Episode 64 Podcast Transcript
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You’re going to have pain, you’re going to get punched in the face, but it’s your ability to have the courage to get up and push through no matter what pain it is. Hi everyone. Rob Kropp and Dan Stones here from Pravar Group and welcome back to another episode of The Trade Den. Good to have you back, Dan.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Good to be back. Thanks, Rob. Really looking forward to today’s conversation all about grit. It’s a very important topic and before we break it down, we’re going to get into two types of grit today and really spell these out for you. But before we do, let’s define what we mean by grit. What is grit really, and I’m going to start off in the classic what you shouldn’t do, which is talk about what it’s not. But grit isn’t about grind. Stubbornness, this grind culture idea that we just keep pushing and pushing. When we talk about grit, I’m going to define it using Angela Duckworth, who is the preeminent person who studies this and has really made this a real big point of focus. And she talks about grit being sustained, passion, perseverance, and consistent action to approach your long-term goals. And that’s really important. There’s three elements to this that I want you to be really mindful of because any one of those misses and all of a sudden the grit disappears or it transforms into something a little bit negative, you take away action, for instance, and just leave yourself with passion, perseverance of being punched in the face, you’re going to suffer.
(01:24):
So there’s a real downside to not understanding this definition.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
Passion’s really important, isn’t it? When you’re in pursuit of something, you’ve got to absolutely be passionate about it. You’ve got to have a sense of purpose around it. It’s that bit of fire in the belly to want to get you up and out of bed and something to keep striving towards.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, there has to be. I like that idea of fire in the belly. It’s got to be there because as the punches keep coming, you fall down, you get back up without the passion, pretty soon you’re just getting punched in the face for no real reason.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah, it becomes hard work, doesn’t it?
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Perseverance, same sort of thing. I think perseverance is worth a little bit of a chat. What do you think about perseverance?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Perseverance is that thing that you keep going over the long sustained period of time through the good, the bad and the ugly. And it’s your ability to endure pain, endure the pleasure, and really just keep pushing towards that thing that you’re passionate about, that vision, that goal, that desire that you want to fulfil in life. And so perseverance is no doubt a trait that will do a whole topic on here in The Trade Den, but it’s that one thing you’ve got to hold to be able to endure something for the long term to be able to play a long game. And as we were saying, coaching, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, it’s staying. It’s keeping your seat at the table. It’s continuing to play the game no matter what happens. I think the pain you talk about is inevitable. It’s going to happen. Like we said, you’re going to get punched in the face if you can’t persevere, you going to get up that many times. So I think that’s really important. And then for me, consistent action, it sort of speaks for itself. I think both words are equally important. It’s got to be consistent and you’ve got to actually do something right. You can’t just stand there and think about it or say, I’m just going to keep standing here while I get punched in the face.
Speaker 1 (03:16):
Yeah, you can’t achieve something amazing in business and life just by hoping, dreaming and wishing you’ve got to get off your ass and actually do the work, show up day in, day out. No one great has achieved something amazing in their chosen field, whatever that is, without actually getting up and getting on with the job. So consistent action is super important.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
For sure. And then the downside then of not having grit, let’s talk about that quickly before we break this down. What’s the downside? If you’re missing grit, what’s the result of that? What do you see when you see that? What does it look like when people don’t have grit?
Speaker 1 (03:53):
In the absence of grit, especially in business, you’re absolutely going to get punched in the face multiple times. And if you lack that ability to be able to get punched and get back up again, you will quit at some point and you will lack that ability to be able to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, take the lesson from it, get back up on your feet and keep moving forward. And if you lack that grit, you are constantly going to get punched. And if you don’t have the purpose or the why behind it, that’s where the doubt starts creeping in. You’re going, is this what I really want to do? Should I be doing this? I don’t know how much longer I can handle this. And if you lack grit in that moment, that’s when you open up the door to potentially quit or give up on something that you really, really want to achieve in business and life.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, I think the quitting almost becomes inevitable, right? Without it, you will quit. And then what happens is in the meantime, you waste a whole lot of time, a whole lot of resources, be it time, money, time with whatever it is. You’re going to waste a whole lot of time without grit because you’re going to end up quitting at the end of the day anyway. It’s a foregone conclusion. It’s just going to happen.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
The other side of someone who doesn’t have grit is they almost develop this negative mindset of why is this happening to me? It’s almost like they become a victim of the circumstances around them. Compare that to someone who acknowledges that there’s going to be challenges, there’s going to be issues. It’s just about how they approach it. If you lack grit, you almost sometimes wallow in your own self pity going, why me? Why is this happening to me? Why is this keep happening? That’s someone who lacks that grit and that determination, that resilience to be able to take the hit and keep moving forward. They somewhat have that negative mindset and wallow in that to some degree.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
And I think most people that into business, they get worn out, they burn out. It’s not necessarily that they don’t have any grit. We’re not talking about people that way. And I think this lends itself into our first breakdown, which is people that they mistake, what grit they’re using, it’s almost like they haven’t got the grit you need. They’ve got this other sort of form of grit, which we’re going to call dumb grit. And if we break that down, that’s the grit that just grinds you slowly or quickly into the ground. It’s the grit with no brains. It’s the grit that doesn’t. It’s the non quitting grit. It’s the grind idea of that’s my idea of grit. So I think that breaking that down, if we look at it the dumb side of grit, where we’re heading towards here, and there’s probably three of those that we want to highlight today.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
The first one I think of is just muscling your way through it. It’s that common mindset of the longer and harder I work, the more money I make, or the telltale signs of that as someone who’s just been spinning their wheels, doing the same old strategies, taking the same old action, keep showing up day in, day out, not making progress, keep taking the punches, keep getting the hits, and they’re just trying to muscle their way forward, but they’re working on the wrong shit that isn’t working yet. They’re trying to muscle their way through it. It just doesn’t work. That’s just a pure definition of dumb grit in my world.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
It is. And one of the things it looks like are people that walk around no results to show for all their effort, but they walk around telling you how exhausted, we talked about this on a previous episode, like wearing your burnout as a badge of honour type stuff. That’s a sign that you’ve engaged in dumb grit.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah. Other examples is maybe you’re ignoring the warning signs or you’re refusing help or you’re getting feedback. You’re getting the taps on the shoulder going, Hey, what about this? What about that? Maybe you should think about this. Well, maybe you should think about that. You’re getting that feedback and those warning signs, but you’re just not doing anything about it. You’re ignoring that and keep showing up and doing that. That’s just an example of dumb grit where you’re just repeating the same patterns of behaviour over and over and over again expecting a different result.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah, pushing harder is rarely the answer, right? Pushing harder. Again, we call that banging your head against the wall. That’s another type of dumb grip, but pushing harder, repeating the same tactic over and over, even when you know that they’ve stopped working or aren’t working. It’s screaming at you. And I think people make that mistake for grit a lot. They do this push, I’ll push harder. Like you said, you just work harder at for longer. What about the third one we’ve got, which is mistaking stubbornness for a strength. I’ll just hold out. I’ll be more stubborn than anyone else. And you see people say this, I hate it when people do this too, but people are like, I’m just a stubborn bastard. I’ll just do it until it works. I shake my head at that. I don’t know what you feel like.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
Yeah, it’s crazy. I think deep down when you’re holding onto something that doesn’t work, if you’re holding onto an employee that it isn’t right for the business, they’re underperforming or they’re toxic in the workplace, or you’ve got a customer that squeezes you on price and stuffs around with your schedule or keeps pushing jobs out, but you’re holding onto them because you’re so desperate for work or whatever it is, they’re examples of stubbornness and holding onto shit that is not serving you in the long term yet. You’re grinding it out, hoping things are going to get better, but inadvertently it doesn’t. It just prolongs the pain that you’re going through.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
Yeah. Things change. Things move. Markets move, products change. Technology marches on. Everything keeps moving. And if you sit there holding out stubbornness and saying, I’ll just hold out longer than anyone else, you end up probably sitting on a rock by yourself just wallowing like we said before. And again, that’s dumb grit. So I think that is some good examples. Hopefully you’re not feeling any of those of you, but if you are, at least you’ve got some clear definitions. Let’s turn our attention now to what smart grit looks like. And again, let’s sort of break this down. I think there’s three pretty clear ones. Lead us off, Rob.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah. The first one is recalibrating, not retreating. And I think it’s when you get punched in the face, when you experience that bit of pain, I think it’s human behaviour to retreat, and most people don’t want to lean into pain. There’s not many crazy people out there who love it that much, and so the temptation is to retreat. But the thing you can do smart grit is your ability to recalibrate in that moment, which is stop, reflect, recover, and consider a better path forward. Now, that’s the definition of recalibrating. If you can do that, what it gives you that time is your ability just to stop in the moment, cop the punch in the face and go, okay, well that hurt. Let’s now reflect on it to be able to go, well, why did that happen? What’s the root cause of it? What lesson am I trying to get here? Recover a little bit because it could have bloody hurt, whether it’s a cashflow thing, pipeline issue, whatever it is, and then think about the most strategic way forward. And sometimes you’ve got to change tact, a new strategy, a new way of operating. But if you can do that, that’s what helps you powerfully move forward and get back up on your feet and get on with the job after you’ve taken a hit to the face.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah, I think that what you describe is great, and I think that’s the idea that you learn to respond to things rather than just react. React is I got punched in the face, I got to jump up and do it again, and before you know it, you get smacked in the face again because nothing changed. You just did it blindly and you react it. But if you learn to do this right, what you said, stop, recover, reflect, consider your next options, all that sort of stuff. Then you’re responding with some intelligence, you’re responding with a different strategy. You’ve owned that lesson behind the punch, which is our second form of smart grit. It’s learning to own the lessons that come from the punch and take something away from the punch as opposed to just blindly getting up and getting hit again.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Yeah, correct. When you cop a punch in the face, what that actually is, is it’s feedback and in business feedback is an important thing, but if you don’t take on that feedback and see the lesson behind that punch in the face, you are destined to repeat the same pattern of behaviour until you learn the lesson. And so in business, you’ve got to take the lessons every time they come your way, whether it’s a cashflow issue, a pipeline issue, a team issue, or whatever it is going on in your business, if you don’t learn from that lesson, you are destined to repeat the same pattern of behaviour again until you actually take that lesson. And that’s the important thing to remember.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah, for sure. And I think there’s one more step beyond the lesson that you take out of this. There’s one thing beyond the recalibrating, and that’s actually taking another set of actions, right? Taking that next step, having the courage if you like, to get back up and actually do something again, even though it could be completely different, even though it could be something else, but you have to get back up and do something, not just walk around with a lesson.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
You said courage there. Why is courage important, do you think?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Well, I think if we look at the definition or our coaching definition that we use at Pravar for courage, we talk about it being the ability to take action in the presence of pain, fear, and doubt. And that’s really what we’re talking about. You’ve got to have that because the pain isn’t going to go away. The fear doesn’t go away. So much of what business is, it’s not about overcoming any of that. A lot of people think, oh, when does imposter syndrome go away? When does that fear? I’m not enough, go away. It never does, but the courage you develop to offset it, to be able to say, you know what can happen, but I’ve got to act with courage. I’ve got to put my big boy pants on. Whatever you tell yourself, you’ve got to still show up and take action because if you don’t, what’s left?
Speaker 1 (13:59):
It comes back to where we started at the beginning of this episode is that that’s why passion is important. Because passion is what keeps the fuel going. The perseverance is the courage to persevere and endure the pain. And like you said, it’s the courage to take action despite the pain, and it’s accepting that you’re going to have pain, you’re going to get punched in the face, you’re going to get hit multiple times in your journey, and you’re deluded to think that you are immune to that in business. It’s going to happen, it has happened, it’s going to continue to happen, but it’s your ability to have the courage to get up and push through no matter what pain it is. And I think if you’re going to endure that in the long term in business, that’s what’s going to help you create a successful business and play a finite game rather than cop hits and bail because things got too hard.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, absolutely. Now, before we go, Rob, I know we’ve prepared a little week’s challenge. We’re going to call this the checking in on your grit based on the two types that we’ve talked about today. Do you want to walk us through what we’ve got in store?
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Yeah. There’s three steps to this challenge, and step number one is name one punch that you’ve taken recently. Step number two is once you’ve identified that punch is to ask yourself, am I responding with smart grit or dumb grit? And once you’re really clear on that, you ask yourself the second question to be able to go, what would swinging back smarter actually look like? So once you’ve identified it and you’ve asked yourself the questions, then step number three is take one move this week to course correct. Now, that could be a conversation, maybe it’s a new boundary that you’ve got to be able to set, or maybe it’s a new tactical strategy that you’ve got to push ahead with so you’re changing tack rather than just repeating the same strategy or the same pattern of behaviour that you’ve previously been on. So if you work through those three steps methodically, that’s what’s going to be able to help you take the hit, learn from it, and be able to push forward in the moment.
Speaker 2 (16:03):
I love it. It’s a small tweak, but it’s got massive ramifications. And of course, if you’ve been taking hits and are looking for help to bounce back stronger, to come back with smart grit and you’re stuck a little bit, then book in a strategy call@strategysession.com.au, and Rob will start the process with you to start exploring that and start making some changes.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
That’s it for another Mindset Matters. Hopefully enjoyed today’s episode. Looking forward to coming back to you next week with another great episode here on The Trade Den. See you then.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
See you soon.