00:14 Russell
Hey all, and welcome back to Resilience Unravelled. Hopefully a fascinating episode today, a subject close to my own heart and someone with similar experience to me except further down the line and got his Ted Talk under his bell and the book and the mug.. So, in front of me today is the very talented Jim Harshaw, maybe even Jim Harshaw Jr. Maybe I'll explain that later on. But first of all, good evening to you, Jim.
00:43 Jim
Good evening. Great to meet you.
00:45 Russell
I can hear from the accent you're across the pond. Where in the world are you from?
00:53 Jim
I'm in Virginia, in the United States. And I grew up in the Pittsburgh area. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But I live in Virginia, which is home of the University of Virginia, which is my alma mater.
01:05 Russell
Okay. And what is it that you do?
01:08 Jim
I'm a personal performance coach primarily. Also, a speaker and podcast host of the Success Through Failure podcast. But primarily a coach, personal performance coach. And my background is in sport. I was a NCAA Division One All American wrestler in college. For those in the States, you understand what the NCAA is. Division One is the largest division, and I was an Olympic hopeful, so I was ranked on the Olympic level. So, my background is in sport. I was a Division One head coach, the youngest Division One head coach in the country at one point. So ,my perspective really comes from the high pressure, high performance world of sport.
01:51 Russell
Interesting. So, mine is the opposite as I've been in the performing arts. So, I often think there's quite an interesting contract between the sports coach and the people like myself with a slightly different approach. Because it’s is all about how you gear people up to peak performance once a week, once a month, once a year. Whereas I’m all about how do you get peak performance, probably in a more routine or dull world every single day of the week. So, it's quite interesting to hear our different approaches. So, tell me about the world of wrestling and how that has become relevant to the world of commerce.
02:26 Jim
Well, my background, I said I grew up in the Pittsburgh area. I was a blue-collar kid. And I don't know if you use that term on that side of the pond or not.
02:35 Russell
You do we have blue-collars? Yeah.
02:37 Jim
So I was a blue-collar kid. Dad was a construction worker, mom was a secretary, and financial sort of success kind of always was for the other people and not really for us and sort of grew up with a mindset that others can find success at the highest level. We're going to work very hard, and we're hardworking people, good, loyal, high character people. But really success was always just felt like it was just out of reach for my family. And I kind of grew up with that mindset. And even in wrestling, my goal was to win the state championship in high school, and I never did that. I never even actually got out under the podium at all, let alone the top of the podium. And luckily, I had good grades. I worked hard, just like mom and dad taught me, and got to the University of Virginia, which is the number one ranked public university in the United States.
03:35 Jim
And so, academically, an elite school, wrestling wise. Again. Elite Wrestling in terms of NCAA Division One. But myself, I was not one of those people who participated at the highest level. I was lucky to get into the university. Wrestling really opened the door for me. I had good grades. Not great, but good enough, and I was not a great wrestler. I was good enough to just get the door open and say, hey, yeah, sure, you can join the team. We don't really expect a whole lot of you. And so, I was kind of an underperformer compared to everybody else, both academically and athletically and even socially. It was an affluent school, and five years later, I graduated with an undergraduate and a master's degree from the number one public school in the country. I ended up being a three-time conference champion. I was an NCAA Division One All American.
04:31 Jim
Complete transformation happened there over the course of that five years through the infrastructure that is in place when you're an athlete or even in the performing arts, there's an infrastructure that's in place there that helps people maximize their potential. But you get out into the real world, and you lose a lot of that. And so, for me, when I left college, when I left university, I became a coach. Ended up, like I said, being the youngest Division One head wrestling coach in the country. I did that for about a decade, got out of coaching, started my first business, and that was successful. I sold that. But I started my next business, raised some angel capital, started a technology company, and about two years later, I realised that this wasn't really going to get us where we wanted to go, and I had to shut down the business.
05:18 Jim
I had a failed business. We had debt up to our eyeballs. I had a struggling relationship with my wife, to be honest, because I was so single minded focused on this business and wasn't working out, I stopped working out. I was in the worst physical shape of my life. I was really broke and broken at that point. Russell to answer your question of how does really wrestling in that background relate to my business, what I did at that moment of really being broke and broken, I look back on my life. And I said, what was in place when I went from underperformer to peak performer, what was in place there, that infrastructure. And I identified there were four things. There are four things that were in place very clearly, four things that were in place then prior, that allowed me to up my game and find success despite failure and to be resilient.
06:11 Jim
And I started putting those things back in place. And if you want, I can certainly share with you those four pieces of that framework. So, the first one is this. When I was wrestling, I had a very clear vision of what success looked like in athletics, in performing arts, you have a clear vision of what success looks like that's not always clearly defined in the real world. A lot of people don't take the time to really get a crystal-clear vision of what success looks like for them. So that was the first part. And to be honest, that is based on the values that somebody has now. I couldn't have stated my core values then like I can now, but I knew I wanted to be tough, I wanted to be disciplined, I wanted to be respected. I wanted to go on to success after wrestling, like so many of my heroes and mentors did.
07:05 Jim
That was the first of the four parts, having a vision and values. And then the second part was having goals that align with that vision in those values, not goals that align with what we see on social media, what we see in the mass media, or based on what's parked in our neighbour’s driveway, but having goals that were aligned with what Jim wanted and with what I valued. And then also not just the goals, but also what we call the micro goals. Some people call these KPIs or metrics that you're going to track along the way. And that was the second piece of the four-part framework. And the third piece is, I had an environment of excellence. I had coaches around me, people who would coach me, who would tell me when I'm doing things wrong, would pick me up when I needed, picked up and dusted off.
07:53 Jim
They would help me see my blind spots, right? So, I had this environment of people around me, not just coaches, but teammates. And I had a nutritionist and a sports psychologist and a strength and conditioning coach, athletic trainer, all of these people around me. And then the fourth and final piece is, I had a plan to follow through. Even when things get hard, even when I get knocked off the path. And in the real world, cars break down, kids get sick, we have to take off of work. For some family challenges, there might be a global pandemic, right? You still have to have a plan to follow through. And I had everything, all four of those pieces of that framework I had. And that took me from underperformer to peak performer. So I started putting these things back in place in my life after this failed business, and it changed everything.
08:45 Jim
I tripled my income, and I healed my relationship with my wife. I started spending more time with my kids. I got healthy and fit and in shape again. It was absolutely transformed my life. But the real lesson here is when I look around and I've interviewed 400 plus individuals or I've published 400 plus episodes of my podcast, it's the same framework. Whether you interview New York Times bestselling authors or CEOs or Olympic gold medallists or Navy Seals astronauts, you name it's the same framework is in place in their lives when people find success at anything. And so that's my mission in the world, Russell, is to share this with as many people as possible.
09:26 Russell
So it's interesting. So, three of those things are about yourself and one's about the external environments that's not about yourself, in a sense. Which is the most important in your view of the four, which is the first one mental?
09:41 Russell
The first one, yeah, you have to have that. If you don't know what success looks like for you, and if you don't know what you truly value in life, then you can't be resilient. Then when you face failure, you're not going to get up one more time every time. You're not going to know what actions to take on a daily or weekly or monthly basis. You're going to be adrift. That's where most people are. Most people are adrift. Most people don't have that clarity and that consistency to execute at their highest level. Some people find it here and there, but you really have to have that vision and clear value.
10:19 Jim
Yes, but just for the sake of an argument, really, most people don't have that because they're surrounded by an environment of adequacy or averageness or poor. So, the thing is, the sports environment is fuller. You're part of a tiny ecosystem. You're sort of in your, like a little place in your honeycomb, as it were, pretty similar to mine. And then if you look at organizations, often, they're quite average, and naturally some of the highest performers go there and they fail because of the atmosphere of the culture within the organization. And they have vision and have values. They don't stick to them, but they have vision and values. They have goals, they have KPIs more KPIs than you can shake a stick at and they have lots of plans, but they have hardwired into them as an environment of failure, really. So, I just find it interesting that one's, because actually in a place that the way I see it is that sort of surrounds the other three in a funny sort of way.
11:11 Jim
Yeah, I see these as sort of chronological. You have to have all of them. Like, if you take out any one of those, you'll fail. You may find success periodically, or you may have sort of fits and starts, but you will not be consistently moving in the right direction. You can't just set the goals, or you don't even know what kind of environment you need to create. What kind of coaches do I need to bring into my ecosystem? What kind of language do I need? There's more to the environment of excellence than just people. But people are kind of the biggest part. But you really don't know what to bring into that environment unless you understand what the vision is. Right. So, if you have that vision, you have those values, and then you're communicating them and living by them through these goals and then these smaller micro goals, then yeah, that next part is absolutely the environment of excellence.
12:03 Russell
So give me an example of what a vision might be.
12:07 Jim
Example of a vision?
12:08 Russell
Yeah. So just to help come alive for people, what would be a vision?
12:12 Jim
Sure. It's going to be different for everybody. My vision for my life is and now we spell it out in four different areas relationships, self, health, and wealth. All right? So, you have to go, okay, what is the vision that I have for my life in my relationships, my relationship with my spouse or my friends or God? Getting very clear on that. What does that look like? What does that, more importantly, feel like? And some people can go into granular detail, but for the most part, it's going to be somewhat of a higher-level thing. This is what it's going to feel like. I'll be doing this kind of thing and spending this kind of time. But you go through this in these four areas. It's hard for me to give you a specific example. These things can often be a page long, but we encourage people to take off the guardrails, dream a little, no, dream a lot, and really identify what would their life look like, their perfect life, their ideal life, creating that vision.
13:20 Russell
A lot of people want to start with career, and that's fine, but you have to really do it in all of these areas. Because if you're missing out on, you could have all the money in the world and a great career and all that. But if you don't have your relationships in alignment, then what's the point of having all the money, right? We know the way to lose all your money as well is to have a poor relationship. Let's be fair.
13:39 Jim
Yeah, that's right. And we know from the Grant Study, the Harvard Grant Study, which is the longest longitudinal study on human happiness ever, it's still going on today. It started in the 1930s. We know that happiness and satisfaction in life comes from relationships, meaningful connections. So that's where we start in terms of the goals and in terms of the vision. But yeah, that vision is critical now, if you're talking to business or company, it's different obviously you have to have that vision for a company and organisation as well.
14:13 Russell
Yes, I think it's quite interesting because lots of people talk about vision as if it's something special or unique. And some people talk about the fact that you don't need a vision because if you have a fantasia, you can't visualize anything. So that's 20%. So, I find that interesting, but obviously I understand the point of it, but you can have a very poor vision, but you can have a strong work ethic and you can head in the right direction somewhere, can't you? Talking about earlier, what you were actually saying, I think, was you sort of started by saying you were above average, but around that sort of level, but you worked hard. It's sort of like Gary Vanercheck ideas. And it doesn't really matter what you do as long as you work hard, you'll end up somewhere. Whereas if you well, if you have people who have high vision but low work ethic, they end up nowhere else. They just end up where they're happy clappy dreamers sitting in a room, bunch of forgetting about their vision. So, you're right about this thing. I'm just surprised, in a funny sort of way that the word hard work wasn't in your four or five, for example.
15:16 Jim
Yeah. So, a couple of points here. So, if you have the vision but you don't have the other pieces in place yes, you're going to sit in a room and be a visionary and that's great. Nothing's going to happen. That's why you have to have the goals, the micro goals, the coach, the people around you, to kick you in the rear end, to point you in the right direction, to hold you accountable. This is all part of the environment of excellence. So hard work. Let me make a point about hard work. So, there's a distinction I make between hard work and inspired action. Hard work.
15:47 Jim
And what inspired action? Inspired action. Okay. Because listen, someone can tell me to go outside and grab a shovel and start digging a ditch and that'll be hard work. I wouldn't be really interested in doing it now if they told me to work hard or if I was guided to work hard to live out my purpose and my vision. Boy, I can dig that ditch all day if that's what I have to do to achieve my purpose and to live out my vision and my values. There's a big difference there. So, when I was wrestling is a hard sport. It's not a game. You don't play it, you wrestle. There's a lot of pain and suffering that goes into it, and that's if you're winning. I did a lot of things. So, I'll give you an example. Wrestling is one of those sports where you have to make weight. There are weight classes. Now, the rules have changed in the last 25 years since I last competed, but one of the things that I did. So, 1998, and I had to weigh in at £150.02 and a half days before weigh ins, I was £22 over that's, what, eleven kilos, ten kilos, something like that, overweight, and I lost that weight. I lost £22.10 kilos in two and a half days.
17:11 Russell
Not healthy.
17:12 Jim
No. Extremely unhealthy. Extremely unhealthy.
17:15 Russell
Let's just say to everybody, that's not a thing you should aim to be doing.
17:18 Jim
Oh, no. Absolutely, yeah. Not recommending this to anybody. I probably should have been hospitalised, but I made weight. I voluntarily chose to put myself through that pain and suffering. Why? Because it was in alignment with my vision. If you told me to do that today, I couldn't do it. I mean, I could do it. There's a way I could physically do the thing, but that's the lack of goals, lack of microaggression, and lack of plan to have left it to two days before to lose 10 kg.
17.40 Russell
So, what was going on there?
17:51 Jim
Well, if you want to really dive into that, I had gone through a significant physical growth spurt at that point. Okay. So, there were other factors at play. I had an injury, so I couldn't work out quite as much as I normally had been, so I was coming off of injury. My weight had gone up. Most of that weight was water weight, so I could ring a lot of that weight out pretty quick. First ten or 15 pounds came off pretty easily, to be honest. Nobody has this perfect. This is always a work in progress. And back then, to be honest, I didn't know the system of the framework, but there were some things out of alignment there. And to be honest, I bumped up a week class a couple of weeks later, and so I made the changes necessary. But listen, we're all going to do that.
18:35 Jim
We're all going to make mistakes. We're all going to have hard things put in front of us. We're going to have things that are within our control or outside of our control that happen to us, that force us to pivot, to force us to make a change. For me, I did the hard thing. It was inspired action. It was hard work, of course, right? It's a matter of semantics here, but it was really inspired action to get there. But here's the other thing about hard work. I was the hardest worker on my team for my final three years of four years of college. For the final three years, I was voted by my teammates and my coaching staff the hardest worker on the team. But I still up until my senior year, I kept failing. My freshman year, my sophomore year, my junior year, 1st, 2nd, 3rd year in college.
19:24 Jim
I kept falling short of my goal of becoming what's called an All American, which is top eight in the country, in the United States. And I remember after my third time trying, I'm sitting in the locker room in tears, my face buried in a towel, wondering, what's wrong with me? Why can't I do this? Maybe I'm not good enough, I'm not smart enough, I'm not capable enough. Maybe this just isn't for me. And listen, I had the environment of excellence in place. I had all these things in place, except for the mental part. And here's the deal. So, I set off that off season to figure out what I was missing. I didn't know. I didn't know. I thought, maybe I need to lift more weights. Maybe I have to get in better condition. Maybe I have to learn new techniques. And so I set off the entire offseason, traveling all around the country, meeting with as many coaches as I could find in order to figure out what the missing piece was for me.
20:16 Jim
And I never figured it out. And it was the night before the very first competition, my senior year, my last year, going into the last season of my life, of my wrestling career. And it hit me in the hotel room. I realized I never figured it out. I never figured out what I'm missing. So, in that moment, I gave up. I gave up on the outcome. I gave up on becoming an All American. And I said, if that's in the cards, great. If it's not, that's fine, too. All I can do is all I can do. I can put all the plans in place. I can work as hard as I possibly can, and if I achieve the outcome, great. If I don't, I will know that I've given everything to this sport that I possibly could have. And in that moment when I mentally released the outcome and focused on the process, put down the baggage, the fear of failure, I was able to be more resilient in that senior year.
21:11 Jim
I had so much fun competing. I finally was free. Just like in the performing arts, if you go out there having a fear of having a bad performance versus going out there to give everything you've got, knowing that you've put into preparation all the preparation you possibly could, have. And there's nothing more you can do right now but step onto stage or step onto the mat or step onto the field of competition or step in front of that group to make that presentation, that Sales presentation or whatever it is, for the listener. If you know that, then you can let go of the outcome and simply focus on the process. Simply do the best you can do in that moment.
21:49 Russell
But isn't the outcome the vision and the goal? You have to let go of it. When it comes time to let go of it.
21:59 Jim
Yeah, that's right. This is Performance Psychology 101. You talked to any performance psychologist. Focus on the process, release the outcome. Because Stephen Covey said this years ago in the seven habits of highly effective people. Start with the end in mind. Start with the end in mind. What is the end? The end is the vision. Now we work backwards through the process. And when it comes time to perform when it comes time to step on the golf course to hit that putt when it comes time to step in front of your boss and have that tough conversation about getting the raise or getting the promotion. You have to let go of the outcome and just be fully you and focus on the process. Yeah, and I get that, and it makes a lot of sense. And if you're doing a presentation or doing a speech, that's absolutely fine. But if you're running an organisation and what you're doing on most of the day is going to meetings, having conversations, setting strategy, dealing with suppliers, all that sort of stuff, it's a different process. Sure. And so this is like a strategic planning process, but then you've got a performance process as well, which is totally different. But it's different to those four steps really, isn't it?
23:10 Russell
They dovetail together. That is part of it. This is the mindset piece. This is part of the environment of excellence. This is the inner environment of excellence. And this is about the words that you say to yourself. This is about the mindset that you create in order to perform your best. And again, it's always starting with the vision and going to the goals, but then coming back to releasing the outcome and doing everything you can. Because listen, in sports there are bad calls by the referee really, aren't they? It's all the old chimowski idea of flow that's right behind me. Oh, is it really? There it is, yeah. If you think I can see that far, that's quite impressive. I'm very flattered that you think I can see that time, but that's what you're actually talking about here, isn't it?
24:03 Jim
That's exactly right. So following my career, I met with a friend of mine, he's an Olympic gold medallist, Kendall Cross, and we talked about that book. He actually told me about that book Flow, and that's the book really claims that helped him get into a flow state to win the Olympic gold medal. We have to have the vision, we have to have the goals, we also have to have the mindset, the performance mindset to let go because fear of failure is only going to hold you back.
24:43 Russell
Well, it works for some people. I mean, people often wired that way around, aren't they? They know what they don't want. They're very good at turning anger the wrong way around. And I've met lots of people who are very frightened and extraordinarily successful. So, it's about what works with the person in a sense, isn't it? I mean, the risk with a framework is that it's attempted to be applied to everybody, but it's about finding the framework. That's the individual person I would maintain.
25:13 Jim
Yeah, well, I mean, when you look at, say, education, right? Education is a framework in the United States. There's typically four years of college, and it's somewhat prescriptive, but at the same time, there's flexibility within that framework. There are different majors, different professors, different projects you can pursue different internships, you can pursue different extracurricular activities you can pursue within that framework. And this framework is the same thing, right? It is different for everybody. Everybody's vision is different. Their values are different. Their goals are different. Their micro goals are different. What they need in their environment of excellence is different. Everybody's coming from a different place. And when you have no sort of plan or framework, you just don't get to the same place. Now, yeah, sure, there are a lot of people who can find a certain degree of success without a framework like.
26:09 Russell
This, but it depends how you define success, of course, isn't it?
26:13 Jim
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
26:14 Russell
And again, it goes back to the vision. Some people just happy, muddling along and not having a vision and just enjoying the life. It's that difference between trying to find happiness and actually finding the happiest and what you do. It's like the digging the trench thing, isn't it? You don't need to dig a trench. You can actually just enjoy the process.
26:32 Jim
That's right. And you're going to enjoy that process if it's going to be moving you towards something you want in your life, even if you haven't expressly written it out as a vision. But if I told my wife to go dig a trench right now, she wouldn't be very happy. But if I said, let's go dig that trench because it's going to, oh, I don't know, help us build a garden bed or a flower bed or something, she might enjoy that.
27:01 Russell
So there are negative reasons to do things as well.
27:04 Jim
There you go.
27:05 Russell
I totally agree with everything you're saying. There's no value in a podcast. When we’re sitting a group, each of them.
27:11 Jim
No, I love that. And I've listened to your episodes before, so I do appreciate the pushing back because the pushing back, actually, you're helping the listener who's listening to you and I talk right now. You're answering their yeah, but question because the listener might be saying, yeah, but and you're representing the listener. So, Russell, that's a great way to run an interview, and I do appreciate that.
27:33 Jim
That's very candidate. Now, Jim, people need to know how to get hold of you. Find out more about you. Find out information about the podcast and your coaching program. So, tell me a little bit about all of that.
27:46 Jim
Sure. The podcast is Success through failure. Published over 400 episodes with. Navy Seals, world class performers, Olympic medallists, you name it. And then if anybody wants to have a free one-to-one coaching call, you can. Go to my website, which is https://jimharshawjr.com/ So we're going to have a specific page built, Russell, just for your listeners. If they go to Jimharshawjunior.com/resilience, they can find a way to they can look at my calendar, grab a time, 30 minutes. We can have a conversation about how this framework applies to your life, or if you're not quite ready for that and you just want to sort of listen to some episodes, maybe get access to the action plans from these episodes. We'll have those right on that page as well. Jimharshewjunior.com/resilience, you can find me on any social media platform as well.
28:42 - Jim
Just Google my name.
28:44 - Russell
What a pitch. That was brilliant. I love that. Such an inspired way to do it. And you got a Ted Talk, so don't hide your head in the bushel. I mean, that's worth listening to. And that's all about you see, the thing is, what's fascinating is I thought you're going to talk a lot more about failure, and perhaps that's my bad there, but I'm a real believer in about learning. So it doesn't really matter whether you learn from success or from failure, but some people learn better from failure, some people learn better from success, and I think it's actually vital that you do more. So, is there a specific one of your podcasts you could point people to about the whole concept of learning from failure?
29:22 Jim
Not off the top of my head. I do bring it up in every conversation that I have, whether it's a solo episode with myself or an interview episode with Tim Ferriss or Ken Blanche or Jack. Canfield we talk about failure? And really the crux of my belief here in this framework that I shared is that you can endure failure. You can be resilient. And if you have a clearly defined vision and identified your values and you have these aligned goals and this environment of excellence, we understand that in sports, you can fail and get up and keep going. We have that infrastructure built in place. We have to have that in the real world, too, because failure happens. And when you don't have that infrastructure, you don't have that framework, you end up lowering your goals, settling for less, and finally lifting your head up one day, looking around and going, gosh, I thought it'd be further along at this point.
30:18 Jim
Well, not having failure means you're not taking risk, which means you're not doing any useful action because you have to fail. Otherwise, you're not really actually doing anything at all. Failure is a natural part of life, maybe has been parented out of a couple of generations at the moment, probably. But our generations, failure enough. We've not taught our kids how to fail enough. We've not set them strict enough, tasks hard enough.
30:44 Jim
My TEDx Talk is called Why I Teach My Children to Fail.
30:47 Russell
Yeah, it's so important, isn't it? We can't become adults unless we've learned how to fail because we live in a happy land of childhood. Naivety, otherwise, don't you?
30:57 Jim
That's right.
30:58 Russell
Great. Jim, it's been a delight to meet you. Actually, I really enjoyed listening to it. You've got a fantastic speaking voice. I really enjoyed listening to it. Thank you, Russell. Thank you so much for spending time with us this evening.
31:08 Jim
It was my honour.
31:09 Russell
You take care.