Hello everyone. Welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind. I’m your host Kristin Maxwell, and in this show we explore the process of transformation to give you tools and strategies that you can use to transform your own life.
Today, we’re going to be talking to Kenny Weiss about what it takes to increase confidence and live in your greatness. Kenny Weiss is a highly rated coach, speaker and author. He is the host of the podcast The Greatness Movement, and also the founder of the movement, the Greatness Movement. His book, Your Journey to Success, lays out what keeps people from their greatness and gives them a path for how to step into that.
Kenny, welcome to Your SuperPowered Mind.
Hi Kristen. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Sure. My first question is always, what superpower did you uncover as the result of mastering your mind?
When you become an expert in those feelings, when you become an expert in your brokenness and all the difficulties that we all go through in life, that’s where the answer is.
Well, for me, it’s actually, it’s going to be the title of my next book. It’s The Answer’s in the Opposite. And what I discovered is we’ve pretty much been taught to avoid the difficult feelings in our life. When you become an expert in those feelings, when you become an expert in your brokenness and all the difficulties that we all go through in life, that’s where the answer is. It’s the avoidance of all that and the lack of information and tools on how to look at all of that stuff and overcome it. That’s really what I became an expert in and that’s whether it’s clients or myself. That’s what I’ve found is kind of the secret to finding your greatness.
Wow. And let me tell you, I am so glad we are talking then because that is one of my biggest missions in life. Is to let people know that they can get through their brokenness and that there are tools and information on how to get through that. I love what you’re doing.
Thank you.
I guess in terms of your answer to your superpower was super intriguing because I want to know, how to become an expert in brokenness, in your brokenness, but let’s go back a little bit and you obviously are talking about greatness and how do you define greatness for a person.
Yeah, that’s a great question. Success. It’s funny. I was still in the process of defining greatness in my own mind when I wrote my first book. Had I, and greatness is used all throughout my book, but I hadn’t quite defined it yet. I would have changed the title of my book, Your Journey to Greatness, but success to me, success and greatness are two different processes. Success is an external process. If you think about it, it’s all about the accumulation of things outside of yourself: Whether it’s wealth, the corner office, the trophy husband or wife. In other words, my validation of success and who I am is an external acquiring of things. Now, I’m all for people being rich or poor. For some people, there’s the whole movement of the small houses. If that’s success to you, however you define it, but everyone defines it as something external to them that will validate that, “Wes, I’m now successful.”
When you learn to forgive yourself, they can’t hurt you with it anymore.
Pardon me. Greatness to me is completely different. Greatness is an internal process. And the way to be, the way I show that or help people find that is to find your greatness, you have to become an expert in those deep, dark recesses, those places we’ve all been taught by society and everything never to go. And the reason for that is wherever I am in the success process. If I’m at peace within myself, if I can see my imperfections and accept, I have a quote, “When you learn to forgive yourself, they can’t hurt you with it anymore.”
And so when you have that place of greatness, you’re walking in your authenticity. Wherever you are in that success process, you’re okay. It’s not defined by, well, most people they’ll say, “Well, I’m not a success yet. I’m still a manager or I haven’t acquired this house.” It’s always about something outside of them. And so that’s how I differentiate. Greatness is an internal process. And when you have that, wherever you are in the success process, you’re at peace. And most of all, once you achieve that success you want, is we all know almost everybody that achieves success ends up waking up miserable going, “Wow, I thought this would do it, but I don’t.” And that’s why greatness separates you. Because when you have that, again, wherever you are in that process, you can accept that level of success that you’re pursuing.
Right. With your answer, it’s almost sounds like you’re talking about two different things. I want to ask you to reconcile because you’re saying we need to become an expert in our dark recesses, meaning I’m assuming our dark emotions, and then we’ll be able to come to peace within ourselves. How does that happen?
Well, in my experience, over 80% of people will say their childhood was perfect. It’s absolutely impossible. None of us, none of our parents have taken a single class on how to be a parent. And even if we had, we still screw up. And so, all of us have been through difficult times in life. And the societal response is to not deal with stuff like that, not learn about it. Well, I will talk about in my book, what I called it, there’s a cycle that I discovered that every single person lives their life by. And it’s all predicated on, we’ve all been through some sort of difficult, trying emotional or traumatic event. And until you discover how that trauma or whatever it may, it could be as simple as like my mom.
Let me give you an example. I was reaching into the refrigerator as a kid to grab cottage cheese and my mom goes, “No, no, no, that’s for the dogs.” Well, what my mom meant was when the dogs are sick, she uses cottage cheese to hide their pills. Well, as a kid, what I heard was, “If you eat, you get in trouble. If you eat, mom doesn’t like you. And oh by the way, we feed the dogs before we feed the kids in this house.” Now again, that’s not what she said, but because we don’t teach about parenting, she didn’t realize the underlying message she was sending. And so everyone, we’ve all had moments like that in childhood and people just brush that off.
Well for 30 years, if you ever asked me if I wanted to eat, I would say, “Nah, eating bores me.” I played pro hockey and I literally lived off three Super Big Gulps and something like a Dingdong something chocolatey. That’s it. I refused to eat. We develop these false personas, these beliefs. I thought I was just a person who didn’t like eating. Well, that’s what I mean. It’s these little events and some are bigger. I found my mom passed out naked on the toilet at 10 years old in the middle of the night. It’s when I discovered she was an alcoholic. Most of us would recognize, okay, that’s a big event I could see that would affect me. But mom making that comment about cottage cheese, well, those things affect us the rest of our life. And I show you.
I can sit with anyone and in two seconds, I know by your career, what your childhood was like. You’re just trying to reconcile that pain you went through. And that’s what people don’t understand. And so until you discover that, most people are living against who they really are, against their greatness. Gallup has done a poll for decades and only 7% of the population is fully satisfied in their careers. Well, that tells you 93% are living in the cycle I’m talking about. They’re still replaying that traumatic event against themselves and they don’t know it.
And so, that’s what I’m saying is, until we as a society condone and make it okay to go learn about how to be a parent, how to have relationships, how to deal with our emotions and look at ourselves and do the self-awareness work and hire people like me or others to help us through that journey, we’re not walking in our greatness. For most people, it’s a maladaptive coping skill that they aren’t even aware of and that’s why they’re struggling in both their pursuit of greatness and their pursuit of success.
Yes. Okay, that makes sense. And I want to go definitely, more deeply into, what are some of the tools that we can use to start to build more self-awareness and to address maybe some of that trauma and underlying emotions. But we do need to go to a break first. Before we go, can you let people know where they can learn more about you?
Sure. The easiest way is just Google Kenny Weiss. My podcast will come up, my YouTube channel will come up, my website will come up, but you can find me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube all under Kenny Weiss. My website is thegreatnessmovement.com but if you just Google my name, everything will show up.
Great. Thank you so much. In a moment we’re going to come back and talk a bit more about how to increase confidence and live in greatness. But hang on.
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