Chapter 5 - Think Like an Underdog 

I Am…Traffic?

You’re in your car driving to work one day. Suddenly, you see brake lights start to fl icker in front of you. You take notice but maintain your speed. A few moments later, the fl ickering lights turn into a sea of steady red, and you’re quickly forced to slow down so as not to rear-end the person in front of you. Within a few seconds, the cars in front of you come to a complete standstill. You’ve slowed to a crawl, and it’s only a matter of feet before you’re forced to come to a complete stop. Check your mirrors and settle in because…

You are stuck in traffic!

In 2010, the Dutch firm TomTom placed a thought-provoking billboard on a California Highway for this very audience that read “You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic,”29 as seen in figure 5.1.

 TomTom poster, 2010 (Carlton Reid)

At first glance it might be easy to miss the subtlety of their message.

The idea was to make the connection between driving and its effects. Personal effects for you (being stuck in traffic) and, in this case, the negative environmental impact (from driving). The underlying message is this: drive less, avoid traffic, and make less of an environmental impact. It’s a simple win-win scenario from their perspective. Changing the way you view the power of a single decision can have positive and unseen benefits both for you and for others around you.

TomTom, while a little paternalistic in their approach, is not wrong. It’s hard to justify complaining about something if you are actively contributing to the problem in the first place. Yet we fall into this sort of faulty thinking all the time in our personal lives. We blame others for things that we ultimately have some amount of influence or control over. 

The truth is that if we don’t like a situation in which we find ourselves, we can almost always do something to improve it.

We’re not victims of our circumstances but rather agents of our own change. (unless you are currently being victimized)

Under normal conditions, the change we look for begins with self-awareness, perspective, and being present in the moment. Being a credible contender requires an ability to develop creative or novel solutions to diffi  cult problems. This provides distinction and creates opportunities. When these eff orts don’t pan out, it is likely time to phone a friend, confi dant, or therapist. Remember, when it comes to our mentality, usually the only person we’re competing with is ourselves.

The Way Things Should

Be In life there are two broad ways to view things. First, there is the way things are. Second, there is the way we think things should be. The former is based on objective facts. The latter is based on subjective values. Understanding which is which is a good place to start.

The most powerful distinction can be found in the space where facts and values exist in our minds. Underdogs find themselves in a place of having been disadvantaged in some material way—fact. Conversely, suggesting that disadvantage could have been experienced diff erently or avoided is a value. In addition, the values that arise from the negative experiences we’ve suffered should be monitored and evaluated. Not all of them are accurate or useful. The ability to parse out what you’ve been through and compare it to how you feel about the experience is valuable to the long-term healing process. Trauma never heals itself.

As we outlined in chapter 4, developing an ability to objectively consider the current and past events of our lives helps us evaluate experiences in the right context. Importantly, it can help us avoid unnecessary emotional strain as we learn to appropriately embrace our role in our own life experiences. That means understanding and accepting that we were victimized, not that our disadvantage could or should have been avoided.

Let’s consider an important distinction between facts and values:

Facts are easy to understand. These are the real things that happened. They are generally knowable, agreed upon, and unchangeable. They are intellectually discernable and objectively true. Thus, they can be independently observed and measured. Here is an example: Abraham Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States—fact.

Our values are a little squishier. They are symbolized by the things that are important to us. They represent how we view the world and live our lives and how we think things could go in the future or should have gone in the past. There are often emotional reasons or experiences responsible for our attributing value to certain behaviors or actions. Our values can change over time but are uniquely our own. It can be easy to confuse values with facts. We do this all the time, especially when we develop values that become particularly important to us. 

Here is an example: Abraham Lincoln was a decent man and would have accomplished even more as president if given the opportunity. People should never take justice into their own hands—value.

In figure 5.2 let’s consider a few facts versus values scenarios.

These examples should give you some idea of how our values come to be. There is nothing inherently concerning about any of the example values. If these are the values you develop from those experiences, that’s probably fine. But the values you develop could cut another way too.

Over time, as you mature and begin to think about the facts of your life with a more seasoned eye (critically), be sure not to confuse the facts of your life with the values you developed that have stemmed from your life events. That’s a dangerous thing to confuse.

Those same unique perspectives can work against you. Sometimes we develop limiting or unnecessary values that serve to hold us back. This is especially true for values that arise from our more negative experiences.

These impactful and profound perspectives can sometimes cloud our perceptions of the world. Negative value development happens slowly and incrementally, creeping in on us over time. As a result, these poorly established values tend to have disproportional and unwanted effects on the quality of our lives. Let’s consider alternative values that you could have developed using the same example experiences outlined in figure 5.3.

These examples have a different look and feel, right? Experience suggests that these sorts of negative values can be developed within us if we don’t actively work to avoid or reframe them to work for us.

In short, what are the values you have today that may be holding you back?

Remember that the tough things you’ve been through can sometimes skew your view of reality. This is the starting point of your self-evaluation and the way to begin viewing the world through the eyes of an underdog.

The Difficulties of Self-Evaluation

About fifteen years ago I got caught up in the financial perils of the “Great Recession.” At the time I owned a small commercial mortgage brokerage, and when the market turned, things went from bad to worse in a hurry. I lost all my clients in the course of a single week, and I was devastated.

With no clients or income, I made a bold decision. I took everything I owned and sold it on Craigslist. I packed a backpack and decided to use the money from the sale of my possessions to travel and volunteer for a while. I needed to regroup. That led me to find a school and orphanage in the jungles of Guatemala. They needed an extra set of hands, and I needed a reset—win-win.

On the bus trip down through Mexico, I remember an intense feeling of despair. I felt like I had nothing to go back to, and really, I didn’t at that point. I was now at the mercy of the world, regardless of what happened next. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself, to be honest.

As I settled in at the orphanage, I started to get to know the volunteers and the kids. My Spanish was better than many of the other twenty-five or so volunteers, apart from a few from Spain. Having a handle on the language helped me interact and really get to know the kids. The more time I spent with them, the more I learned about their stories and backgrounds. I also got a glimpse of their attitudes about life and their unique stories.

As I got to know them better over the first few weeks, there was a common theme that struck me about our daily interactions— they were happy. I don’t mean happy-considering-their-circumstances happy, but genuinely happy. They woke up happy. They went to bed happy. They were carefree, playful, and even joyful. Their diet consisted of nothing more than rice and beans with corn tortillas, but the kids were even OK with their food.

Somehow, despite the odds, these kids were happy and content. They were essentially homeless, parentless, and living in the middle of the jungle. Their home consisted of rundown group barracks with broken-down, dirty, and unserviceable showers. They didn’t care and bathed in the river instead. New volunteers kept coming in and out of their lives every few weeks, but that didn’t faze them either.

These kids were unflappable. Initially it seemed naïve or ignorant to me. These kids didn’t fully understand their circumstances, right? How could they? They hadn’t experienced the world yet. They all seemed to decide to make the best of the situation in which they found themselves. They were getting a jump-start on an attitude that would serve them well later in life.

One day, the teenage group of boys and I sat on the dock of the river, fishing and joking around. As I stared at my fishing line wrapped around a small plastic orange drink jug, a realization hit me like a ton of bricks.

“George, you’ve been acting like a real spoiled asshole lately. In the presence of these kids and their real-time disadvantage, how can you possibly feel sorry for yourself?”

I had lost what felt like everything. The experience of sitting with these kids was redefining what it meant to truly have nothing. It was time for my self-induced pity party to end. The reality was that I had become a victim to my circumstances, which wasn’t like me. I had always felt like a survivor and an underdog—capable, positive, passionate, driven, determined, and even successful.

Now here I was, sitting among some of the least fortunate kids in the world, feeling sorry for myself.

That was an eye-opening, slap-in-the-face sort of realization. Sometimes that’s precisely what we need to get our asses in gear. That mini epiphany was the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was time I took a cue from the kids and got my proverbial “shit” together.

Clearly, the first step was to get my mind right. I had to shift how I was viewing things in a major way. That set me on a journey of personal discovery.

Since you’ve picked up this book and read this far, it suggests to me that you already have some level of personal agency. You care about your personal development. You want and are likely looking for more control over your life. You’re on your way to a better you, as you work to wrestle life to the ground by the horns.

In our thinking about the amount of control we have over the circumstances of our lives, we need to consider our perspectives, our current frames of mind, and some of the “ruts” that we’ve dug over the years within our mental pathways. These rutted ways of thinking are no longer working for you. It’s time to knock them f lat and level the road for a smoother ride going forward.

The three approaches you need to accomplish this involve a new empowerment framework across three critical self-refl ection areas:

• Locus of control—the big picture, perspective, personal agency

• Mindset—real-time “thinking tool” to practice and implement

• Binary thinking—smoothing out old thinking ruts, paving a smooth surface

Before we review each area in detail, I want to share a profound thought a mentor shared with me many years ago. I’m not sure where he got it, but I’ll paraphrase it here:

“It’s not appropriate to question the motives of others, but you sure can question their outcomes.”

This insight has had a way of sticking with me over the years.

Locus of Control

In the therapy community, a lot has been said and written about the concept of locus of control. Aside from being cryptic, locus of control is a philosophical way of distinguishing how we perceive the origin of the events that happen in our life. The value lies in understanding how the answer to two simple questions can shift our perspective and infl uence the trajectory of our life.

Do you believe that events and behaviors of your life are dictated by fate, luck, or external circumstances?

or

Do you believe that events and behaviors of your life are guided by your own actions, decisions, and effort?

The answers to these questions will determine to what degree you feel in control of the actions and the outcomes of your life. Another way to think of this is as personal agency. In either case, the two fundamental ways of perceiving our lives involve the use of either an internal or an external view of personal responsibility.

This is not to suggest that you will ever be in control of all events and circumstances. Instead, it’s about believing that you have at least some influence over your response and thereby the outcome, despite the circumstance in which you find yourself.

The idea is that each of us should actively participate to positively influence the outcomes of our lives. In the case of the disadvantaged, this also includes actively working to overcome past trauma or disadvantage.

More than anyone else, if you want to show up in the world as a credible contender, you’re going to need to have a strong sense of personal agency. It would be easy for one to blame the disadvantage of the past for their becoming a martyr. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that’s not an option for those intent on improving their lives.

A critic might point out that none of us have complete control over anything. Sure, there is a degree of truth to that argument. However, it doesn’t free us from the responsibility of taking ownership of what can be controlled. Life changes every day; our job is to navigate it to the best of our ability. In short, we need to be accountable in the moment for what we choose.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an acute underdog with recent trauma or a complex underdog with historical disadvantage. We all need to retain control of our decisions, own them, and decide right now to reclaim our agency and thereby control of our lives.

Now that you’ve got your mojo back, let’s look at the next component: mindset.

Mindset

A decade or so ago, I was provided with my first non-military professional performance review on a Friday. My boss and I would get together on Monday to go through the review in detail. This company used a range to rate success in each area from one to five, with one being the lowest and five the highest. I was a little anxious, not knowing what to expect from my first review. Most areas of my work were rated as fives with a few fours here or there—no biggie. As I read through the document, I noticed a single area where my performance was rated as two. Wait, seriously, a two?

I will admit (embarrassingly) that at this stage of my personal and professional development, my first response was to get upset and defensive. I took it as a personal attack on my character.

A flood of questions ran through my mind: What do you mean a two? How dare you. I work my ass off, and you reward me with this crappy performance review? How can you think that I’m not performing in this area, considering all that I’ve accomplished during these first few months?

I started questioning whether I needed to start looking for a new job, out of fear that they might fire me. My Monday morning meeting was a different story. As we went through my review in detail, my boss outlined that, overall, he thought I was doing a fantastic job. Truth be told, he wanted to put me on a new career track, which included unique professional development and the opportunity to work directly with the executive leader in charge of their organizational development. The executives at this small private firm agreed that they wanted to improve my leadership skills and prepare me for a future role with their firm. I was stunned and confused, but they explained their rationale to me. Essentially, it came down to two ideas:

1. Yes, there was an area that needed some work (patience with colleagues, FYI), but it was manageable and remediable in their view; and

2. They believed in the concept of vulnerability. To them, that meant that being imperfect was acceptable or even desirable. Recognizing areas for improvement was useful.

However, this took both the firm’s willingness to allow professional growth and my willingness to work on it, openly and collaboratively. This is a radical concept for any firm to embrace. This was also a novel concept, which I was not used to in my personal or professional life. This uncommon idea of vulnerability has changed my life and my mindset in innumerable ways.

Carol Dweck, a psychologist, professor, and well-known author, performed seminal research and wrote the definitive book on the subject of mindset. Her research and resulting book were published in 2006. Her book is literally titled Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I’ll attempt to summarize a few aspects of her work here. As much as I wish I figured this out on my own, I didn’t.

The principles laid out in Mindset are relatively simple to understand but much more difficult to consistently implement. Her findings involve recognizing that we have two primary ways of thinking about our qualities. We can have either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset.

Here’s a sample and paraphrasing of what Dweck has to say about mindset:

Fixed mindset: “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone.”30 That is to say, you believe you have no ability to improve your personal qualities like your personality, knowledge, or moral character. These are finite, unchangeable, and unable to be improved upon. You believe that you have achieved all you can or will achieve and that things will always be the same for you. The tone might be characterized as cynical, defeatist, and pessimistic.

Growth mindset: “Your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts, your strategies, and help from others.”31 With some work, you can improve your skills, talents, and natural qualities. Your abilities are infinite and decided by you, not by fate. You believe that you can improve, develop, and grow. Things can and will be better for you in the future. The tone is characterized by being vulnerable, positive, and optimistic.

Underdogs frequently have limited help, support, encouragement, mentorship, and the like, so it’s easy to understand how they might fall into the fixed mindset trap.

Dweck goes on to talk about how using this mindset is akin to walking around with the proverbial “chip on your shoulder.” It’s limiting and dangerous to your health and your success, and frankly, it’s exhausting when you have to prove your self-worth or capabilities repeatedly. That’s no way to live. Believe me, I tried living like that for a long time.

The ideas of openness and vulnerability, along with our personal values and attitudes about what is possible for us are all tied up in the idea of mindset. Consider the earlier story to see a mindset being shifted in real time. I left on Friday with a fi xed mindset. I was closed off , defensive, and unconsciously convinced that I was unable to change. One person introduced me to a single idea that I wasn’t done growing yet. It was possible for me to change and improve. There were development opportunities I didn’t even know existed. Moreover, I was introduced to the idea that others would help and even support me. These simple recognitions changed everything for me.

Here’s a fundamental question to consider: If you could dramatically improve every area of your life in a relatively short period of time by applying a shift in perspective and a little energy, intention, and eff ort, would you do it?

I hope the answer is a resounding “Hell yes!” This is both possible and allowable. In fact, moving away from a more rigid or f i xed mindset and adopting a growth mindset is a core requirement of getting what you want in life. Notice I didn’t say getting what you deserve or what you’re fated to get.

You can get everything you want in life if you’re willing to implement a simple yet profound “ABC” practice.

1. Accept that you are worthy and capable of improvement

2. Believe that others will allow, support, and accept your personal growth and development.

3. Complete, implement, and iterate on said personal growth and development.

Getting hung up on one or more areas is common. Often, the toughest part is believing that others will let you improve. When we have little or no experience with others believing in us, allowing us to grow, or receiving support, it can be hard to let our guard down and trust others.

Even if you get past the mental hangups, executing will take some practice. It won’t happen overnight, but in time, you will get better. Get used to making conscious decisions and recognize which mindset you’re employing. Your goal is evolution, not stagnation, progress, not perfection. This naturally builds on itself over time.

You may be wondering: Why would someone let you grow and improve yourself right in front of them?

In short, because not everyone has the experiences you do. Most people didn’t come from where you did. They don’t have the same struggles you do. They aren’t scarred by the past events of their lives. Their lack of disadvantageous experiences provides the space and capacity for personal development within themselves and affords others the same liberty.

There are many people who will let you grow and flourish if you let them. There are people who will support and guide you. As we talk about developing relationships later in the book, these are the people you want to surround yourself with—positive people who want the best for you and are invested in seeing you succeed. Experience has shown me that the old proverb is spot on: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Start now by preparing your mind to do some new and different things as you begin to put yourself out there in new and scary ways. The risk is worth the investment. 

Binary Thinking

“Perfect is the enemy of good.” —Voltaire

All-or-nothing thinking is a binary way of experiencing the world, and it’s not a good one.

Actually, it’s a very bad one. Many of us approach events and opportunities in our lives from a place of black or white, right or wrong, up or down, left or right, good or bad, rich or poor, happy or sad.

Doing so creates a situation in which we constantly must choose from only one of two competing alternatives. The trouble is that for nearly all choices in life, the binary presents a false narrative. In other words, it’s bullshit!

Choices in life are rarely limited to this sort of false dichotomy. There are times when it can be helpful to use a binary framework to make broad points. Like most things, context matters. If, however, you’re making day-to-day decisions as though they are either/or, you’re setting yourself up for failure in the long run.

We live in a world characterized by nuance and choice. We encounter so many choices, in fact, that there have been books written about the number of choices we have and the paradox it presents for us as humans. We’re not built for this many choices. What we’re discovering is that there’s a sweet spot between a false binary selection and a suboptimal place of excess options. The story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” comes to mind.

Another tendency many people have is to make their disadvantages seem worse than they were. If it sounds counterintuitive, it is. Why would someone who has been disadvantaged exaggerate or convey their experiences as worse than they really were? This, too, originates from binary or all-or-none thinking. As the false logic goes, if it wasn’t worse than someone else’s situation, then it somehow doesn’t count. That’s a false and dangerous premise to ascribe to.

This slippery slope reveals itself through the story you tell yourself and others over time. Upon each retelling, the events shift ever so slightly, getting subtly more tragic. For underdogs relating stories about their past trauma, it means you may be recounting the trauma as being worse than it was. It’s the reason my brother’s kids don’t believe his stories about our childhood—they think he is speaking hyperbolically when he talks about trudging to school through the snow, going uphill both ways. Honestly, it is only a slight exaggeration, but just enough to destroy his credibility with his teenagers. This is low-stakes fun at home but can have powerful, high-stakes consequences in building relationships in the real world.

The takeaway is to be careful not to make things seem worse than they really are or were. In overly dramatizing the events of their lives, underdogs run the risk of retraumatizing themselves. That’s the opposite of healing. That same logic applies whether we refer to the internal story we tell ourselves or the external version we share with others. People can only appreciate your story when it is both believable and relatable.

The final binary thought process to avoid is the idea that if something can’t be done perfectly, then it’s not worth doing, having, or participating in.

I tried that strategy for a long time too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. Anything created, designed, built, developed, or established is better because of iteration and improvement over time. In addition to improvement, things are rarely as good when conceived by a single person as they would be with multiple contributors (up until a point of too many—a.k.a. diminishing returns, of course).

When you must do something or figure something out, ask for help and iterate. Improvement comes through the modification process. Things are better when you edit, change, and revise them. Our opinions, views, and beliefs should change over time. We get new ideas, and we learn new things. Update your thinking accordingly.

Underdogs benefit from seeking out and including nuance into their lives. We develop, slowly and incrementally, by introducing small refinements over time. When done consistently, these add up to powerful personal performance improvements.

The alternative would prove Voltaire’s point from the opening quote. It’s hard to get anything done if what you’re doing is only complete when it’s perfect, especially since perfection is a myth. Perfectionism stems from a fear of being vulnerable or worrying about what someone will think about your work or, more likely, you personally. It’s a defense mechanism. The quicker you can let that go and share your willingness to iterate with others, the sooner you can reap the associated benefits of collaboration and improvement. Experience suggests that people are often pleasantly surprised by and appreciate the willingness to let them into your world.

Vulnerability, as it turns out, is not the enemy, but the solution.

Why Most Underdogs Never Show Up

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.” —DH Lawrence

When I was much younger and more emotionally raw, there was a simple little phrase I used to use all the time. I said it without any conscious thought, and that was a big part of the problem.

Anytime something would go “wrong,” I would whip out my phrase. Whether I dropped a spoon by accident or got a worse grade than expected on a test, or even after I was in a bad car accident, the expression was the same. There was no distinction between the scale, signifi cance, or impact of the event. They all fell into one big bucket of negativity and got the same response from me:

“And why wouldn’t it?” which was really shorthand for the full phrase: “And why wouldn’t it happen to me?”

That little phrase packed a powerful punch but in the worst possible way. I am hard-pressed to think of a better example of blatant self-victimization than that insidious little phrase.

Anyway, at the time I didn’t recognize that I was using this phrase to unconsciously accomplish a couple of diff erent objectives. First, it was a simple coping mechanism that helped me deal with my perceived setbacks (a.k.a. a way to feel self-pity). Second, it really captured the momentary attention (sympathy) of others. I really needed the attention at that point in my life. 

I didn’t realize the impact this phrase was having on my psyche at the time. Nor was I wittingly trying to manipulate anyone. It was the only tool I had available to express myself during that early life stage. Like Maslow said, “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”32

My phrase had to be abruptly brought to my attention for me to even recognize I was saying it. I was taken in by a family as a teenager. Mary, my “mother-by-choice,” sat me down one day and lovingly, but frankly, explained to me how my words exerted influence in my life. That included how they made me feel personally, but also how they came across to others. She wanted the best for me and knew I was capable of more.

Of course, she was right.

Eventually, and with her help, I was able to remove that phrase from my vernacular. It required intentionality, encouragement, practice, and, most importantly, patience with myself. Once the phrase and its impact were explained to me, I became aware of them. Then I was able to do something about removing it from my mind and my vocabulary. This simple shift twenty-five years ago had a lasting effect on my mentality. Indeed, that path has led me here, to write this book to help others try to do the same.

Underdogs have a seemingly endless number of ways to undermine their own success. One of those ways is through the words and phrases that we allow into our vocabulary. Over time, this incremental and insidious vocabulary starts to have an impact on our thoughts, stories, and actions. That has an impact on our behaviors and, over time, even our personality. All of these have a cooling effect on the people around us and compound over time. Left unchecked, this repetitive practice can spiral into a self-fulf illing prophecy of negativity and self-victimization.

I like to think of this victimization practice as the victim knot. Our struggle and trauma have a unique ability to get us tied up in figurative psychological knots. Every time we introduce a new negative word or phrase into our lives, it’s akin to adding a new loop to the knot.

A subtle victim mentality begins to grow and develop with each new loop. With time, it gets harder and harder to undo. Our experiences compound and so does the complexity of our knot. Left unchecked, the knot can become outsized compared to the original disadvantage suffered. This disproportionality has the effect of making events seem more tragic than they were. Being more difficult makes them inherently harder to overcome. That is the opposite of what underdogs need.

Instead, we should be doing everything possible to untangle ourselves. If you’ve ever tried to untangle a knot in a string or a chain, you know that eventually it’s possible. You can also appreciate how difficult and tedious it can be. I recommend avoiding making the task more difficult than necessary by inserting words and language that don’t serve you well. The best way to quell this is by removing and avoiding this disempowering language as you go. It’s best to catch it early, start untying what you have, and stop adding anything new to it.

The self-defeating phrases we use show up in our behaviors and performance. Here are a few examples of the common phrases that tie up victims in knots, starting with my own little (former) knot:

• “And why wouldn’t it happen to me?”

• “Must be nice!”

• “That might work for them, but it’s easy when you have all the  you need.” (Fill in the blank: money, time, looks, connections, etc.)

• “Why does  get all the opportunities?”

• “I can’t catch a break!”

• “Who cares about their fancy vacation? I’m fine staying home with my  and eating .” (Fill in the blanks. I like “cat” and “bon-bons,” but use whatever works for you.)

The list goes on and on. If you’re honest with yourself, I bet you can think of a phrase or two that may be disempowering you right now.

Go ahead, I’ll wait. Can you think of one or two poor phrases that you lean on today?

Now ask yourself, “What kind of impact is that phrase and associated attitude having on my life today?”

I’m confident you could do without the added pressure of injecting additional negativity into your life through your own words.

Introducing or continuing to use negative words and phrases is not setting you up for success in the long run. To be an authentic underdog you must walk, talk, and act like one. That includes updating your language. The good news is that you’re 100 percent in control of the language you choose to use. With a little practice, you can easily transition away from the type of language that is no longer serving you.

The decision is yours, but if you allow a set of poor words and phrases to permeate your language and life, what chance do you have of convincing anyone you’re a credible contender?

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