Watching Everyone But Yourself

If you've followed my work for a while, you've probably heard me say I'm not really a runner. That's still mostly true. I don't love it, and you won't find me lining up for marathons or half marathons. But I do know cardio matters if I want a long, healthy, active life, so my husband, Manish, and I have started training for the Cap10K, the 10K Austin runs every April. I walked it last year. This year, I wanted to see what it would feel like to actually run.

Back in September, on one of our first training runs, I fell hard. I scraped my knee, banged up both elbows, and thankfully kept my head intact. Manish helped me up, I took a few breaths, and we kept going. By the time we got home, I had five leadership lessons I couldn't wait to share.

Lesson 1: Watching everyone but yourself doesn't keep anyone safer

We were running toward the busiest intersection in our neighborhood, and I was completely locked in on Manish. I watched every car that pulled up and worried that a driver wouldn't see him. Our daughter had taken a spill on her scooter just a few days earlier, and I suspect some part of me was still on high alert.

Here's the thing: I've run and walked that route more times than I can count in the decades we've lived here. I knew exactly where the uneven stretch of sidewalk was. I hit it anyway, because every ounce of my attention was on someone else.

Manish is a capable adult who's been crossing intersections safely for a very long time. My vigilance wasn't keeping him safe. It was just keeping my attention off myself.

In Connected: Discovering Your Inner Guides, I write about Guard Mode, the state we slip into when the part of us I call the Inner Guard decides it's our job to scan for every possible threat. The Inner Guard means well. It's trying to protect us and the people we love. But when it runs the show, it narrows our attention so much that we lose track of the one thing we actually have control over, which is ourselves.

Leaders do this constantly. Attorneys anticipate every client's next fire. Physicians track every patient and every staff member. Parents try to control every variable in their kids' lives. And when we lose ourselves in the process, we end up untethered, and finding our way back usually takes more effort and creates more work for everyone, including the people we were trying to protect. We can't serve others well if we aren't caring for ourselves first.

Lesson 2: Pushing isn't the problem. Pushing from empty is.

High performers don't struggle to push through. Powering forward when our backs are against the wall is how most of us got where we are. What's much harder to build is the discernment to know whether pushing forward is actually the right response to the moment we're in, especially when the cost of pushing is a personal one.

The difference comes down to where the decision is coming from. When we push because it's expected of us, or because we're afraid of looking weak, lazy, or incompetent, that's often the Ego talking, the part of us focused on making it look good and proving that we can. Layer in the fear of dropping the ball and catastrophizing about everything that might follow, and we end up pushing from a place of emptiness, often at real personal cost. It can look like:

• Canceling a doctor's appointment to accommodate a last-minute work request instead of articulating your needs and availability
• Trading sleep for one more round of polish on something that was already good enough
• Sitting at your kid's game with your phone out, answering emails that could have waited until morning

My fall handed me a much smaller version of that same choice. I went down hard, and once Manish helped me up, I had to decide: walk home, or keep running. Habit had an answer ready: brush it off and keep moving. Instead, I let myself feel the fall. I caught my breath, felt the sting, and checked myself over. I was scraped up, but nothing serious, and I was safe.

That pause mattered more than it might seem. Emotions are a lot like beach balls. If you push them underwater and pretend they don't exist, eventually they pop back up and hit you in the face. In my experience, letting ourselves feel the fear, the anxiety, and the pain is usually the fastest way forward.

Once I'd let myself feel it, the decision got clear, and it came down to love. I'm training for the 80-year-old version of myself, and I wanted to honor her. Walking home would have been OK, but I knew I'd be phoning it in. That's what choosing from wholeness looks like: the decision comes from love for yourself, not from habit or fear.

So I kept going, and I dedicated the run. I dedicated it to my future self at 80, who I hope is grateful I made time to move in my 40s. I dedicated it to my past self, the one who was too overworked to even consider a run. And I dedicated it to my body, out of gratitude for everything it can do right now.

Lesson 3: Our best performance shows up when we stop gripping the outcome

I've told you I'm not a runner. But by the end of that run, I was doing high-intensity sprint bursts, and I've never felt so free in my body on a run. It was honestly my best running performance ever — and it came right after a fall.

I think that's largely because I took all the pressure off. I didn't have a goal for how the run should look or feel. The dedication was the whole point, and once I'd made it, there was nothing left to prove.

This has been true for me in other areas, too. When I landed my book deal, it didn't happen because I woke up one day and declared I'd publish a book that year, on a specific topic, in a specific way. Publishing a book wasn't a goal of mine at all. It turned out to be a dream I didn't know I had. Like every author I know, I had my share of frustration and uncertainty in the publishing process. But the deal itself arrived as a complete surprise, and I believe that's because I was showing up authentically, with joy as the goal rather than any particular outcome. In my experience, that's when amazing things happen.

Whether you're leading a merger, having a hard conversation with your spouse, or trying to get your kid to eat their broccoli, your best outcomes tend to come from that grounded, whole place.

Lesson 4: We choose our hard

On the way home, it was hot and muggy — which is to say, it was September in Austin. Manish was running ahead of me on the sunny side of the road. I crossed over to the shaded sidewalk, because the run was challenging enough and I didn't need to make it harder.

Afterward, he mentioned he'd noticed me switch sides. I told him I was hot. He told me he'd stayed put because the sidewalk on his side is more even, and he felt steadier there.

It would have been easy for me to call out and ask him to join me on the "right" side. I'm glad I didn't, because he had his reasons. He chose the heat in exchange for peace of mind about his footing. I chose the shade, while paying a lot more attention to where I was putting my feet.

As leaders, we watch people approach things differently and immediately think our way is better. Sometimes it is. When we rush to redirect, though, we lose valuable information about how the other person makes decisions, what they're experiencing, and what they need. When we slow down enough to get curious about what our team members, patients, clients, or kids are doing, we invite compassion and empathy into the relationship, and it gets stronger as a result.

Lesson 5: You're the one doing the noticing

This last lesson is the broadest, and it's one scholars and seekers have explored for centuries. There's a well-known line, popularized by Wayne Dyer, that we're spiritual beings having a human experience. Vedantic philosophy, which sits at the root of how I understand joy, offers a beautifully simple way to test this. It's at the heart of a short text called the Drg Drishya Viveka, or "discerning the seer from the seen": anything you can observe, you aren't. You can observe your body, your thoughts, your feelings, and the meaning your mind makes of things. So you can't be any of them. You're the awareness that notices them.

On that run, this stopped being theoretical. My body was scraped and sore, and I could feel every bit of it. But the awareness noticing that pain wasn't wounded. It was whole, just as it always is. And it was from that wholeness, not from fear, that I chose to care for my body and keep going.

This is also why I talk about joy the way I do. Joy isn't something I have to go out and get. It's part of what I already am, and the work is noticing what's been sitting on top of it. When we return to it, it feels like coming home, because it's our own nature. Better results often follow, but they aren't the point.

I'm not a gamer, but the analogy that helps me most here is a video game. It's as if we've been dropped into this world and get to decide how we play, what we make of our experiences, and which beliefs we build them on. That choosing happens in the mind, not in the awareness watching it all, and that's exactly why mindset work matters so much. These experiences are meaningful, but they're also temporary, and we get to decide what they mean.

If this one isn't landing for you yet, that's OK. I understand it in theory much better than I live it, and I've only started applying it in practice in recent years. It's worth keeping close anyway.

The thread running through all five

Every one of these lessons comes back to the same place. When we act from fear, whether that's fear for someone else's safety, fear of looking weak, or fear of not hitting the goal, we lose our footing. When we act from wholeness, we tend to make clearer decisions, perform better, understand each other more fully, and remember who we really are. And it starts with something simple: giving yourself the same attention you give everyone else.

Listen to the full episode: Hear all five lessons in my own words on the Joy First Method™ podcast.

Pushing from empty has a cost. I call it the Stress Tax™, and you can stop paying it. Grab my free Stress Tax Exemption™ Guide for five ways high performers can move from stress to serenity.

Ready to go deeper? If you want to stop pushing through and start choosing how you move forward, book a clarity call. We'll look at where you're pushing from empty, where you're choosing from wholeness, and what you want to choose next.