You Are Your Own CEILING: How OWNERSHIP Unlocks Your TRUE POTENTIAL | Erwin McManus EP 630

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12I'm like you. I'm a very optimistic person. Yeah. I'm incredibly hopeful. So the moment I see a negative, I see the positive, by the way. Uh-huh. So I'm going, oh, wow, I'm going to study these negative structures for failure, but I'm going to actually begin to construct all the positive structures for success. And I was working with the urban poor at the time. I was working in the inner city with a lot of gangs, with a lot of drug runners, and people trapped in poverty. And I knew that if I could change their internal mental structures, I could actually prepare them for a life of success. And I realized that poverty creates self-limiting structures.

0:48One of the things you have to do for a person is not just give them opportunity. You actually have to change their internal mental structures so they can see those opportunities and take advantage of them. And you can't just give them what looks like success without changing those structures internally. It all begins internal. internally before it begins to be actualized externally. I wrote MindShift because I thought, wow, if I had just known these things in my 20s or known them in my 30s or even my 40s, if I had had clarity about them, I would have accelerated my success at a faster level and I would have increased my influence dramatically.

1:24So what is the main thing that you can see in someone that says they are structurally prepared to welcome success in their life and handle it and potentially stay successful versus someone that is not prepared. They're wired for failure or structured for failure. And when success comes, it's all downhill after that. If I had to pick one word, because remember I have 12 chapters, one word, it's ownership. One of the chapters of the book is called You Are Your Own Ceiling. I had some pushback on this the other day because I spoke about this at the Global Leadership Summit about that our limitations are self-imposed.

2:06You can have trauma in your life. You can have circumstances and situations that are dramatic, but the structures that are internal are self-created. They're your response to those circumstances, to those traumas, to those situations. And somebody said, that's so unfair. You know, you're putting all the blame on the person. No, I'm not. I'm giving all the ownership because if the limitations are external, you're powerless. You're relying on someone else to give you power. Someone's got to fix it. But if the limitations are internal, you're powerful. So to me, no, this is the most optimistic, positive, empowering mindset framework.

2:47if those limitations are within me and I've created them out of response to the world around me then I can change them and I can redirect them and realign them and so maybe I became bitter maybe I'm a hurt person who hurt people and I thought hurting people was the only way to survive a world that constantly hurts me but that's the mindset I created but now I realize oh this is a self-limiting mindset if I'm always going to hurt people I will never be loved. If I'm always going to hurt people, I'll never know closeness. I'll never know intimacy. I'll never have friendships. I'm going to live my life alone.

3:24See, the moment you realize, oh, this self-limiting mental structure of hurting people because I've been hurt is actually costing me everything I want in life. And then you go, okay, it doesn't feel right, but I'm going to forgive. It just feels so counterintuitive. But I'm going to let go. I'm going to forgive people. And the moment you forgive and you begin to open yourself up to people, and begin to trust people, your life changes instantly. It's radicalized. One of the chapters talks about talent. What I find is people who are highly talented when they're young actually struggle with having structures for sustained success.

4:02Really? Because their talent is usually matched with external structures for success. So if you're a super athlete, they put you on a team, and then they give you a coach, and they create discipline in your life. And they manage that talent. It's not self-discipline is what you're saying. No, it's an external structure. And that's why about 75 % of all pro football players five years after they're done with their career are bankrupt. It's why at least half of the three quarters of them are divorced, drug addicted, dead, or divorced within two or three years after their careers are over. Because their talent did not require them to create internal structures.

4:45because they're external structures. See, I have the great gift of not having talent. And when you have low talent, you have to create high internal structures. Because if you're going to succeed, if I'm going to match against someone who has high talent, I have to have a harder work ethic. Extreme discipline. I have to be more disciplined. I have to have more determination. I have to create a different internal structure because I'm at a liability. And so I have people in my life who were super talents when they're young, and I was considered nominally talented, average. Then the moment we were out of high school, and the moment we were out of college, and the moment we're in the real world, they actually lost momentum and I accelerated.

5:30And the difference was that talent is a hallucinogen. It's an illusion that allows you to believe you do not need discipline and hard work to succeed in life. Right. But greatness is not the outcome of talent. greatness is the outcome of this one and it's taking that talent and harnessing it to its optimal capacity you know i felt like i didn't have the talent but i had the the work ethic the discipline the willingness to remove distractions from my life you know all these different things to to focus to show up and make the most of my talent as well so yeah i i think there's the curse of talent and especially when you are a prodigy at a young age yeah or you win olympic adult at 16, and you're like, now what?

6:14You know? And fortunately, most of us, you know, we have some degree of talent, but not so much that we begin to live in this mythology that we don't have to work hard. But it's such a small little shift when you think about, oh, okay, I can accomplish almost anything if I'm willing to pay the price to develop the disciplines, to develop the skills to accomplish this.

6:44Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation. And I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:33Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.