How to Stop Feeling Like You’re Never Doing Enough | Caleb Campbell - EP 813

26:22And for the longest time, anytime you search my name, he was the one who came up. And so it was taking forever to do it. So I put the middle initial in there just to try to capture my space on the internet. I love it. So I have been fortunate enough to know many professional athletes over the years. And one of the things that I immediately connected with your book is how military academies and high-level athletics can simultaneously forge identity and consume identity. When did you realize first, because you talked about this a little, but I wanted to nail, when did you first realize performance had become more than competition for you?

27:11I think there's a couple of different moments. I don't think I consciously understood it when I was younger, but there was a moment that I oftentimes think about. I also speak about it from stage, but I was seven years old when I scored the game-winning touchdown in a community all-star championship game. Now, again, as you can relate, I grew up in Texas, so obviously this was still a very big deal. I always laugh because according to my grandma, the only thing that would have been a bigger deal than this is if I would have been cast to play Jesus in the annual school Christmas play, but scoring the touchdown, that was a big runner up.

27:43And I just remember after scoring that touchdown, I'm scanning the sideline looking for my biggest fan. It was my mom. And I ran as fast as my legs could possibly run. And I reached my mom. I'm looking up at her. I got this smile on my face and she's looking down at me. She's got this really beautiful, bright smile on her face. And my mom in this moment, she said something to me that honestly, John, it went on to heavily influence the next two and a half decades of my life. And she said, son, in the most innocent way, son, I love you so much. You scored the game winning touchdown. And I remember those words like verbatim.

28:10And I tell you that because I remember in that moment, even though I wasn't consciously aware of it, what I heard is that I was loved because I performed well. And from an early age, my performance became more than just scoring touchdowns, right? My stats were more than just numbers on a piece of paper. My stats were now a definition of my worth. Success was no longer something that I did or didn't do. It was now who I was and who I was not. And that was reinforced time and time again. And so my entire life was in so many ways a performance, a pursuit of greater success, and also a performance of self.

28:44How can I present myself externally so that I can find the acceptance and the belonging and the validation that I so desperately needed in my life? And I followed that trajectory all the way up to the NFL. And I remember there's this one specific moment in the NFL with the Kansas City Chiefs. And my time in the NFL up until this point, it felt a lot like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. It just wasn't working. I wasn't firing on all cylinders. I was dealing with a lot of pain, a lot of fear that I didn't have the tools or the awareness or quite frankly, the authenticity and vulnerability to work through it.

29:17And so I was not playing good football. And I remember when I got to the Kansas City Chiefs, the GM brought me into his office and he told me what he saw in me. And it was the first time I felt like I had a coach or a mentor or somebody come alongside me and say, hey, I see your potential. And I know you have what it takes to make it here. And I felt like I was on top of the world. Finally, it felt like everything was coming together. And in addition to that, I remember this one specific practice with the Chiefs shortly after I arrived, I had one of the best practices in my NFL career and in the NFL practices, everything is in so many ways.

29:51It's your currency. And I remember after that practice, coach, he sent us to the team meeting room so that we could watch the film together. And I always hated these moments, historically speaking, just because usually they were like a watch Caleb mess up practice film. But every time around, I knew that, hey, I just played some damn good football. And I have every reason to sit tall and to feel proud. And long story short, we're going through the film. and he's eventually I saw myself up on the big screen and he said where's Campbell at and I said right here and he congratulated me he was like this is why we signed you this is why you're here keep up the good work and I felt proud I really did and I remember at the conclusion of that practice that film session everybody got up they went home for the day and I remember sitting there John for a good 10-15 minutes because I wanted to take it all in I took a lot for me to get to where I was in that moment.

30:47And I remember as I was sitting there smiling to myself and feeling proud, I could not help but to also feel like despite getting to the very version of reality that I had been chasing since I was just a young boy, I had this moment of realizing that it's still not enough. And I know how cliche that sounds, but it was so disheartening in the moment that I followed all of the rules. I was as resilient as they come. I faced more adversity than most people had to in order to make their dreams come alive. And I was standing in the middle of it all. And here I am realizing, holy shit, it's still not enough.

31:29I'm not enough. And that was the moment that my relationship with performance was really exposed. And it was really clear to me that something needed to change in that moment. I'm not sure. I think you guys probably played at about the same time if you ever played against Vincent Jackson. I did not, but I know the name. Yeah. He was a Pro Bowl wide receiver first with the Chargers and then he played for the Buccaneers and he and I became really good friends. And I remember he had a long, for football standards, a pretty lengthy career. He played somewhere between 13 and 16 seasons. But he was telling me probably four to five years before he ended up getting out and his parents were both Army veterans, that he started to think about life after football because there was such a void and he had been warned time and time again, you need to start thinking about this.

32:25When I met him, he was really humble because he was trying to learn the business world and he was trying to surround himself with people who he thought were business leaders who could kind of give him the acumen to get better in that space. But as he and I got to know each other more and more as time went on, he also said he had this huge void that existed where he too didn't feel like he was enough. What is me after football? And unfortunately, he ended up developing CTE and ended up ending his life. But it was really an interesting perspective for me to see. And I have another really close friend who played on the 88 Notre Dame team who won the national championship.

33:12And I've gotten to know a lot of those players because every year they do a big team gathering now at his house where 20, 30, 40 of them now show up. And it's interesting as I've talked to them and so many of them played in the NFL, how many of them say the same thing you say that there's this deep void. Why do you think there's so much of a constant from person to person that keeps coming up? And I don't think it's just around NFL players, because I experienced it too. Why do you think so many of us are feeling this way? It's a beautiful question. And it's one that we should really probably sit some time with individually and collectively speaking, because I think for a lot of high achieving, high performing, successful people, whether you're a professional athlete, or a C-suite exec, or a mid-level manager, whatever it might be, I think there oftentimes comes a moment, a threshold that we all face, where we realize that more external success is not actually synonymous with a more fulfilling life.

34:11I think for a lot of us, we find ourselves, and this was my experience sitting there in the NFL, in that film room with the Kansas City Chiefs, I was externally successful, but I felt internally bankrupt. And there was something that was off within myself. And I think this idea that we experience a lot of success, and it's still not enough. It's not a reflection of that we have not yet achieved enough success, right? It's not enough is always for me, from my personal experience was more of a reflection that some part of me believe that I was not enough. And I'm not enough is from my experience always a reflection of some deep shame that I'm still carrying in my life, probably from my childhood.

34:52And for me, the way that I learned how to compensate for the shame, that feeling of being reduced and devalued and seen as not enough or feeling like I'm not enough, the way that I compensated for that shame was by performing more and by doing more and by being more and by achieving more. And so for a lot of me, my experience personally, I can only speak to my experience, I think that we get to this point of externally successful, but still filling that void, not because the success is not sufficient, but because there's some deep pain that has been hiding behind our ambition, a deep pain that's been hiding and buried beneath our striving, or our pursuit of success.

35:31And so when we get the success, we get the thing that we have been wanting, we have to slow down for a minute. And as we try to experience or to enjoy it, we suddenly realize, well, shit, all of this pain, all of this insecurity, all of this shame is still coming along with me. And I think that's what creates the void. The void isn't necessarily a reflection of our inadequacy. It's really just a signal that there's a misalignment within ourselves. I was recently interviewing Blake Mycoskie, and I'm not sure if you know who that is, but for the listener, he founded Tom's. And after selling Tom's, he went through a period where he felt suicidal and it was for much of the same reasons as we're describing.

36:14So here you have a person who spent much of his success as an adult, fulfilling his purpose in life, giving away shoes to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of needy people throughout the world. and he still felt he wasn't enough. And he's recently started a new nonprofit called We Are Enough that I think, and I hope will do good for so many people given his platform and everything else. But you're right. It affects so much of us. And what I found and what I want to go back to is as I was writing and researching my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, I found that for the vast majority of us, like it did for you.

36:56This goes back to our childhood. And I found that most of us live in two different scenarios that we grow up in. The first scenario is what you described coming out of that peewee football moment, where we think it's our performance that makes us feel that we're seen. And then the other most common scenario is you grow up in a family culture where your invisibility is what is rewarded. But no matter which one it is, they all end up in the same result, feeling that you're not enough. So in the book, you describe growing up in a culture where football, patriotism, masculinity, and faith were all deeply intertwined.

37:38Yes. How did all of that coming together shape your understanding of what it meant to matter? I oftentimes joke that when When you are born in the Texas panhandle, especially if you're a boy, they hand you a Bible, an American flag and a football. All in that order, because that's the holy trifecta. And I was born into evangelical Christianity. And early on, I was taught to believe that God has a really big purpose for my life. And I also was told that I have an incredible skill set. I can throw a football and I can run really fast and I can make big plays on the field. And so very quickly, my passion for football was in so many ways co-opted by evangelical Christianity.

38:26And it wasn't about a game for me. It was all about now. This is my duty in life. This is my purpose in life. This is the way that I give back to God in so many ways in the way that I can actually find deeper meaning and significance for my life. And so I think early on, that is what fueled me as a young boy growing up in the Texas Panhandle, that God gave me a gift. And my job and my purpose in life is to give that gift back to others and to essentially help people along the way. And I found such a sense of belonging in that at a very young age. But so many others, essentially, that sense of belonging really became a cage.

39:07and it would be slowly become the very thing that would lead me into some deeper challenges in my life. When I think about what you just said, I think of Will in Good Will Hunting because that's exactly the cage that he put himself in. The things that he thought and were some of his biggest strengths ended up becoming the biggest cage for him and being able to develop a relationship with others. Absolutely. And I think it's important. I think is a Henry Deer Swift, Henry Swift Deer, a Native American teacher. He said, we all have a survival path and we all have a soul path. But while everyone experiences their survival path, not everyone experiences their soul path.

39:46And that soul path is where we can step into a more satisfied, nourishing and fulfilling life. And for me growing up with that experience, that being my kind of baseline in life, that was really the way that I survived. I moved through my young adult life really asking, okay, how can I be a man or a child of God? How can I demonstrate great faith? And how can I perform really well on the football field? That's the way that I found survival. And I think it looks good from the outside. Like somebody hearing that might be saying like, well, why is that a problem? And for me, great faith was just taught to believe that God always has a plan and you got to believe that God has a plan and there's no room for fear.

40:24There's no room for a lot of the uncomfortable emotions that are just a byproduct of being human. And so I never was given a safe space to talk about the deeper fears or the deeper emotional complex challenges that I was holding in my life. And so every day I would show up trying to be this person that I thought everyone expected me to be so that I could belong and also perform really well on the football field. And that just wasn't my truth. I didn't feel safe enough to talk about the deeper challenges of my life or allow myself to be fully seen because I thought it would compromise the sense of belonging that I found.

40:59by being everything that I was told I was supposed to be in order to be successful. And that's how it quickly becomes our survival path. And essentially our survival path, while it allows us to fully survive our lives, it will never allow us to fully live our life. There's a well-known psychologist at Cornell University named Tom Gilovich, who has been studying this topic for decades. And one of his most prominent pieces of research was analyzing thousands of people who were in their trimester of their lives. And what he found was that 76 % of them all have the same regret. And that is the regret of never pursuing their ideal self, which is really that version that they felt enough being.

41:45And in my first book, Passion Struck, I talked about this through my own experience is wearing a mask of pretense. You use the word survival self, the version of ourselves that we have to become, or we think we have to become in order to stay loved, accepted, safe, et cetera. And I think especially for men who are listening, and I believe also for many of the women listeners, that is a version of us that over time we recognize less and less. And for me, what ended up happening is the more I became that person, it seemed like the more the rest of my world started to become more dull. It's like hard to explain unless you've experienced it, but it was like, I was still there, but the colors of my life were starting to fade.

42:40It was like this slow fade. Did you feel the same way? I think you're speaking to a lot of what people would maybe even call a midlife crisis or a midlife reinvention opportunity, however you want to phrase it. But I think you named it well, our survival self, this version of who we were taught to be in order to stay safe and survive our lives. Like it is such a gift. It gets us through so many challenging and hard and difficult childhood experiences. We learn how to get loud when we need to get loud. And we learn how to stay silent and disappear when we need to stay silent and disappear. We could tort ourselves in all of these beautiful ways so that we can survive our lives.

43:18And we shape personalities from this survival self. And for so many of us, our survival self is really successful. It allows us to do well. We perform really well. We were able to push through the burnout. We're able to overcome challenges. We're able to do all of these beautiful things. But eventually what ends up happening is life is love. We have to understand that life is love and life wants us to succeed more than we want to succeed. And when I say succeed, I'm not just talking about external accolades and achievements. I'm talking about life loves us so much that it wants us to live these deeply satisfying and fulfilling and nourishing lives so that we can feel fully alive in this one beautiful life that we have.

43:57Life wants that for us. The hard thing is that our survival self, while it allows us to survive our lives, it can never offer us that gift. It will never allow us to fully live our lives. And so I think what ends up happening and what I experienced is that my survival self, it took me all the way from the red dirt roads of the Texas panhandle to West Point to the NFL. And then slowly, as you communicated so well, I found myself in the middle of my childhood dream, this version of reality that I have been chasing since I was just a young boy feeling passionless, feeling like I was wearing a sweater from five years ago that fit really well.

44:31But now it's like all tight in the wrong places. Life didn't feel good to live. my success looked good but it didn't feel good to live i felt a loss of clarity a loss of direction i was living in more confusion than i had ever felt before my life everything felt so disoriented and i thought that was all just a reflection of my inadequacy or i thought it was a signal that i needed to work harder and to push forward even more but what i come to realize now is like no life created this beautiful ecosystem with enough tension and discomfort to surface this reality that my survival self has come to the end.

45:11It has gotten me to where I am today, but it is not going to take me to where I want to be. And now the journey to cross over the threshold from what was to what will be isn't about more striving or more ambition or more external effort. It's now about learning how to allow that survival self to die so that we can go into the cocoon of our lives and reappear as somebody new we become a more aligned more true more whole version of us that's fully capable of actually stepping into the fullness of life not because we tried harder right but because we became somebody new in the process i absolutely love that and share that that vision.

45:52It's everything that we try to do here on the podcast is explain to people how to do that through all aspects of their lives. Because to me, that would make the world such a better place, wouldn't it, Caleb? Yeah, honestly, I told my wife the other day, I said, honey, this is going to sound like a really arrogant thing to say. And I said, if everybody just followed my path, the world would be a better place. And I was joking when I said it, but I also, I was like, no, I'm serious. All right. We can even look back at Robert Bly has been a major influence in my life. Wrote the book, sibling generation.

46:23I love this concept. I bring it up in my book, but essentially we are living in a sibling generation. It doesn't take long, John, for us to look around at the current landscape of leadership and see that there are a lot of adult people still tethered to an adolescent psyche, right? There are a bunch of grown ass men and women acting like a little bunch of boys and girls that are deeply wounded in their lives. There's no avoiding that. There's no ignoring that. It's out in plain sight. And really what's happening, John, is because rites of passages are so voided in our culture today, there's no elders.

46:58There's no communities coming alongside of the younger people and saying, hey, you are evolving and it's time for you to let go of your survival self. Go out and be initiated through a rites of passage so that you can come back with a deeper understanding of not only who you are, but the gifts that you carry to your community to make the community a better place. And that's essentially the death of an old way of being a death of an old identity and the process of becoming somebody new and reinventing yourself that so that you can contribute in a more meaningful and whole way. And that is so void in our culture.

47:32And it's evident the problems that it's creating when it comes to so many the different challenges that we're experiencing in our country. And it's all because we are afraid to evolve at an identity level. We are afraid to die. We are afraid to let go of this version of who we were created to be in order to survive our lives. And if we were just willing to do that, more people would be living from a place of alignment. And from that place of alignment, we wouldn't be perpetuating fear and pain, but we'd be offering greater love. And I think that truly could change the world. One of my, I don't listen to a lot of Joe Rogan podcasts primarily because they're freaking five hours long.

48:15I actually listened to a couple that have been life transformative for me. I had a lot of traumatic brain injuries throughout my life, and so did he. And I actually discovered a doctor on it who was helping a whole bunch of veterans process this because in combat situations, you get a ton of TBIs through micro explosions that you're exposed to. And I actually got treatment from him and it changed my life. So if it wasn't for Joe Rogan, I would have never discovered that. I love it. But one of the things I heard Joe talking about was exactly what you're describing, but he was talking about it more of why do we stay in these identities?

48:52And he was talking about what ends up happening is you get so comfortable in it. Comfortable meaning your lifestyle is surrounded by it. So it's now become the neighborhood you live in, the way that people see you, the cars you drive, the expectations of your family and everything else. And I always describe it when I talk to people about it, it's like you have just climbed Mount Everest. And now you realize that where you really should be is not at the top of Mount Everest. You really want to be on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, but Kilimanjaro, but it's 2000 miles away. And you see this huge void in between, and you realized what it's cost you and how hard it was to climb Mount Everest.

49:38And now you think to yourself, one, do I have it in me to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, but how do I even go from where I am to even start the climb to get there? Because I don't even know how to cross the terrain to even get to the base of the mountain. And I think that's where 99 % of people get stuck even before they begin. Do you think that, does that resonate with you? I think if I'm hearing you correctly, what you're describing is the idea of liminal space, right? It's that space between what was and what will be. And I think the poet David White, he is referencing Dante's Commandeer. And there's a line from that.

50:16And he says, I awoke in the dark wood of my life and the way was wholly lost. And David, why in response, he says, how do you know you're on the right path? He says, well, the path disappears. And I think there's something about, okay, I built this beautiful life. I climbed Mount Everest. I'm very successful, but it's not enough, or it's not my fullest expression of myself. And I can sense that something is missing. Life is no longer alive like it once was. And I know there's something more, but I also know that this more isn't just a byproduct of more external effort, hard work, and success because I've climbed the mountain of success and it's still not enough.

50:56So I have enough awareness to understand that's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for something deeper happening within myself. And now what life is asking us to do is that we've come to a threshold. We've come to this moment in time in order for us to cross over the threshold, this liminal space between what was and what will be is going to require us to fully accept uncertainty in the unknown. We're going to have to be willing to essentially walk feeling confused, feeling disoriented, feeling a little unclear on who we are and why we are here. And all of that uncertainty, it creates immense vulnerability.

51:30And if you don't have the internal capacity to hold the tension that is inevitably going to be found in the space between what was and what will be, we will always revert back to the familiar. We will always cling to what we know, even though we have outgrown what we know and what we know is not allowing us to live a satisfying and fulfilling life. And so for me, creating the internal conditions and creating the capacity to hold the unknown that inevitably comes in order for us to cross over that threshold and walk through liminal space to step into a new life, that's some of the most important work we can learn how to do.

52:05I want to talk about this liminal space here just for a second with one of your examples from the book. I call these spaces transition points because when I served, I often found that more veterans became vulnerable were in the transition points on a mission. This is where I got the concept. When you get to the point where you're going to accomplish the mission, I feel like you're functioning at optimal anxiety. You know why you're there. You know the mission that needs to be done. But a lot of times in the transition points, you let your guard down. It's where you kind of get lackadaisical. You're not really thinking about everything that you need to.

52:45And oftentimes I think that's how most of us live our lives is in these liminal spaces. You tell the story in the book about veteran linebacker Julian Peterson inviting you to watch film with the team, but instead you did something completely different. Why is that story important about understanding how we use liminal spaces and the decisions that we make? Because I think some decisions take us closer to our dreams and some decisions take us farther away. It's a great question, John. Just to give the listener more context, I was drafted. I was celebrated immensely Honestly, at the draft, when Detroit drafted me, like I was a seventh round draft pick, but Roger Goodell, he came to the podium and he announced me to the 10 ,000 screaming fans that were at the draft.

53:34And I think there were 36 million people tuning in on national television, watching the draft. And when I got drafted, they called me America's athlete. I was a West Point graduate, I was an army officer, and now I'm an NFL athlete. And I know that they all meant well when they called me America's athlete, John, but I didn't hear anything good in that statement. And what I heard is, Caleb, failure is not an option. Caleb, you better have it all together all the time. Caleb, don't you dare be weak and mess this up. And so that's the pressure that I was living in, using all of my energy, trying to perfect this facade so that on the outside looking in, you saw a Army officer, NFL athlete that had it all together all the time.

54:08I was, in fact, America's athlete, even though internally speaking, that was the furthest thing away from my truth. And when I got to Detroit and I was in training camp, I wasn't playing good football. all of the pressure and all of the fear that I was carrying, it was definitely affecting my ability to show up and perform my best. It was affecting my ability to connect with my teammates. And I, again, from a young age, my performance was how I found acceptance and belonging in my life. And I always lived in a way where I presented myself so that I surpassed your expectations, so that you validated who I was, so that I could feel good.

54:44That's the way that I survived my life. And now in the NFL, I was reaching this threshold. I was reaching this point where I didn't have what it takes to perform really well. And I felt like I was on the verge of, I felt that I was on the verge of being exposed as a fraud. I went from the growth mindset that it required of me to make it to the NFL. I completely disregarded that. And now all of my energy was now all about managing the image of being a success. I was just spending all of my energy managing an image. And when Julian asked me if I wanted to go watch film, I disregarded it. And I said I had other things to do and I had nothing else to do.

55:22I wanted to go numb the pain that I was feeling. And so I was on my way to a bar, essentially to drink alone on our first night off when all of my teammates were heading to the film room to get better. And the reason why I wanted to say or reason why I said no is because there was a part of me, even though I probably couldn't have consciously articulated this at the time, there's a part of me that didn't want to give it all that I had because my identity was fully wrapped up in my performance and if I gave it all that I had and I went and I watched film and I put in the extra reps and I went above and beyond and I still came up short and I didn't make it what would that say about me then that would threaten my identity it would threaten the way that I found acceptance and belonging in this world and so for me what I did is I gave myself a way out And if I did get cut, I could always have an excuse on why I didn't make it.

56:20It would always prevent me from looking within myself and realize that the version of who I am today needs to die because it is not capable of creating the life that I want to live tomorrow. And that's ultimately the deeper work that I was avoiding by making excuses in my life and avoiding giving it all that I had because I didn't have the capacity, the tools, the awareness or the guidance to navigate the liminal space that I would inevitably have to cross over to go from who I used to be to who I needed to become so that I could actually step into my fullest potential. Caleb, a few years ago, I was working with a gentleman who was a lineman at Kansas State.

57:05And his senior year, he was all big 12, first team, all American, drafted in the second or third round. And he said after he got his contract, went to training camp, he said it was the most incredible panic he's ever felt in his life because he realized he was the worst player on the team. he was the slowest he wasn't the biggest all the advantages that he had had up until that point were completely erased and he never made it past training camp and he said it it haunts him till today because of the way it all transpired but he said when you reach that elite level and you think you're elite going into it and then you realize you're just ordinary at us he said it is just such a hard thing to confront.

57:54I think, John, this is the difference between really having confidence in your skill set and your talent versus having confidence in knowing who you are. And for so many of us, our identity is secure to our performance. And so it rises and it falls based on our performance. And when we are thrusted into an ecosystem where we are no longer the biggest, the fastest and the strongest, we are in fact the worst one on the team, right? Now our identity goes from being very expansive to now very small and we have less spaciousness to work with. And so this is just like the reason why learning how to evolve at an identity level, learning who you are apart from all of the ways that you found security, validation, acceptance, and belonging, and ultimately apart from your performance is so necessary because you just realize that there's the small self that so many different religions and Eastern practices and philosophies and religions will speak to.

58:42And then you have the big self, right? And for so many of us, we live in the small self of our life. The small self is everything. This is how we survive our lives and we never tap into that big self. But when you go through enough identity evolutions, when you go through enough learning how to let go of who you once were, crossing over the liminal space between what was and what will be, allow life to mirror back to you the deeper inner growth that needs to take place so that you can evolve and then step into who you are becoming. Like when you go through that thread and that journey enough, you start to learn how to connect to your big self and really essentially really understand who you are apart from this small experience or this hard experience that you're having in your life.

59:22And that's some of the greatest work that you can ever learn how to do. And in my book, I call it the dance of detachment and is absolutely important. Caleb, I wanted to give the listener a clear picture of what life looks like now. So we've talked a lot about what achievement life looked like for you, but now that you have found yourself again in the process, what does healthy striving look like now for you. That's one of the biggest misconceptions that I really try to address in my book. And when I say unstriving, people are like, oh, so we just give up trying in life? I'm like, no. And John, there's a really big difference between me waking up every day and sitting at my computer and doing work in an attempt to prove my worth in life versus me waking up every day, sitting at my computer, doing work from a place of deeply knowing my worth.

1:00:14And it's not that I do less. It's not that I don't put myself out there. I've never been more ambitious in my life. I'm going to be 42 in September. I have never been more ambitious in my life. But what changes, John, is the energy behind my ambition. It's not coming from a desperate place. It's not coming from a fear or a scarcity place. It's not coming from an insignificant place, right? I don't need my success to be something for me that it was never supposed to be. because if we're being honest, for so many of us, we have a really codependent relationship for success. Just like you can have a codependent relationship with a spouse or a partner, like we need our spouse or partner to do or to be certain ways so that we can feel okay about ourselves.

1:00:56That is not the recipe to a nourishing life for so many of us. We need our success to be something for us so that we can be okay with ourselves. And that's essentially a codependent relationship with success. And so now I've never been more ambitious, but where it's coming from, That's what changes. I'm not here to prove I'm here to serve. I'm not here trying to avoid my fear. I am here to step into my fullest potential because that was the biggest shift for me. I realized, John, that I was never chasing success for success. I was chasing success in the avoidance of stillness because in the stillness, I would have to be more present with all the internal discomfort, the fear that would surface in my life.

1:01:34For me, I'm still more ambitious than I've ever been, but there's no hustle in it. I'm not trying to be somebody that I'm not. I'm not trying to prove my worth. I am living from more of a inner compass of what inspires me, what feels good, what feels like play, where is inspiration? And am I willing to follow it even when it doesn't make logical sense? There is a recalibration that has happened where the way that I explain it, John, life is a river and the river is flowing. And for so many of us, we spend so much energy trying to push the river, trying to swim faster and harder. But the truth is the life, the river is already flowing.

1:02:16Our job is to learn how to rest in the river and allow the current of the river to take us downstream to exactly where we're supposed to be. But the difference is we get there and our souls aren't tired from the journey. And you just are able to live a much more satisfying and fulfilling life as a result. It's interesting you bring up that analogy because you might not be aware of this. Maybe you are, but President Abraham Lincoln for so many years of his life described himself as a piece of driftwood just floating down the river. And it wasn't until the twilight of what most people remember him for that he figured out how to start taking the rudder and directing that piece of driftwood.

1:02:53Yeah, there's a Clarissa Esses, the author of Women Runs With Wool, she calls it the river beneath the river. All of our lives have a river beneath the river. And for so many of us, we live on the river on top of the river. And we live striving and hustling and proving and attaining and accomplishing and trying to do all the things that we need to do in order to survive our lives. But there's this deeper river that we have access to that is never in a rush. It does not panic. It does not fret. It moves at the exact pace that it is supposed to move. And it always gets exactly where it's supposed to go.

1:03:25and there is great wisdom in learning how to tap into the wisdom or to the river beneath the river. And what I try to do with my book on striving is to take you on the arc. So that's exactly what you can do. The last chapter in the book before the conclusion, it's the river's already flowing. And when you learn how to rest in the river, you still accomplish everything you want to accomplish. You still set out, you're still ambitious, you're still hungry, but just you have changed in the process. And so you show up differently. I had a mentor that once said, John, what you start with is what you finish with.

1:03:54And so for so many of us, when we start our pursuit of success from a place of insignificance or fear or scarcity, it doesn't matter what you do or how much you accomplish along the way. In the end, you will be left with the scarcity, with the fear and the insignificance. But if we can start from a place of wholeness, if we can start from a place of purpose, if we can start from a place of alignment, then in the end, that's what we are left with. And as a result, our success isn't just more authentic. It's more meaningful and satisfying as a result. I love it. So the book, Unstriving by Caleb Campbell.

1:04:28What I took most from the book is that the emotional promise of it is not to achieve less. It's to stop sacrificing yourself to achieve. That's absolutely right. I like how you said it. I'm going to use that, John. Thank you. Caleb, where's the best place for listeners to learn more about you? So you can go to my website, calebcampbell.me. My day job, I'm a full-time keynote speaker. I spend almost every week, if not, or multiple times every month on stages across all different organizations, associations, and conferences. And essentially, I help leaders and teams rise under pressure. I think right now with the world and the way that it's operating, it's moving faster than ever before.

1:05:07AI is faster than it's ever before. There's a lot of uncertainty and unpredictability. And so what really is going to be the determining difference between the leaders and the teams who can rise under this pressure versus those who burn out trying. And my work as a keynote speaker is to show you exactly how to do that, how to rise under pressure. And CalebCampbell.me is a great place to start, and it will direct you to every other resource that I offer. Caleb, it was an honor to have you today. Thank you for joining us on PassionStruck. Thanks for having me, John. I hope today's conversation with Caleb Campbell gave you a different way to think about ambition, identity, and what it really means to change.

1:05:43For me, one of the biggest takeaways was that sometimes we don't need to try harder. we need to be willing to let go of who we've been so we become who we're capable of being. If something from today's conversation resonated with you, I'd love to hear your biggest takeaway. Share it with me on Substack, LinkedIn, or Instagram. And if you know someone who's wrestling with the transition in their own life, send them today's episode. And if you haven't already, be sure to follow PassionStruck on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube so you never miss an episode. And with that, we've come to the end of our August series, The Adaptive Brain.

1:06:18We spent the month exploring how our brains change, how our biology environments influence us, how identity and behavior shape our lives, and what it takes to keep becoming. Next Tuesday, we're going to widen the lens. I'm kicking off a brand new series called The Adaptive Human, How We Thrive in a Changing World. And I'm joined by someone who has been a huge influence on how we understand human potential, Angela Duckworth. Angela is the author of Grit, and her new book, Situated, takes her work in a fascinating new direction. She argues that grit and individual effort matter, but they're only part of the story.

1:06:56The situations we're in can amplify our strengths or diminish them. We talk about the people, places, mentors, cultures, and environments that bring out our best. And one question that I found especially powerful, do our situations change who we are, or do they reveal what's already there. Whether you are optimistic or discouraged, whether you think your work is interesting and that you matter, or you think the opposite is not just a function of what's inside you. It's also a function of where you are. That conversation launches a September series about agency, adaptability, belonging, courage, meaning, and ultimately what it takes to thrive when the world around us keeps changing.

1:07:40I think you're going to love where we're headed. Until then, remember, you're not finished becoming. I'm John Miles, and as always, stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.