Revenue Diaries Entry 82

Close your eyes and imagine this with me for a second. 

It’s one of those perfect fall days in Indiana. Sunny. Mid-70s. The leaves are starting to shed their green hue for an orange tint. Three to four hundred people are crowded at a starting line at the edge of a woods in Columbus, IN, and at the top of every hour, all of us take off together to run a 3.1 mile loop. 

My feet hit the ground solidly through the first couple of hours. It’s beautiful. The sun is streaming though the trees. Ya, I got this, I thought to myself. 

And then a couple of hours later.. About 15 miles in… my legs start killing me. 

All I can think about is my feet hitting the ground. Every single time. Adding another foot to my progress despite the pain. Okay. Now, again. 

Last weekend, I ran my first backyard ultra called Outlast. If you’ve never heard of one, here’s the deal: you run a 5k loop every hour, on the hour, and you just keep going. Ours went for 12 hours. That’s a little over 27 miles and I didn’t train. 

I didn’t train for a marathon. I didn’t train for an ultra. I didn’t train for a trail run. 

I run a lot but on a treadmill. And treadmill miles are not trail miles. My knees agree. 

The first four or five hours were fine. I would even say fun. And then somewhere between hour five and six, my legs were getting PISSED. 

The seventh hour is where the race gets real. A big group signed up for the 6-hour race, so when you come through the start, you have the energy. Everyone is high-fiving and celebrating. Only about 50 of us were signed up for the full 12. And I wanted to be hone. I really, really wanted to be done. 

My friend Phil (who ran 41 hours a couple of months ago.. Yah, I know. Crazy.) looked at me and said, “Hey, man, it’s all in your head. You can do it.”

“No, Phil. I don’t think I can but let’s do the seventh hour. Let’s go.” 

I wasn’t the slowest person but I was definitely in the last 10 slowest but I still went. 

Hours seven, eight, nine, and ten weren’t about running anymore. They were about putting one foot in front of the other. I didn’t have to be the fastest person out there. I didn’t have to have it all figured out. If I had to walk half the loop to make it back before the top of the hour, fine. I’d walk. By hour eight or nine, only finishing mattered… no matter what. 

And I finished. 

It’s one of the harder things I’ve ever done and I felt it for the week after but it’s been interesting to connect the race to work. 

Especially right now, because the job feels like an ultra. Every single day. 

We all know it. It’s the busy season. Board meeting. Planning for next year and budgeting while still pushing to finish the year strong. On top of that, AI is upending everything, in both good and bad ways. 

Some days you're in hour two, sun in the trees, feeling great. Some days it's hour seven, and everyone around you is packing up and heading home... except you. 

And I'm not complaining. We are incredibly lucky to have these jobs. The hard part comes with the privilege.

So this week is about grit. Specifically, the kind of grit that got me from hour seven to hour twelve... and why I don't think it's the kind we usually coach.

♥️ kyle

Phil was right. It was all in my head. And if you've been reading since Entry 72, you know it gets crowded in there.

Quick refresher for the new folks.

Back in May, I started working with Dr. Michael Brabant and reading Outshine Trauma, which introduced me to Internal Family Systems (IFS).

The short version: you're not one person. You're a collection of parts, each with its own job and its own fear, and underneath all of them is a core Self that can actually lead, if the parts learn to trust it.

IFS identifies three types of parts: 

• Exiles carry the old wounds… shame, rejection, the stuff that got buried because it’s really, really hard to deal with.

• Firefighters are the reactive ones, the parts that sprint in when an exile gets triggered and try to douse the pain fast, usually by making things worse. 

• Protectors are the managers, calculated, strategic, running interference before the pain can even surface. The voice that won't let you rest because resting feels like falling behind

I named a few of mine. The Achiever. The Approval Seeker. The Worrier..

So who was talking at hour seven?

The Worrier was definitely in there, wondering if I had torn something in my 42-year-old knee.

The Approval Seeker was probably counting the people passing me. I can confirm, he was. (Last ten. He noticed. Trust me.) 

The Achiever was there as well. He wanted to make sure that I showed up because “you don’t quit no matter what.” That sounds positive, but mostly not. 

Because of the work I’ve been doing, I had the mindfulness to thank each part for their feedback and connect with my true self. Sounds a little corny, maybe a little granola, right?

But it worked. I was able to block the parts of me that were shaming me. The parts of me that weren’t helping, only hurting. And my true self wanted to finish because I had made a commitment to my friends and to myself.

In IFS terms, I think that's what it feels like when Self is in control. When YOU are in control.

In Entry 79, I wrote about talking back to The Achiever with something specific: "this one's not a threat, it's a Tuesday." If I'd had the 1-3-2 language in the moment, hour seven would've sounded something like this... I hear you. My knees hurt. We're doing one more loop.

I don’t remember because I blacked out after hour eight. Phil got me to the start of hour seven.

Hour twelve? It was all me.

And now we move on to performance coaching and why PARTS work matters to your job.

I posted this on LinkedIn today and is pertinent to this conversation: :

The more meditation and IFS work I do, the crazier it is to me that we performance coach the hell out of each other without first dealing with childhood trauma.

Look, I love performance. I'm guilty of all of it. The morning routines. Reading LinkedIn posts after X posts… doubting my ability to do anything right because I don’t have the right frameworks… or I haven’t stacked the MOST positive habits.

Blah. Blah. blah.

Most performance coaching feels like it’s all about reinforcing the Achiever in all of us. It makes him better at his job. And that means we are missing the point.

Your head trash isn’t just showing up at 40. You hire them young, usually when something feels unsafe or not enough, and they try to do the job for decades. The child who learned that being ‘impressive’ was the way to stay safe grows into an executive who can’t rest and keeps chasing the next thing.

When Michael told me to pick up Outshine Trauma, I naturally scoffed at the title. I’m an executive! I’m a CMO. I work. out. I write a newsletter. PEOPLE LIKE ME!

I was wrong. Dead fucking wrong. Here’s what I’ve learned about myself, and I’m assuming many others can relate.

You have to do the work to meet your inner trauma head-on. The shame will always be there unless you recognize it.

I don't have the answers. I'm not a therapist, and five months in, I still feel like I'm at the beginning. But I'm convinced of this much: you'll never be fully present (or fulfilled) until you do the inner work. Everything else is a band-aid on a wound you haven't looked at yet.