Living a Successful and Formidable Life

Scott DeLuzio:    00:03    Thanks for tuning in to the Drive On Podcast where we talk about issues affecting veterans after they get out of the military. Before we get started, I'd like to ask a favor if you haven't done so already, please rate and review the show on Apple podcasts. If you've already done that. Thank you. These ratings help the show get discovered so it can reach a wider audience and while you're there, click the subscribe button so that you get notified of new episodes as soon as they come out. If you don't use Apple podcasts, you can visit Drive On Podcasts.com/subscribe to find other ways of subscribing, including our emails. I'm your host, Scott de Lucio, and now let's get on with the show.

Scott DeLuzio:    00:44    Hey everyone. Today we are wrapping up a three-part series with my guest, Lyn Christian. And if you haven't done so already, go back and take a listen to the last two episodes, which are episodes number 40 and 41. In those episodes, Lyn gives us a little background about herself and her company, Soul Salt. We talk about knowing your core values and why knowing them is important. And we also talk about reinventing your career, which is something I think that many veterans are familiar with after transitioning from military life to civilian life. So again, if you haven't listened to those episodes, go back, give those a listen and then come back and listen to this one. So, welcome back to the show.

Lyn Christian:    01:24    Thank you. It's my pleasure.

Scott DeLuzio:    01:26    All right, so today we're going to talk about how to live a successful and formidable life and no pressure here, Lyn, but I expect everyone who listens to this wants to instantly become an overnight success.

Lyn Christian:    01:41    yeah,

Scott DeLuzio:    01:41    I'm just kidding with that. I think we all know that we need to put in the work to become successful. One podcast episode isn't going to push us over that edge, but hopefully we can lead people in the right direction. So, let's start off with the basics.

Lyn Christian:    01:59    Yeah.

Scott DeLuzio:    01:59    What are we talking about when we use the words like successful and formidable? How would you define those two words, in this context?

Lyn Christian:    02:07    Let's start with successful because that is something that I feel should be up to everyone to define what successful is. However, I'm going to use some research from Quinn and Quinn from 2002. Let me read something that they said. And instead of successful, they use a different word, you'll hear it almost immediately. They say being extraordinary does not necessarily mean obtaining a position of honor or glory or even of becoming successful in other people's eyes. It means being true to self. It means pursuing our full potential. That's Quinn and Quinn from 2000 in affiliation with our reflected best self-portraits that were studied at Harvard business school and the University of Michigan business school. And I seem to gravitate to this because my opinion, Scott, is that being extraordinary means being successful in your own eyes. And the bottom line to that is I believe, how much of your life did you live being true to yourself?

Lyn Christian:    03:31    And I even encourage people to define what success is for them. At one point I defined success as at the end of my life I'll ask how soft did my heart remain and how open is my mind? And those will be metrics that I'll use to decide how successful I was. I would encourage the audience to take the Liberty to define success on their own terms and consider having part of it mean how much time they spend being true to themselves. And also I recognize, I was thinking about your audience this morning. I was out on a hike and I was thinking about coming in and talking to you and granted there'll be some people listening that will understand this next part. Again, we need to say there are times in our lives when we feel less clear, when we don't feel as motivated.

Lyn Christian:    04:31    And in those times, perhaps we look at someone that we feel is successful or someone that we have a connection with like we did in our very first discussion together. And we allow them to give us ideas of what success might be and we give them ideas of what it might look like too. Have some guard rails from someone else for a while if we haven't defined it for ourselves, and then eventually define it for yourself. And the word formidable to me is really at the root of why people call other people a badass now. Or they used to call people a rock star. I think it's when we find pieces of ourselves that we can emulate in our actions that make us enlivened, enlarged and vital in terms of character and principle and action.  How’s that?

Scott DeLuzio:    05:29    I like it. I like those two definitions; those help clarify what it is that we're talking about. You know, when we start diving into this here.  I know a lot of times we see people who are, what society deems to be successful, whether it's sports, a professional athlete or in business or whatever. And we get jealous of those people, because we really don’t know these people. We haven't grown up with these people. They're not our family members necessarily. It seems like they're just an overnight success. I know I teased about being an overnight success in the beginning there, but that rarely, if ever, is the case that they're an overnight success. Most of the time it takes years of hard work, dedication, perseverance to become an overnight success, doesn't it?

Lyn Christian:    06:22    Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

Scott DeLuzio:    06:26     And so what is the key, what is the secret sauce, if you will, that allows someone to be successful to become one of these, “overnight successes” where they put in the work and they eventually get there. What is one of the keys to getting into that?

Lyn Christian:    06:50    No, there are several. If somebody wants to go to my [email protected] and look at our blogs, these kinds of questions are the sorts of things that we typically answer at Soul Salt.  I'm going to give you some fresh insight that's just on the top of my mind again today. One is consistency consistently.  That doesn't mean that you're a machine and you never have faltering. I'm a disciplined athlete and I still need recovery after a big tournament weekend and I still must respect my body and I can't consistently just hit it all the time. And when I'm talking about consistency, I'm talking about 80 to 90% of the time being on track or moving forward as much as possible, even if it's just a centimeter. Having something where you're consistently staying aware of your priorities.

Lyn Christian:    07:56    And I think that's another element of success and having clarity around what am I going for? And that doesn't mean that you're going to have it all the time. It means being well advised in your own heart that there are times when you're not clear. That's okay. If you can't make a decision yet, you don't have enough information. When it is time to be clear, you can identify what am I really going for? And once you've identified that, I think it's always important to ask, how come? What's my motivation behind that and check that and see how that aligns with your guiding principles and the goal that you're setting for yourself or the aspiration? I think it's really important for me, it's been important to have people who believe in me and sometimes that's only been one other human being, and so having one person in your life or more than one, if you can find them, that at least believes in you and from time to time can give you a pat on the back and look in your eyes and you can tell you're connected because we are human beings and we need to be connected.

Lyn Christian:    09:13    I feel it's also helpful for us even though we can't be there 100% of the time to have images of what our best self is. What are our strengths or skills or character traits that we have, the talents that we bring, the things that we've learned that we're good at and lead with those not with our weaknesses. There's a lot of research that's been done out of Gallup management that tells us if we focus on our weaknesses, to try to make them a strength, we waste a lot of time. And so I think being successful means, okay, be aware of your weaknesses and manage against them, sandbag against them, make sure that they're shored up to the point where they can't trip you up, you've mitigated against them. Don't try to lead your life from those. And then also having a means for focusing because maybe we know what we stand for, maybe we know what our strengths are, but if we can't manage our focus, we really don't meet our priorities head on. So, this just sort of a top-level strategic look at success,

Scott DeLuzio:    10:21    I read a book last year, it was called atomic habits, which I'll link to for anyone who wants to know about that. I'll link to it in the show notes. But one of the ideas that the book tries to get across is that you don't try to achieve something instantaneously. And this I think goes along with what you were saying earlier where it's incremental achievements. Instead of achieving something instantaneously like that overnight success that we might have seen either in the news or whatever. Instead you take small steps to get to where you want to be. If you just get 1% better at something or work to get 1% closer to your goal each day, you'll eventually achieve that goal. With dieting, for example, you may want to lose 50 pounds, but you can't expect that all that weight's going to fall off right away just because you had a salad and bike to work that day.

Scott DeLuzio:    11:22    These are good steps to take in the right direction, but the path to losing 50 pounds is a much longer than just those first two steps. You need to apply those small changes, those little things every day, but at the same time not sabotage yourself by rewarding yourself with something that's going to take you away from that goal. I had a salad at lunch today because I'm on a diet, so it's okay, I'll have some ice cream tonight after dinner. And that's just going to take away from goal and you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's not really going to help you. You want to make those small changes. You want to make them into a new habit for you. Make them a part of who you are and what you do. You start to think of yourself as the person who eats a healthy lunch.

Lyn Christian:    12:10    yes,

Scott DeLuzio:    12:10    The person who takes the stairs instead of the elevator or something like that, and that will help you to stay on the path to whatever your goal is. I'm using dieting as a simple example, but there's plenty of other goals that people have, whether it's financial success, instead of going out and spending money on things that you don't really need, save that money and stock it away and you know, invest it and whatnot, and eventually maybe that five or $10 isn't really that big of a deal right now. But eventually with the habit of continuously saving that money and investing it and everything like that, eventually that money is going to turn into a significant amount of money and then you'll be achieving those financial goals.

Lyn Christian:    13:00    That's consistency. Yeah. And clear that book. James Clair, I think is his name that wrote a Tommy Cabot's. Yes. One of the things that I'm currently implementing from that book is the 1%, like with my fencing, I'm just working on getting 1% better at say, my flesh or 1% better at a defensive mood and what the statistics and the research in his book indicate 1% better each day. By the end of the year, you've improved by 37% overall. That's consistent persistent, like you said, one way to do it is to not say I'm going out running, but to think of yourself as I am a runner to not say I'm going to invest or I am investing, but to say I am an investor and the words that we use are critical to our success because they're not just things, they literally hold that when we tag a word that works for us as we talked about in the first interview, it can hold deep meaning for us. And so, finding what we call our self as sometimes just as important as what we're doing.

Scott DeLuzio:    14:18    Someone who thinks of themselves as a runner is going to be much more likely to wake up in the morning and put on the running shoes and go for a run. And then someone who just says, Oh, this is a thing I must do because I want to lose weight or whatever.

Scott DeLuzio:    14:36   What you think of yourself is much better than trying to force yourself into any, no goals or anything like that. So, it really does help both the mindset and working that 1% to get 1% better each day, really does help. By the end of the year, you'll be 37% better than you were when you first started, and that's a huge, significant measurable increase. You might think, 1%, “What is that really?” That's such a small, insignificant amount. If we're talking money, if you're talking on a hundred dollars, you're talking $1 and whether you have a hundred or $101, it's not really going to move the needle too much.  But over the course of the year, if you're continuously getting 1% better over the course of the year, it does become measurable and it becomes a significant amount and then we're not even into year 2 yet.

Scott DeLuzio:    15:46    You know, if you keep up with this because eventually this becomes a part of who you are.  Year 2 will be just that much easier because now you've already convinced yourself that this is who I am. I'm this investor or I'm this runner or I'm this whatever, fill in the blank, whatever it is that you want yourself to be. Year 2 is just going to be that much easier. I did this, it's really a mind game really.  I did this with myself a couple of years ago where I wanted to challenge myself to do 50,000 pushups and sit ups over the course of the year. And so obviously if I thought of it as a big chunk in like just doing 50,000 today, it wouldn't have happened and I would've felt my arms like limp noodles and I just wouldn't have done it.

Scott DeLuzio:    16:43    But what I did was I broke it out and I divided out how many days I was going to plan on doing this and I figured out how many I needed to do each day. And it was a small goal that I had to hit every single day. But then when I first started doing it, it was difficult. I had never really wanted to do it, but I said, this is my goal, so I'm just going to force myself to do it. But then eventually I started thinking myself as a person who wakes up in the morning and just does this every morning without fail. It didn't matter if I was not feeling all that great or if I was tired because I was up late the night before, I just did it no matter what. And then afterwards I felt good about it. Achieving that one little goal, which helps me move on to achieve that big goal which I eventually did hit. I wouldn't have hit it if I didn't meet all those little tiny goals. So, 1% doesn't seem like it's going to move the needle at all. It could be big.

Lyn Christian:    17:50    I've talked to addicts. I've coached people who were post addiction and are not actively addicted. And one of them in particular said for 5% of every hour she was sober, meaning maybe she wasn't drinking or she wasn't taking drugs. And eventually she extended that to 10% and then more and more per hour until she could go a full hour without it. And then more. And you know, she was at the point where she was killing herself. And I don't think we can downplay the huge effect of incremental little things. In fact, I just did the math. I know, just looking at some of my training regime, I probably get close to five to 6,000 pushups a year, 30 at a time, three days a week or something. That's not even when I'm within the gym and maybe we must stop, drop and do 10 pushups and I think 50,000. That's quite an accomplishment. That's quite an accomplishment, Scott.

Scott DeLuzio:    19:02    It was. What I ended up doing was a 150 per day every day except for Sundays. So, I would take off Sundays just to give my arms a little rest. Then every day I would just do 150. And it worked out that I came in right around Christmas time that I hit Mecca. So, like anything you're going to have setbacks, there's going to be some days where you just don't because you have an early morning appointment and you can't make it on your normal schedule or whatever. And so, you don't make that goal that day, but that's okay if you get back on track the next day, you never want to miss more than one day in a row.

Lyn Christian:    19:52    I agree. It's, that's the consistency of getting right back to it, right?

Scott DeLuzio:    19:56    Yeah, exactly. Now how does being formidable play a role in somebody's success? You defined it earlier as what makes someone a badass or a rock star, the way people might think of those types of people. How does being formidable…is that like the grit that goes into the determination, what is it that goes into being formidable that plays a role in that person's success?

Lyn Christian:    20:25    That's a good question. And I can only answer in my own frame of reference. And again, people who had listened to the very first recording where I talked about supporting people to be their own version of a bad-ass, but we didn't think of that. Somebody else saw what we were doing and commented on it. So, you're asking a question about a word that obviously I didn't make up. It's a wording, like bad-ass. And if people listened to our first discussion together, they know that we use bad-ass as part of our tagline, supporting people to be an everyday bad ass. We didn't come up with that for ourselves. People attach that to us because they saw what we were doing. In a similar vein, I was really struggling with a personal challenge for growth. And sometimes when I get a challenge, I think it through and I work it through by throwing myself against a challenge.

Lyn Christian:    21:37    And this particular day I was climbing up a mountain and it was the top of it. You can even see you as covered in clouds. It was a stormy day. It wasn't a dangerously stormy day, but it was one that I needed to take some precautions, but I still knew I needed to summit. And I needed that challenge to work out in my head and my heart, the turmoil that I was trained to metabolize and something came to me and it was almost poetic and narrative. I wrote it down. I took a picture of what it looked like around me. And when I came down off the mountain, I think I posted it on Facebook. I don't even think Instagram was around at that moment. And one of my followers who has fought an MMA fight, she's a well-known scientist right now, with a couple of PhDs, just a wicked smart person. I have deep respect for. She commented and she said, Lyn, you're just simply formidable. I was like, Oh, what is that word? What does it mean? So how I define that is there's a place inside of all of us that has a combination of resilience, a combination of being willing to do the right thing, even if it's hard.

Lyn Christian:    23:05 an ability to let your character lead even when it's not popular, and to be so solidly planted in who you are in that moment and what you're going to do and that you're undaunted. You will do it. To me, that's experiencing a formidable moment. And I believe we all have the opportunity to feel that. I don't know if we can feel it all the time or should we, I don't know the answer to that. What I believe that each person, even if you're hearing my voice right now and inside of you there is something about you that is formidable, that can be undaunted, that is stronger, the nails, and has wisdom blended with it and deep character. To me, you're touching on your own formidable stuff.

Scott DeLuzio:    24:17    So it sounds like it's really the secret sauce to being a success is in the grit, the determination, the stick with it. If you want to make up a word to get to whatever it is that your goal is, whenever, however you define success. Well, you only get there if you stick with it. What are some things that people can do to tip the scale in their favor of being successful? I know that's a broad question. Obviously everyone's going to define success a little bit differently, like you mentioned earlier, but what are some of the things that people can do that will make it a little bit more likely that there'll be successful at the thing that they're trying to be successful at?

Lyn Christian:    25:11   I have probably six little tidbits of advice. One is don't cling too tight to what you think that goal must look like. Every significant goal that I have accomplished, including the pertinent partner that I live with, including the room that I'm standing in today, including the lives of my children that I'm connected to, they look a little different or a lot different, but they're perfectly where they need to be than what I could have imagined. So I had more directional aspirations than directive, if that makes sense. So like one part it's 50% you focus on it and you stay in tune with that vision that you have and it's 50% allowing the universe or your higher power or some other force that's bigger than you to cocreate with you. Something better than you could've come up with on your own. So, I feel like even what it is you're going for doesn't need to be held onto too tightly.

Lyn Christian:    26:23    That's one. I also, while I'm working with clients and I've applied this for myself, as long as you have a means by which you're always learning, it seems like the bit of information you need shows up exactly when you need it because you're learning and adding, going, yeah, you're, “Oh, I just needed to know that.”  I'm studying chemistry. How did that come into my life? And this relates to my relationship or something. You have a learning track. It was neat. A podcast, you're reading books, whatever it is you're watching NPR. You have an ability then to have the information you need show up when you need it. So keep learning. Another one is to stay creative. I think a lot of people forget that. As human beings we're innately creative and we think, well that's just for the crazy creative artists or something.

Lyn Christian:    27:16    We are so creative in a gazillion ways that we can't discount that creativity is a neat, every human, the way you style your hair, the way you dress yourself. There's the way that you organize your room, those are just some pedestrian everyday ways that you express your creativity. So stay creative and use creativity on a daily basis. It's almost like it serves the same function as jogging at a stoplight and keeping the body fluid when it's cold, right? So that when the light turns green you can go. So, there's something about staying nimble and ready because you are being creative every day. So those are three of the things. Another one is to have some good trusted people on your sideline, coaches, mentors, friends, peers, people who have deep compassion for you. And also we'll tell you the truth because we can get stuck.

Lyn Christian:    28:15    And I use this term, no one else must understand it, but I think you'll get the gist of it. We didn't get stuck in our own navel, in our own narrow view that's dark and damp and can grow things that are not healthy if we leave it to its own devices. So having outside insight can whack us on the side of the head just when we need it and get us out of tunnel vision. So, having the next one is be willing to take a few risks. They can be tiny risks, they can be big risks, but we all have to stick our neck out a little bit to have a successful life. We have to risk something. And then finally it's the topic you and I've been talking about. Don't give up. Persist, don't give up. Persist. I wasn't planning not to be political.

Lyn Christian:    29:13    We're in an election year. I wasn't planning on voting for Elizabeth Warren, but just this week she dropped out of the presidential race and I was curious to listen to her because she seems to me to be somebody who at one point was actually leading her ticket and now she's out of the race. And I'm curious about what she would say about why. You and I have talked about persistence and she seems so persistent and so as a study on human dynamics, I want it to listen to her interview and I have respect for people who are trying to ameliorate our political system. And I think maybe she had some ideas but listening to her character come forward, what was most interesting was she said, I still have beliefs and things I stand for and even though I'm not in the presidential race, I'm going to work toward those.

Lyn Christian:    30:15    And I thought, that's the persistent use. You and I are talking about the big prize. That big thing that she was going for is not going to be hers. It's just not, she didn't get that support. And the people said no, and yet she will say yes to her cause. To me that's what we're talking about with formidable. It doesn't matter which vantage point you have politically. There are some good people out there trying to help us find our way through this trying time and we need anyone who's going to be persistent to say I'm not going to give up. And so that I'm not going to give up is what we all need. If it's our aspiration for a certain job, if it's our aspiration for a better relationship, if it's our aspiration to be a better parent, it's our aspiration physically or financially, don't give up. Don't give up.

Scott DeLuzio:    31:16    I like how you laid that out in a six-step process or six different things that you can do to get the scale in your favor in terms of being successful. But I especially, want to go back to the first one. I especially want to talk about that. You said, don't cling to a goal. Don't just hold onto something because sometimes you might find out that you're doing something and it's not really what you're good at or what you even want because your goals can change over time. Your definition of success can change over time.

Scott DeLuzio:    32:00    When you're young, you might think getting a good job, making lots of money, buying a fancy car and all that stuff might be your definition of success. And that it could be debated whether that's successful, but that might be your own individual definition of success. But then along comes kids and then that definition of success is suddenly going to change. You know, because you're now not just in it for yourself. You're in it for your whole family and trying to make sure that they are happy and successful and getting the things that they need. So, success to you might look different at that point. So, it's interesting. I like that not clinging to a goal. You might try something and just find out that it's not for you.

Scott DeLuzio:    32:50    And if you keep trying to nail that square peg in a round hole, it's not going to work. And you can keep pounding it until you're blue in the face, but it's just not going to work out. So, I guess it's okay to just have the liberty to be able to change what your goals are, change what your definition of success is and not feel like you failed at something because you tried whatever that thing is. Going back to the presidential campaign, she tried and it just turned out that it wasn't in the cards for her, that's something that's out of her control at that point because that's an especially tricky thing to be successful at because you can do all the things that align with your core values and all the things that you believe in. You can do all of those things, but ultimately it's up to the voters to decide. So, that's a tricky one to be successful at and hats off to the people who are successful because that's a lot of work and that's not a job for me. You won’t be seeing me in politics anytime soon.

Lyn Christian:    34:02    Me neither, they really stick their neck out and it's a crap shoot at times.

Scott DeLuzio:    34:08    It is. Yeah. And you know, it could bad weather. It could be something that screws up an election for somebody where people just don't go out to vote because it snowed or something like that, some crazy little thing. It's not to say that you should give up and quit either. You should just stay true to yourself and like we talked about in previous episodes, stay true to yourself and know what your values are, what your definition of success is and stick with that and move along towards that path.

Lyn Christian:    34:50    Scott, there's one thing we maybe shouldn't interject here.  I think you'd agree with this. Sometimes that thing that we try and we would say I've failed, it's not going to happen for me is actually the opening of the thing that really needs to happen. Like sometimes it's an indication that we're closing this door on you so that you will actually find the window that you're supposed to fly out of. So, stop trying to close the window. And so I would encourage people, if they've gotten to a point where they really, really, really think they want something and they feel like they're beating their head against a wall, to just take a moment and look at that wall. That wall doesn't have arms and legs not coming to you and attacking you. If we are beating our head against the wall, we're voluntarily going over to it and whacking our self against it. We are punishing ourselves. Yes, there are times too, when you agree that the thing we say we want turns out to not be the thing that we need the most and we're getting denied it because there's something other and probably better for us.

Scott DeLuzio:    36:05    Yeah, that's a very interesting, very important point I should say that just because it's not working, it doesn't mean that that's the end of the world. It may open other doors for you. It may lead you down a path. You may meet other people. You may discover new things about yourself in that process of trying whatever this thing is that you're maybe not being as successful as you were hoping for. That eventually gets you to that thing that will make you successful. It's rare to find a 20-year-old, success story.  A 20-year-old person who's a celebrity success, big time, business owner or anything like that. It’s not easy to do that young.

Scott DeLuzio:    37:04    It's one of those things that it's going to take time and you have to try and fail and figure things out along the way,  to eventually get to the point where you're being a success, some of that trial and error may be readjusting what your definition of success is, but as you go along, you learn things about yourself. And that's, I think an important thing to know too. And so you don't feel like a failure just because you didn't knock it out of the park on day one of trying this new thing or even after the first year of trying this new thing because like you said, these incremental changes are what gets you there. And it may take several years to get you to where you're going and you just must be okay with that.

Lyn Christian:    37:55    Yeah, I agree. You must realize whatever it is you've picked must have a steep learning curve.

Scott DeLuzio:    38:01   So it looks like we are coming up on time here and I've really enjoyed this conversation. I've enjoyed all our conversations that we've had and I think they're important topics. So thank you so much for joining us again on the show, but in case anyone missed it the last time, where can people go to find out more about you and what your company and what you do?

Lyn Christian:    38:27    Lyn Christian, you can join [email protected]. You can find me on Instagram at soulsalt or Lyn Christian and on Facebook and Scott, there's one thing I would want to leave with if I could.  And that is I think your example today of the pushups is resonating with me. I work on upper body strength. If you're going to be a sword fighter, you need to have certain strength to be able to have that longevity and endurance dream about to keep your fencing arm ready and able to hold onto your weapon. And so, I compare my incremental training, you know, I train six days a week and pushups are part of that and at the end of the year, I'm probably close to five or 6,000 a year.

Lyn Christian:    39:29    And that's a consistent look at it. You had a specific goal that took that to 10,000 more than I'm leaving casually. If you really are serious about that one thing, and that's going to be your one thing. Then you don't do it three times a week. 30 reps like I do each time you do it, the 156 days out of seven, giving yourself a break and realizing they're going to be some days where it doesn't work up and you do some catch up. You follow your example, Scott. If there's something you truly, truly want and you're listening to this, remember Scott's example with pushups and there is a concerted laser like focus that you had day in and day out and that's how you got that phenomenal number.

Scott DeLuzio: Yeah, absolutely.

Lyn Christian: Some days it's not going to be easy. Some days you're not going to want to do it, but you just buckle down and you do it and afterwards you feel good about it because you know that you've taken that step to achieve whatever the goal is that you have so you stay true to you. Okay.

Scott DeLuzio: Thanks again.

Lyn Christian: Thank you. See you.

Scott DeLuzio:    40:52    Thanks for listening to the Drive On Podcast. If you want to check out more episodes or learn more about the show, you can visit our website, DriveOnPodcast.com we're on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at DriveOnPodcast.