Why High Performers BECOME Before They Have Proof - Ep. 11

Hey and welcome back to another debrief session. These are solar reflections where I unpack lessons, patterns that I see, and different ideas that are sticking with me in my mind from recent conversations and from within my own journey. Today's debrief session is the topic of becoming before proof. And it kind of piggybacks off another debrief session of the gap between potential and proof. But that session kind of then took me down a pathway of the becoming part. So it's based around the concept and the reality that high performers often feel the future version of themselves before any external proof existing. Because there's a strange moment when you can sense something becoming real before you can consistently demonstrate it. So I'm going to ask you a question. What if your identity actually develops before the evidence comes through? So I think as humans and as founders, we carry mental representations of who we think we can become. Your future identity. And that influences your behavior, your persistence, your resilience, and your decision making. It's that parallel, you know, like in business, feeling capable before you have the credentials. And I think identity becomes before evidence. I believe that most people wait for proof before changing their identity. But my observation is that high performers reverse it. The best performers that I've ever come across and talked to view it through this mindset of I'm becoming this. They can feel things emerging. They think of their future selves as just someone they are growing into. And I think the body knows before the mind can explain or comprehend. You know, like an athlete will often say, and you know, like I know it during my baseball career, and now going through my journey in golf, going through different moments where I'll be like, oh, I found something. The feeling of I know it's in there. And founders experience this too. You know, and it comes through instinct and intuition, your vision, pattern recognition. So I think the important insight here is that sometimes your nervous system recognizes your progress before your conscious mind can even articulate it. I think there's some hidden transferable skills. Now, people often think they're starting from zero, especially when trying something new or starting a new endeavor or a new sport. But your previous experiences transfer, whether it's in athletics, sales, communication, leadership, advisory, you're even down to your emotional regulation. And I think this is why that, you know, former athletes can become strong entrepreneurs. Service leaders can become founders, operators can can become visionaries. So you truly are rarely starting from zero because there's so much you can translate in your current capabilities into new arenas. And I think that's why there's been so many parallels between golf and business. And my journey as a founder and an entrepreneur has been incredibly helpful in my journey of learning to play golf and get better at golf. You often will recognize excellence before you can actually consistently produce it. On a golf course, that could be a hole where you go out. You know, I'll go out and you know, you'll get a birdie. But then the next hole, I'll have quadruple bogey. You know, there's early on in any new endeavor, you're gonna lack consistency. It's just part of the game. And that can create a lot of frustration, but it also signals growth capacity because I know that in golf, my potential is the best of my abilities. My potential are the holes where I can birdie, not the ones that I blow up and go for over. Now in business, seeing elite execution before being able to actually do it, that can create frustration in that, you know, in that ability gap. Or it can be something like understanding great leadership before actually being able to embody it consistently. There's a gap there. And so it's important to know that your identity shapes behavior, and your identity is what you believe about yourself, and your behavior compounds into outcomes. And so the future version of you often arrives emotionally before statistically, but you have to make sure you have that self-identity, even though the proof is not there yet. Because becoming requires faith before you have any validation. And I think this is the hardest hurdle to get over. But if you can do this, if you're able to become internally and have the faith in yourself to become whatever it is, or whoever it is you want to be, before you have any proof externally with any results, if you can get past that, you will be unstoppable. Because the most difficult part of becoming is continuing to trust what you feel is emerging before the world can confirm it. So, to my founders and operators out there, trust in yourself, believe and have faith in yourself, because you have to know and trust fully that emergence, that transcendence is on its way.