From Exhaustion to Excellence: Dark Optimist Mindset Shifts for Effective Leadership

Starting the conversation:

Stamina is the new leadership approach. Intentional quick wins to build your team’s confidence and keep making progress in today’s wild marketplace. Ralph H Groce, President and Chief Operating Officer at Scroobious, shares that intentionality with unconventional thinking is necessary to outlast the chaos.

Accountability isn’t optional, it is everything. Mindset shifts that include claiming the outcome as your choice, taking responsibility for outcomes that happened to you, and knowing radical accountability is what will create lasting relevance for your company.

In this program, you will hear how to fully embrace every action which is your choice, how to be intentional and claim accountability, and that the not-easy path is what builds resilience. Jess Dewell talks with Ralph H Groce, President and Chief Operating Officer at Scroobious, about how today’s leadership requires you to be BOLD and break what is not yet broken.

Host: Jess Dewell

What You Will Hear:

01:30 Thinking differently as a necessary skill in a fast-changing world.

• Get comfortable with being uncomfortable because expectations and standards shift.
• Settling into routines or predictability, create comfortable chairs, which are the opposite of what is needed in today’s quickly changing world.
• You will never achieve a permanent, unchanging state of success in a continuously evolving environment.

11:40 Choice and intentionality in decision-making shape our lives.

• Everything in the world is within our control, which means you can refuse to become a victim of circumstance.
• You can distinguish between what you wish for and what actually shapes you — daily choices (not desires or wishes).
• Choose how you feel, act, interact, and respond — acting with intentionality and urgency.

16:50 Resilience and grit are built by embracing not-easy choices

• Resilience and grit are built through facing hard or suboptimal choices rather than by avoiding them.
• There is value in repeatedly making intentional choices, which sharpens your ability to discern and pursue what truly matters.
• Real personal evolution happens in the not-easy moments, where choosing with intention develops strength and capacity for change.

31:10 Stamina and intentionality are required for consistent personal growth.

• Intentionally structure a cadence — during a particular week, for example — to include periods of deep, focused effort that demand significant stamina and presence.
• Necessity of rest and the consistency to learn how to allocate your energy for maximum intentionality.
• Sustaining progress and presence over time requires treating personal development as a marathon, not a sprint.

40:15 Progress happens step by step, not all at once.

• Focus on present challenges instead of feeling overwhelmed by solving everything at once — addressing what’s right in front of you leads to progress.
• Taking small, intentional steps and holding onto hope allows a person to navigate even the most daunting situations.
• Looking back at past achievements in difficult periods helps build your confidence that if you did it once, you can do it again, despite changed circumstances.

41:15 It is BOLD to break processes that are not broken.

Resources

• Ralph H Groce on LinkedIn
• We Have Nothing to Lose: A Dark Optimist’s Call to Action
• The road to enlightenment starts at Knowhere
• Book: In Search of Excellence
• Book: The Great Will Fall

Transcript

Ralph H Groce 00:00
If you approach life and every moment of life with a sense of purpose and intent, you should be exhausted.

Jess Dewell 00:09
People, when it’s beyond one person, in community, in conjunction, in collaboration or co-creation, we get stuck in those competing priorities and we are unable to move past them to find new, novel, different next steps.

Jess Dewell 00:45
I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for stopping by at the Bold Business Podcast.

We are normalizing important conversations. Yes, there are tips. Yes, there are ways to solve problems.

More importantly are gonna be, what do you need for yourself to be able to solve those problems and make the most of the education, the training and the programs that you are already using? This is a supplement to that. It can sit on top of it, fuel your soul, fuel your mind and most importantly, regardless of where you’re at on your journey, maybe you’re starting out.

Maybe you’re ready to scale. Maybe you’re going through reinvention. The conversations we are having will help you at each of those stages.

So hang around, see what’s going on and I look forward to seeing you engaging with our videos.

Announcer 01:14
Wow! You are listening to the Bold Business Podcast where you will hear firsthand experiences about what it really takes to ensure market relevance and your company’s future.

Jess Dewell 01:27
I’m excited to introduce you to Ralph Gross III, an accomplished entrepreneur, visionary thinker and dedicated advocate for change. His background is filled with amazing experience in many different areas, including tech, finance, philanthropy, in addition to entrepreneurship. I will tell you what, the conversation that I’m having with this author in the relationship of how we think, what we are doing, where we are today, where we want to go, both as individuals and as the collective is intriguing on many levels and thinking differently is a big part of that.

Taking responsibility for our actions is a part of that. And I’m gonna tell you, facing change is a part of that. That’s something you will hear.

How do we show up and own the fact that we get to choose everything we do and not choosing is also a choice. Another thing you are definitely going to hear and take away is the how, how to own and claim your own accountability with intention. And the third thing is the process of being intentional, facing every choice is not easy.

It’s in that not easy where we’re building resilience, where we’re building the ability to be who we really wanna be, change what we wanna change. And maybe it’s not even change. Maybe it’s just impact the world around us and live fully all the way to creating ripples.

Even when things are a little darker, even when things feel unhelpful, even when things feel like the choices are just neutral to negative and there really isn’t a great positive choice. And that’s what We Have Nothing to Lose, A Dark Optimist’s Call to Action is about. And I’m excited to bring you this conversation with Ralph H. Gross III.

Ralph H Groce 03:30
So for me, that was part of how I was raised. And I talk a little bit about it in the book, Tiger Parents on Steroids and Possibly High Standards with a caveat and a nuance thrown in that here are the standards we expect you to uphold, to rise to, to achieve, but we’re not gonna give you direction on how to get there. You gotta figure that out.

And once you do successfully figure it out, we’re gonna change everything up and introduce a whole new set of standards, a whole new set of practices, a whole new set of expectations that you’re gonna have to start over, start anew and figure out all over again. And one of the many things that experience taught me was how to think critically, how to figure things out, how to persevere and get comfortable with being uncomfortable. And it’s something of a cliche today, but that is exactly how I was raised.

I was just not allowed to get comfortable with a set of routines, with continuity, with predictability. Something was always changing. Something was always new.

Expectations were always in a state of flux. And it just prepared me for what we have today, which is a world that continues to change. And then I went and played college basketball at Boston University for a guy named Rick Pitino.

And one of the many things that Coach Pitino said, and he was a lot like my father, was that if it ain’t broke, break it. The notion there is that you get to a point where you’ve got it, you’ve figured it out, it works. You’re there.

And now, don’t break it. Whatever you do, don’t break it. Don’t alter it because we finally got it just right.

Unfortunately, the world around you continues to evolve. Unfortunately, the world around you continues to be in a state of flux. And the notion that you’re going to arrive at this place and you don’t need to touch it, fuss with it any longer, is just a complete fallacy.

And if you stay at that place, it won’t be very long. It could be the next day. It could be the next minute when you find that, oh my God, I’m behind the curve.

And then now you’re scrambling to get yourself back to that place again. You just have to get comfortable with evolution. You have to get comfortable with change.

You have to get comfortable with figuring it out.

Jess Dewell 06:12
A lot of what you’re sharing, three books came to mind. And I think they’re on my mind because I’m rereading one, which of course, having conversations, then these other things show up. You may have even read this book.

It’s an oldie but a goodie called In Search of Excellence. Do you remember that book? From the 80s.

So this is like, what? How many years ago was that? The 80s?

Here’s what they were doing though in the search of excellence, which is exactly what you were saying is, somewhere along the line, people would show up in these companies and they would do things differently. And the companies were thoughtful enough to go, let’s see what happens here. And it turned out some of those things turned into greatness and made these companies have this excellence.

And so that was what this whole book was about. And then I’m rereading it and I was talking to somebody else and they said, did you know? Did you notice yet?

And I said, what did I notice yet? And they said, most of those companies don’t exist anymore. They got to this place, they tried to stay in this place and hold on to that and the world changed around them and they fell.

And then I was like, wait a second, I think Jim Collins wrote a book about that. And sure enough, and The Great Will Fall, I think is what it’s called. And that showed up in a conversation that I was having recently too.

So I’m thinking, okay, cool. So you see this big cycle of decades, right? The 80s was a long time ago from now.

And at the same point in time, recognizing that each piece of this might be part of that wheel that you’re talking about. If it’s not broken, break it. And having the discernment and the ability to go, oh, my world is always changing.

And whether it’s by design, like what your parents did, what your basketball coach did, or whether it’s because that’s just what we face in the world. We wake up and we don’t know what’s gonna show up on the day, little or big. That’s that, huh?

Ralph H Groce 08:00
Stephen Jobs talked about this notion of self-cannibalization and self-destruction when he introduced the iPad. And folks were lamenting and questioning and wondering and in some cases worried about what’s gonna happen to iPhones or what’s gonna happen to Macs or MacBooks. And he was like, if we don’t cannibalize our products, someone else will.

And it’s better that we do than to allow our competition to do that. And many companies, just as you said, arrive at that point where they think they have it all figured out, only to discover that the world around them continues to evolve and things continue to change. Competitors catch up, competitors leapfrog and introduce new ideas, new radical ideas that build on what’s been done.

And next thing we’re at a different place. Three years ago or so, folks have been talking about AI for quite some time. Was it the focus of conversation, Gen AI, the focus of conversation two years ago, three years ago?

No. Just when you got used to Gen AI and you understood what that concept was and you might’ve played around with a few things, someone comes along and introduces a Genic AI. And it’s building on that even further, taking it to another place.

So this notion of disruption, this notion of constant change is just something that if you’re going to stay relevant, if you’re going to remain in a place of influence, that you just have to get comfortable with this notion of evolution and constant change with a sense of purpose. So without that sense of purpose, it’s just chaos, but with a sense of purpose, with a sense of direction and with a sense of urgency about it. Because without that, then it just becomes chaotic and hectic and dare I say chaos.

Jess Dewell 09:54
Please say it again.

Ralph H Groce 9:56
Chaos. Yes.

Jess Dewell 10:01
There are these tropes that stick with us. And one of those is that is especially, and you probably had this in basketball. I hear it from self-help and raising an athlete myself.

It shows up in that as well, which is control your controllables. What you shared that Steve Jobs did, what you were talking about with your baseball coach was, hey, we get to choose. Why wait for somebody to make the choice for us?

Ralph H Groce 10:26
It was Gandhi that said, be the change you want to see in the world or something to that effect. Basically, the change is an inevitability. It’s a constant.

Become the change that you want to see in the world. Since it’s going to change, it’s going to evolve. Things are going to move around.

Someone’s going to move your cheese. Then figure out a place that you want your cheese to reside and the place after that and the place after that. And be the architect and the initiator of that change.

Jess Dewell 10:53
So let’s say, how do you know what’s actually in your control? Maybe we could start there, right? Because these bigger conversations start with looking at ourselves first and then the people that we’re sharing rooms with, like you and me right here.

And then to the people who are watching and listening to us, right? Right, Ralph? For those of us who are like, maybe I’ve got this or yeah, I’ve done it, but I’m not sure I can do it again.

I actually have a choice, which by the way, happens in more and more of my conversations. Yes, you do have a choice. So I’m curious from you, how do we know what the controllables are that we actually have choice over?

Ralph H Groce 11:26
So Jess, that’s a fantastic question. And I think my answer is going to potentially alarm a number of your viewers and listeners.

Jess Dewell 11:37
Oh, then bring it. Let’s go.

Ralph H Groce 11:41
It certainly will be a point of debate for sure. So from my personal philosophy, and this is Ralph’s view of Ralph. When people have asked me that question, the response that I give them can tend to be a bit alarming.

In my world, everything is in my control. And there’s a couple of philosophical inputs that inform that perspective. The power of that is that I don’t ever become a victim of circumstance because it’s all within my control.

My economics professor in my MBA program said to me one time we were having a debate about the great recession and who was responsible and that kind of thing. And he said to me, he said, Ralph, in the long-term, everything is variable. So you have this notion in economics of fixed and variable costs.

And he said to me, in the long run, everything is variable, which we were talking about economics, but has an amazing philosophical bent to it. And so when I think about my life and the direction I want things to go, for me, everything is variable. Everything is in my control.

Everything, we are the sum of our choices. That’s what I believe. We are the sum of the things that we choose, not the things we want or wish or desire, but we’re the sum of the choices that we make every single day.

And I accept responsibility and accountability for the choices that I make every single day. I choose how I feel. I choose the perspective I have.

I choose the things I do. I choose the places I go. I choose to have the people in my life that I want.

I choose to have the people, not have the people I don’t want in my life. I choose how I respond to things. I do so with a sense of intentionality and a sense of purpose and a sense of urgency.

That creates an extraordinary level of power for me. It means that I can go and do and be whatever I want. It also creates an extraordinary level of accountability for me, because I don’t get to say, I don’t have, or I didn’t get, or this didn’t happen because of all of these other factors.

At the end of the day, it’s on me. And I embrace that, and I accept that. Now, again, that’s where the content, a lot of people will talk about, there was a time when I wanted to play professional basketball, and that was my passion, my absolute passion, and I felt one of my purposes in life.

I happen to be 5’10”, and there aren’t a lot of 5’10”, professional basketball players, there never has been, but there are a few, there are people who have done it. I didn’t make it, that’s on me. I mentioned in the book, I said in kindergarten, I wanted to be president of the United States.

Today, I’m not. Maybe one day I will be. But the fact that I’m not is on me.

And it just goes on and on in terms of the things that I am and the things that I’m not, and the responsibility that I embrace for all of those things. Jim Valvano said in a very famous speech about never give up, as he was talking about his cancer diagnosis and his battle with cancer, and he talked about three things that you should do every day. You should laugh, you should cry, and you should think.

And I add a fourth thing to that. You should be exhausted. Because if you approach life and every moment of life with a sense of purpose and intent, by the end of the day, you’re exhausted.

Because you’ve fought through all the things you’ve said, you’ve fought through all the things you’ve done, the places you’ve been, the people you interact with. If you do all of that with a sense of intent and purpose, by the end of the day, you should be exhausted. I know I am.

And that’s how I manage and think about change and evolution and where I should be, what I should be doing, and what I expect the outcome and the benefits and consequences of those choices.

Jess Dewell 16:03
You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast. I’m your host, Jess Dewell. This is your program for strategizing long-term success while diving deep into what the right work is for your business right now.

Announcer 16:18
You’re listening to the Bold Business Podcast hosted by Jess Dewell, a nationally recognized strategic growth consultant. She works with business owners and executives to integrate just two elements that guide business through the ups and downs of growth. Number one, know what work is necessary.

Number two, do all the work possible. Schedule a complimentary consultation to find out more at reddirection.com.

Jess Dewell 16:48
We’re talking with Ralph H. Gross III, a visionary leader and advocate for change. Now, back to the program.

And not all the choices we have are between optimal and suboptimal, or even neutral and neutral. Sometimes it’s both negative and less than optimal, or really not good. And to your point, you’re right.

Those are the choices, and that’s what we have to choose between. When you, circling back to the beginning of what you said about we are the sum of our choices, and then it’s us, we always get to make our own choice, and every decision we make, every action we take, we could have chosen another path. And even it’s up to us to not be on autopilot, is what I’m hearing you say.

To actually take a step and say, okay, I’m going to be intentional here. And I know humans in general, I know I do this, I’ll speak for me personally, but in general, we tend to optimize. That’s what we do, right?

It’s probably one of the reasons we still have fight or flight about certain things, even though we don’t have tigers chasing us anymore. It was just, we had it for so long, it’s just part of our brain and our evolution. And we’re showing up because we have different circumstances to things that are new and different and unusual.

And it’s hard to overwrite that sometimes and go, oh, is this just a reaction that comes from conditioning and just the evolution of people? Okay, cool, so what do I want to do with that? What is my risk tolerance?

What is my ability to handle the unknown? Is it something I have to decide right now? Can I take a day or a week?

Or does it, there are things that show up in the day that you got to take immediate action on. And that’s just the way that it goes. And being able to do it with integrity, whatever integrity means to you, because there are a lot of different reasons.

And my integrity is more than doing what I’ll say I’m going to do, but believing in the choice that I make. That’s where integrity goes a little bit of a level deeper for me. It is a mindset and it’s hard to keep that mindset, especially with things that seem to be competing priorities.

I am curious, one of the things, okay, so everybody who’s listening, I have to tell you this. We have nothing to lose. A Dark Optimist’s call to action is Ralph’s book and I have been reading it.

And one of the things that came out of this, I came up with a lot of things, but one of the things was the thing, we’re talking about mindset. We’re talking about the sum of our choices, which means we have to recognize when we have competing priorities for ourselves. And that’s actually something I think where, Ralph, it seems like you suggest people, and people, when it’s beyond one person, in community, in conjunction, in collaboration or co-creation, we get stuck in those competing priorities and we are unable to move past them to find new, novel, different next steps.

Not the whole solution, but maybe even just the next step. And I’d love to hear more about that from you.

Ralph H Groce 19:52
One of the things about choices and moving things forward, it, generally speaking, although you can do it without being informed, but it suggests that you’re making these choices as an informed person. And so that’s a responsibility as well, and part of the solution of moving things forward. But as I talk about it in the book and where we find ourselves in the country and in the world, is that while you may accept personal responsibility for the choices that you make and the outcomes and things that happen in your life, other people are doing the same thing.

They’re making choices or not making choices that can impact and affect where you are and what you’re trying to accomplish. And in terms of government and policy, there’s a whole notion of partnership and partisanship, philosophies of where we think the country should be, how we wanna take things forward, what we wanna do, what we don’t wanna do, what we think is valuable. What is integrity?

There’s a different definition of that, and that can create an enormous amount of conflict, inertia, paralysis, in many cases. And the point that I was trying to get across in the book is that there are factors, maybe consequences of some of that inaction or some of those choices or lack thereof, but there are situations now that are brewing in the world and in this country that are coming at us with a sense of urgency to them. And if we don’t do something, if we don’t take action, if we don’t find a common sense of purpose around these things, then we are really affecting life as we know it in this country and on this planet.

And we don’t have a plan B. There’s no other place that we can go to escape these things, and they really are things that affect the entire world that we live in on. So I happen to believe in climate change.

I happen to believe that we’re having an effect on the planet with the choices that we make and the things that we do, and that we need to find different and better ways to live in partnership with the planet, to do less harm to the planet and our surroundings. I happen to believe that gun violence has reached a place where we just shouldn’t shrug it off and we just shouldn’t think of it as a normal course of business, if you will. At least that’s how we’re treating it.

And that the notion of our children, I don’t have children, but I have nieces and nephews, and I do love children. The notion that a child can go to school and they’re practicing active shooter drills, it’s actually responsible to do given the world we live in today, but we shouldn’t have to live that way. That just should not be a part of how we exist.

And we can choose, collectively choose to do something different and something better that remedies those kinds of situations. But the point is that we’re at a place where we can’t simply tolerate inaction, these competing kinds of choices that don’t solve and don’t address these issues, because these issues are going to have consequences. And they’re gonna have consequences for all of us.

I don’t care who you are, I don’t care how much money you have, I don’t care what’s your status in life. What’s going to happen is going to be inconsequential for the citizens of this country and the inhabitants of this world.

Jess Dewell 23:31
I completely agree that inaction is definitely a choice, and I’m gonna just say that out loud, and you and I agree on that. Not answering, not taking action, that is a choice. And so, consciously kick the can down the road, or put it on the shelf, or not take any action, or say, okay, not for me.

Since we’re talking about some dicey topics, I’m gonna throw something in here that I actually laughed out loud about, only because I was like, I never thought I’d hear anybody else in the entire world talk about Lyndon B. Johnson in a slightly positive way. It made me remember, this is actually really interesting.

I’m like, what? In ninth grade, I got a D on a paper because the teacher did not like my topic, and my topic was I had to choose two presidents and decide which was better. So my choices that I chose were Richard Nixon and Lyndon B.

Johnson. And he told me, he goes, I can’t give you a good grade. And I’m like, what does that even mean?

He goes, I don’t know yet. And he goes, you wrote a great paper, don’t like either of these guys? D.

Okay. Wow. So I’m just like, huh, interesting.

So I chose to play your game. Cause I knew I was, I understood where he stood. And I was like, I gotta think differently.

I wanna learn something slightly different. We didn’t talk about politics in my house growing up. So this was an opportunity to contrast what I was learning in school and what I might learn about more about why were these people perceived the way they are perceived still to this day, by the way.

And I appreciated that experience and I didn’t care. That’s not true. I really did care because grades mattered in my house and I got in trouble for that.

But I said, there’s nothing I can do about it. This was a choice I made. I stuck to my, I stuck to the choice that I made.

I went all the way through what I said I was gonna learn and guess what I did. And I found out both these guys, overall, whatever their perception is, they both did good in the world. And that’s something that you said in here.

So I wanted to point that out because I literally laughed out loud going, we both can find good everywhere, can’t we? I never thought it would be with that, but hey, this is cool. This is really cool, Ralph.

So I wanted to point that out because you do cause people to, readers have the opportunity to sit with things and to think about things and to bring in their own experiences and look at it from a different lens in a fairly safe and easy going way. And thank you for letting me tell that story because I’m just, I’m telling you what, Ralph.

Ralph H Groce 25:59
I love it.

Jess Dewell 26:00
And you’ve been talking about accountability in our conversation here. So I wanna know what are your steps to being accountable that when you’re looking at somebody and their output and you’re listening to the answers of questions and the thoughtful discussion you have, I’m guessing from your own experience, what accountability looks like, how to get there. And I’m guessing then you’re also assessing other people that you’re engaging about how accountable and responsible they are.

So I was curious, do you have a set of guidelines that you follow that are shareable so that other people can measure how they might do it against what you’re doing so they can evolve and grow?

Ralph H Groce 26:38
Just, these are really great questions. And let me start with the ish part of that answer.

Jess Dewell 26:44
I like this. Bring it forward. Let’s go.

Ralph H Groce 26:47
And the reason why I do that is because as a leader and as someone who has built teams and led teams earlier in that journey, I tended to think about the world in the way in which I was conditioned, maybe part of my DNA at this point, but certainly my perspective on the world really came, as you would expect, really came into the forefront of my leadership style. And when you play that out and you think about this extreme accountability, this extreme intentionality, this extreme focus on the power of choice and the responsibility that goes with that, when you start to project that onto other people, you come to realize that not everybody views the world that way. And not everybody views their place in the world that way.

Not everyone wants the responsibility of all the choices they make. Not everyone wants to be exhausted at the end of the day because they’re really contemplating every single word that comes out of their mouth, every interaction that they have, every place that they find themselves in and the responsibility and the outcomes that are derived from all of those choices. Not everyone wants that.

And you know what? It doesn’t mean that they are somehow bad people or defective people or inadequate people because they choose not to live that way, not to exist that way in the world. And so that’s the ish part of it.

And so the yes part of it is when people approach me and ask for my perspective on how did you do that? Or how did you get there? What was your path?

I then get to share this notion of choice and power of those choices. And the responsibility comes with those choices. And the accountability comes with the choice.

And the willingness, the intentionality with which I approach those things and the sense of purpose I have around that and how it has worked for me. And the cost, if you will, the price that I pay for that. I have, like I said, nobody wins at everything.

So I definitely have my series of what some folks may characterize as failures. I try not to put them into that context because I see that as part of the process. You don’t get to walk.

No toddler walks without falling repeatedly. And they don’t view that as failure. They view that as part of the process.

And then one day they’re walking and the next day they’re running. And the next day they’re all into everything. And you as a parent are like, I can’t keep up with you because two days ago you were crawling and here you are this week and you’re all over the place.

But that’s part of the process. And so I don’t necessarily see those places where I didn’t come up, I didn’t achieve what I wanted to or things we talked about being suboptimal, they were suboptimal as necessarily failures. But they certainly were not what I was aiming for.

They certainly were not what I was targeting and hoping to achieve with the actions and the things that I did. But it’s just part of the process. And so for people who want to aspire to live that way and hopefully derive benefits of their own from that way of being, great.

And for those who don’t have to find a way to coexist in the world without judging those people for who they are, what they are and the choices that they make to be what they wanna be and have out of their life the things that they wanna have out of their lives. So that’s the yes and that’s the ish.

Jess Dewell 30:36
I’m your host Jess Dool and we’re getting down to business on the Bold Business Podcast. This is where we’re tackling the challenges that matter most to you with actionable and achievable advice to get real results that lead to your success.

Announcer 30:52
Focused on growth? Listen to more programs like this which support the challenges and opportunities you are working with right now. Search Bold Business Podcast for the key terms at reddirection.com or your preferred podcast listening app.

Jess Dewell 31:08
We’re talking with Ralph H. Gross III, a visionary leader and advocate for change. Now back to the program.

It takes stamina. Honestly, you’re an athlete. I need stamina in different ways though.

I have conversations like this almost every single day and in the work that I do. And I know you’re having these conversations in the work that you’re doing today too, right? You had a really good basis to learn and so I’m thinking, okay, if we have something with a lot of structure that required us build stamina for whatever reason, to compete, to get better at something, to learn a new skill, to go out on an edge and think differently than everybody else around us just to see what it might be like.

I think stamina is actually what keeps us in that neutral to positive place as we’re making choices and not accidentally second-guessing or doubting or letting other people’s, I’m gonna call it judgment, their opportunity to help that comes across as judgment, those can, they sneak in. And so their stamina to keep those out, their stamina to be intentional in a whole day, their stamina to be intentional for two days in a row, their stamina to do that a third day. I actually flow my weeks so that there are one to two days of deep present stamina requiring things.

They’re just two days that anything that’s gonna require a lot of stamina and presence, I get in there as much as possible because I do need time to rest and this is how, this is what my evolution has been is, oh, I really don’t do well if I have to do just a little bit every day and there is a time to get out of that really big intention because I gotta pay the bills to keep the lights on, I gotta answer that email that’s coming in all the time, I gotta make sure that everybody’s obstacles are taken care of and that we’re all working on the right things.

That is still intentional work, it’s at a different caliber with what we’ve been talking about and so I try really hard to bring the deep necessary intention all in one place so that I can still be intentional but at a different level and make it through a week to get to next week. I’m sharing that because I’m interested in hearing your version because everybody that’s listening can then go, oh, there’s more than one right way to do this.

Ralph H Groce 33:31
I saw an article, I love to read and I think reading is not only fundamental, it’s just fun. You mentioned that before, you can get mental constructs from the words that you’re reading and my constructs will be different from your constructs even if we read the same thing. So just reading is just an amazing thing.

So I was reading this article that talked about the benefits and characteristics derived from and that can be seen from how people load the dishwasher.

Jess Dewell 34:02
Okay. Oh, I’m so excited to hear what this, of all the things that it could have been, I never thought it would have been that. Let’s go.

Yes.

Ralph H Groce 34:11
And so it talked about in a household, you have partners and potentially children or other people who are loading the dishwasher and the many different ways that it can be done. And in this case, they had, I think a husband and wife and the wife loads the plates and saucers towards the front and the pots in the back and the husband tends to do the exact opposite. And it talked about the real lesson in that is finding people or people finding the ability to understand that this notion of optimal comes in many shapes, sizes, flavors, realities and there is no one right way to load the dishwasher.

And if you can understand that and accept that and even learn from that, dependent upon the day, the dinner, whatever you’ve eaten and whatever you’re trying to clean, there might be some way of loading something that gets it a little cleaner than it otherwise would. But your ability to be open to other ideas in other ways really says a lot about who you are as a person and certainly who you are as a leader. And yeah, for me, as you talked about how you approach this concept of stamina and maintain your ability to, because it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint, it’s marathon and your ability to maintain your strength, your focus, your power over time is really important to actually getting where you wanna go.

For me, I feel like I have to be in this fight every minute of every day and so I don’t necessarily have what I would call downtime but I have maybe me time in a sense of my workouts are a time when I can take time to revitalize and they also give me a sense of accomplishment. So doing things, and for me, that’s what’s important is getting these little wins where I can find them. Shooting off an email to a friend or sending a text to someone just to say hello, working out and having a really great workout and pushing past some obstacles.

Many years ago, I was in a motorcycle accident and I really ripped up my knee in a very profound kind of way because I don’t do anything half-ass. And I had to have a knee replacement and then I had to have a replacement of the replacement and there’s an intensity. I checked myself out of the hospital after less than 24 hours.

Afterwards, I was back on a stage interviewing the president of Boston University in a fireside chat, back on the basketball court, talking trash as I’m crossing over some young cats and letting them know I’m beating them senseless with one leg. It’s these wins in places that kind of matter to me. These helped sustain me for some of the bigger challenges and the bigger things that I have to get accomplished and make sure that I intersperse those opportunities into my day so that I can sustain myself and build up some confidence about what I’m trying to accomplish.

Jess Dewell 37:41
Totally, whether it’s going to work on Wall Street, whether it’s opening and working with the art gallery, whether it’s just having and being able to be present in a conversation with somebody you’re excited about or if it’s gonna be a difficult conversation yet can still be productive and helpful to everybody involved, I hear you. This is interesting because accountability, intentionality, it’s not easy and it’s not always fun. If it’s not fun, to your point, bringing in wins, being able to have some of that and then something we haven’t said yet outright that I’m gonna bring in and you’re gonna tell me if I’m in the right direction, that’s what’s actually building our resilience.

That’s what’s building our grit. That’s what’s building our ability to see what the choices are because the more we practice making our choices out loud and in front and with intention the more we get to see the choices and we can decide and discern and filter what the actual ones we want right now actually are.

Ralph H Groce 38:46
One of the things, the ability to reflect back because nothing is new under the sun. So as complicated as these things are, it’s all a matter of context and relevance. It’s hard today but guess what?

When I just graduated from college and didn’t have any money life was hard then too. It’s context and relevance. Somehow I overcame.

Somehow I got through. This philosophy worked and I was able to move forward and accomplish things and continue on my path. And in some cases maybe achieve things that I didn’t think even think was possible because I stayed true to who I am and how I view the world and how I want to interact with the world.

And so if I did it then, if I did it once, then maybe I can do it again. Even though the circumstances are different, the stakes may be higher, but they were just as high back then as they are now if you make everything equal. It’s like inflation.

If you take a dollar, today’s dollar and yesterday’s time you can get back to what a dollar was accounting for some of those other factors. And that’s where the whole notion of dark optimism comes in the sense that recognizing I’m in a tough situation and that things don’t appear to be in a place where they’re going to work out. But I was there before and I managed to somehow hang on to hope.

I managed to somehow hang on to the notion that I can figure this out, that I can work my way through this. I don’t have to solve the whole thing all at once. I just have to solve the thing that’s right here in front of me.

And I take that step and I take the next step and I take the step after that. And I arrive at a place where I’ve worked my way through it. And again, that’s a function of how I was raised and the things I was put through.

Everyone has those situations where whatever you’re going through seems larger than life and bigger than your ability to master it or overcome it or work your way through it. But you don’t have to solve it all at once. You just got to solve this little piece of it.

And when you do that, you solve this other little piece of it and you just hang on to that hope. You recognize how challenging the situation is. Nobody finishes a marathon all at once.

You run a marathon mile by mile, step by step. And if you can just put that one step in front of the next, step after that, you eventually get there.

Jess Dewell 41:18
All right, Ralph, I want to know what makes it bold. What makes it bold to add intentionality, to claim those choices that we’re making, especially when it’s not easy?

Ralph H Groce 41:28
What makes it bold? I think what makes it bold is the willingness to break what’s not broken. Is to be in that place where you think, yes, I’ve arrived, I’ve done it.

This is exactly what I want. And then to say, you know what? I’m going to break this.

It’s great. I came, I saw, I conquered. But you know what?

I’m going to tear this up and start anew, or I’m going to alter this, or I’m going to enhance this somehow, but I’m not going to accept that I have arrived and that this is the best that it can be, it, whatever it is, or the best that I can be. I’m going to think about how I can break this and make it better. Many people would call people who think that way, crazy, to get to something and get to what you think is Nirvana and then reinvent yourself all over again.

Tiger Woods used to talk about owning his swing and that’s when he knew he arrived. And I’m sure over the course of that journey, owning his swing meant something different in his 20s, different in his 30s, and it means something different today, given all the challenges, physical challenges that he’s had over the course of his career. There’s no doubt in my mind that he continues to pursue, and there’s no doubt in my mind there was a period of time when he did own his swing, and yet he continues to pursue defining his journey in terms of owning his swing.

And I think people who are capable of doing that, that’s bold.

Jess Dewell 43:05
Every single time I have a conversation, I take away something that I want to share with 25 people. I know when you’re listening to this podcast, you’re also listening for that and will have something that you want to share. In the comments, I would like for you to engage with us.

What is that thing that you want to tell 25 people from this program? Here’s why it’s important. It’s important because, yeah, there are gonna be how-tos.

Yes, there are gonna be steps. Yes, you’re gonna be like, oh, I wish I wrote that down. I wish I wasn’t doing this and I could actually take action on that right now.

But guess what? You’re not. So engage right now because that one thing you want to share with others will be the thing that you can figure out how to incorporate in your business, in your workflow, in your style tomorrow.

Announcer 43:54
Wow! Jess hosts the Bold Business podcast to provide insights for building a resilient, profitable business by deeply understanding your growth strategy, ensuring market relevance and your company’s future. It is bold to deeply understand your growth strategy with your host, Jess Dewell.

Get more information about how to drive solutions and reset your growth mindset at reddirection.com. Thank you for joining us and special thanks to our post-production team at The Scott Treatment.