a very micro small commitment is a miracle when you're in promise debt, it is absolutely a miracle to that internal observer. Yeah, I mean, you say this that again, basically having these big overhaul, like I'm going to do a sweeping change, like no, it's I forget who I think it was crystal pain way back in the early days of the show had a phrase called discipline begets discipline where just doing a little bit of something and that's exactly what you're talking about, you're lay some bricks and then you see that the bricks are there and it's just one more brick, one more brick, one more brick, but eventually it you wait, there's a wall here or there's a step here and now I can use that and so it's not about these big major commitments. It's about these what you call impossible to fail commitments about, you know, make your bed or do a push up or drink one glass of water or get you know, walk to the mailbox kind of stuff and you just do that and it wears that groove and deep wears it deeper and deeper and deeper and I love that. I think the thing here then is that there's also you talk about this this next phase that most people quit in or you call it the desert where the excitement, if even if they didn't start and I think this is a key here, you don't have to start with excitement to do those small things. So I think that's really key, but if they do get into that part where they start to notice and feel the difference, when that feeling kind of wanes a little bit or completely and you haven't built visible progress like you're saying to do that silence of the feeling not being there anymore and no visible proof, no debt paid feels like the proof doesn't exist. Yeah. So what you're speaking to Eric is the three phases of that dignity engine and so we have what are what I'll call enthusiasm and then little asterisk the enthusiasm gap which I'll come back to in a moment and then we have the desert and a big chunk of the book is dedicated to the desert because that is where most people fell and then we have momentum and that's that J curve, right? And so one of the most important lessons anyone can ever learn and we'll call it performance is the ability to act independent of your internal state or your feelings. It is the absolute greatest lesson anyone can ever learn and the reason so many people fell in the desert is because the enthusiasm got them going their feelings got them going and then you hit that period where you're acting as if but you don't have the outcomes yet and it can be much. Eric. And you're in that period where you're acting as if there are no outcomes and all the feelings have disappeared. So if you're relying on a feeling to complete writing my book, again, I always want a favorite confession over critique. I wrote over a million words before I've finished a book. I could, I could be on book 21 by now, Eric. But I was focused on a feeling and I didn't feel like finishing that project or that manuscript. So I would shift gears. It's not the right one. And instead of just focusing on the protocol itself, the process. And so it's that ability to act independent of your internal state. That's the key to great performance. And then once you you've mastered that and it's been months and you're sticking to the process and you're just working the process, then you get to that period where the beliefs catch up. Confidence is a consequence. You're building your confidence. Your confidence is growing. Your beliefs are catching up. Your feelings are catching up. And then all of a sudden the outcome appears. And you made it through the desert. And that desert though, it's what gets people, Eric. And I mean, this in a very non-religious context is this concept of faith. And again, not religious, but faith is a belief in an outcome you don't have any evidence for. And so you have to maintain faith in the direction and then the process. Okay, when I was sitting down independent of my feelings, this is who I said I need to become. And I just got to work the process. Okay, so we've talked about, I think now what two of the phases, let's talk about let's name the other ones. And give a give a quick summary or definition for those. Yeah, so you have enthusiasm, which is where you get going. It's when it's fun. You're telling everybody about it. Oh, I'm going to write a book. You know, when I when I finally published my book, I sent an email to all my clients. And the first one in Eric was, I know we've talked about this for 10 years. And so I had to honor it. You know, and most of the people that were buying the book are probably like, this is not the book he told me about nine years ago. You know, and so you have the enthusiasm piece where you want to tell everybody about it and it's change you're doing and you're so excited about it. But then you get into the work. And the unglamorous, unsexy daily process. And that's the desert. When you get through the desert, you reach what I call momentum, which is where everything is called back up and everything is an alignment now, including the outcomes, right? The outcomes are reflecting those months of protocol work. And and just in the beliefs have called up the feelings have called up. So you you have the enthusiasm or enthusiasm gap, you have that and then you have the desert and then you have the momentum phase. Got it. Perfect. So I know you also talk about this is there are there to seasons that, you know, they're in the midst of, I mean, some people are like, yeah, but even with those tiny, tiny, tiny things, you're saying to start doing, and we're not saying do all of them at once, by the way, we're saying, you can probably figure out which one would be the one to do. But that on top of that, there are priorities that I can't get rid of. There's things that I can't drop. Things I've already said yes to that I can't say no to. So we understand that there's restriction. There's there's existing commitment. In other words, existing expectation. But you say that there are also seasons. So then starting to look at the seasons of life, not the literal ones, although those tie into it sometimes. What seasons are my in with certain things and talk a little bit more about how this plays into moving forward. Yeah. Well, I want to connect it even Eric to your episode about agency. And so, you know, one of the first exercises I'll walk new clients through is trying to get clear about what season they're in right now, what demands are being placed on you. Where are you allocating your resources? I'm very big on roles. So what roles are demanding of you right now, which ones aren't demanding? And it's trying to understand what season they're in right now because every this is one of the most important things about seasons Eric is every season should have a deadline. It should have a boundary. And whenever we can get clear about where we are right now and then start determining boundaries and those boundaries should be reflective of that. Didn't you did that individual trying to grow into? Didn't you can say, okay, I'm in this season. It's very demanding at work right now. But when I cast out in my calendar, this season has a three month boundary. And then three months, this is where I want to shift my resources and my roles. And so you you've actually said the phrase dropped a moment ago, which is really important when we think about seasons. I coach around glass rolls, rubber rolls, glass priorities, rubber priorities. And those are reflective of seasons. And so I've worked with clients who were in the middle of a startup effort. And unfortunately, their marriage became a rubber roll. And that startup effort was a glass roll. And I know some people may have a reaction to that. But the beauty in determining that, okay, my marriage is a rubber roll this season is you talk to your partner and you say, hey, the next three months are going to be hell. I don't even know if we're going to have a single date night. But if you just bear with me for the next three months, my seasons are going to shift. And you're absolutely going to be a glass priority for me. And we will have weekly date nights. And we will do so. It's about awareness, really Eric. And so seasons are critical to think about, to understand where you are today. But then more importantly, to start forecasting out into the future. And that brings that agency back. One of the things that you talk about here is that there's there's no finish line that the work never ends. And we all feel like that's true. But to be honest, some people listening, that's going to land less for them, like freedom and feel more like a never ending treadmill. And so and feel a little bit like a, you know, a never ending self improvement grind that you're suggesting we should be getting off of. So when you say that the work never ends, is there an enough in there somewhere? Or again, what version of that is where is there a version of that where we get to actually arrive and rest? Talk a little bit about how, how you put your perspective works with this and the future. Yeah. And so I'm, I'm actually going to try and weave in almost everything we've talked about. And so yeah, the final chapter of the book says the work never ends. And I encourage people, you know, not to, you know, throw the book at me or attempt to hit me with it and to just read the chapter right. And what I'm explaining Eric is this, this concept of this spiral staircase. And so whenever you get through the desert and you get to the momentum phase, I wish I could tell you you get to enjoy that momentum phase for the rest of your life, but you don't because the second that you get through the desert and you reach that momentum, you typically reach a new level. And when you reach that new level, you're kind of back at where you started. And to ignore that means that you, you, the world passes you by, right? You want to intentionally, you're always either going up this staircase or down it. And so there is no stagnation, right? And so that's for aggression. And I'll, I'll explain it in a common client that I have where a salesperson comes to me and they had an amazing 2023 and 2024 made president's club. They were rocking it. And when we look back and reflect on their journey, they were doing all the things. They were working on process, independent of outcomes, they were grounded, they were doing meeting prep, they were doing all the things, Eric and they crushed it. And they made president's club two years. But they mean in 2025 things kind of fell off a little bit, you know? And although their peers continue to get better, their performance fell off. And now in 2026, they're having a difficult conversation with their boss about mixed misgoles. And will they have a spot in the company in 2027? And so they reach out to someone like me and we sit down and look, Eric and inevitably what we found is they went up this staircase and then they stopped doing the things. And they didn't look at the evidence they accumulated. And they stopped working the protocol. And so they regressed, right? Again, there is no sitting still in life. And so they regressed. And what instead, what we need to do is when we reach a new level, and in their case, they're now a president's club member, bigger expectations, better goals, they need to realize they're okay. I'm just back at the enthusiasm stage. And I need to rethink who I am and who I have to become to keep moving forward and to keep growing. And so I would be irresponsible if I told people. Hey, you're going to run that duty engine. You're gonna get through the desert and life is gonna be cozy after that. I would be completely irresponsible. Instead, what we need to learn is, I made it through the desert. I know how to do this. I know I may be back at the starting line, but I have a body of evidence that I can reflect on and lean on. I know how to design a process, design a new identity, and I know how to work it. Or somebody listening to this conversation, and they've identified themselves in there somewhere. They've recognized themselves, whether it's the over-organized one or the person who has quietly stopped believing their own word, they lack that self-trust. Let's give people something. When you give people some suggestions, suggestions, you've given people that have talked to you about this, in terms of some of those things that are good starting points as far as those impossible to fail promises that are small and a good first step to start laying those bricks. Yeah. Discomfort is a clue. This is one of the first things I'd say to the individual listening. You can do this in three or four minutes, possibly faster. Sedona, think about a behavioral gap you have right now, and so whether that's something professional, something family-based, something health and fitness, think about a behavioral gap you have right now, and discomfort, a signal, right? That's probably where you should lean in, and just think about one embarrassingly small. I'm stressing them embarrassingly small, because if it's not embarrassingly small, you need to get smaller, and just think about something embarrassingly small. A deposit you can make in that area discomfort, and it may be just walking around the block after work before you drop home if it's health and fitness, right? If it's family, it's putting, leaving your phone by the front door for the first hour of your home, just being present with your family, whatever it might be, think about something embarrassingly small, and just do it in track it for seven days, nothing else. You don't have to adopt a new system, you don't have to read my book, you don't have to do anything. Just do that one embarrassingly small thing for seven days, and just track it. If you mess up, do not self-flagulate. If you mess up, ask yourself what went wrong, was there a trigger in your environment, whatever it might be, think about what you did wrong, but still do it, just immediately do it. You may have to walk that block when you get home, because you forgot to do it before you left work, but just do it in the moment, but track it for seven days, and then after seven days, you still don't do the whole life change, after seven days, you just layer on a new micro commitment, and just focus on those incremental gains over an extended period of time, and you will notice down the road, downstream, that your belief starts shifting and your belief starts catching up, and that's when everything starts shifting. I have done this before, I will say this, and it does work, it does help. I think I'm in a place where I need to start doing some more of this again, so there you go. I'm right there with you people, I'm right there with you, I want to point them to where they can grab the book and find out more about what you're doing with the day one program and everything else. I'll link up to everything you say in the show notes, so let's point people to where they can find out more about what you're doing and the work you're doing in the book. I'll live, work, and play at thefatheraverage.com, so anyone can get in touch with me there. I have a quiz, it's free, it takes a few minutes, and I took five of the most dominant laws that I'll find in my coaching practice, and I built a quiz, and it'll identify the area in which you are lying to yourself. There's nothing to buy, you'll get a few emails for a few days. It does have a link to purchase the book, you don't have to. You can take the quiz, figure out how you're lying to yourself, all for four lessons around that that you can take immediate action with. Very cool. Again, I'll link up to that, defytheaverage.com in the show notes. That's also where you can find, stop lying to yourself, the book, and Lester, it's been great talking with you, and I really hope that people find this as a line in the sand of changing the way that they think, but maybe changing the way they act first, so thank you for being here. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate it, Eric, and like I mentioned, I think before we hit record, I've listened to your show for well over a decade now, like, I can frame it in states. I'll listen to your show states ago, and so I really appreciate you having me. Not just states of being, but states that you lived in as well. So many states ago, many, many, many states ago, many, many, many, many, many, so awesome. Lester, again, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. Well, that's another podcast, "Crossed Up," your podcast listening to Do List. Wasn't that a great conversation with Lester? The thing that stays with me from this is, you don't earn the outcome and then become the person. You become the person and the outcome follows. It's all about the being instead of the doing, and the proof of that isn't a feeling you can talk yourself into, it's a record that you've built and kept one promise at a time, mostly through small actions that often nobody else will ever see. So if you're a capable, organized person who quietly stopped trusting your own word, Lester's book Stop Lying To Yourself Is Worth Your Time, and probably will make you a little bit uncomfortable, but to be fair, that's the whole point. If while listening to this, you thought of somebody who does everything right, they color code things, they're on top of it, they're capable, and yet they still can't make one important thing stick this episode is for them. Would you do me and them a favor by sharing it with them right now? Go to the show notes at BeyondTheToDoList.com or hit the share button in your podcast player app of choice. Thank you for sharing, thank you for listening, and I'll see you next episode. [Music]