Why Success Can Still Leave You Feeling Behind | Jim Murphy

Finding Peak with Ryan Hanley

Jim Murphy discusses the emotional toll of high achievement, explaining why success often leaves people feeling unfulfilled. He introduces t

Key takeaways

• Success without purpose leads to emotional exhaustion and guilt.
• Confidence is fragile; belief and presence are more sustainable drivers of excellence.

Main topics

• The emotional cost of high achievement
• Mindset vs. belief in performance

Notable quotes

"Selfless is fearless. And when fear is gone, love remains and love is fearless."

"Nothing really great happens without passion, and passion is the willingness to suffer."

Conclusion

True excellence comes not from chasing results but from aligning with a deeper

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) If you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to constantly pull yourself out of the temporary situation you're in because selfless is fearless. And when fear is gone, love remains and love is fearless. Where I'm Speaker 1 (0:10) at work, I feel guilty for not being home. And when I'm home, I feel guilty for not being work. And every day I'm in this endless cycle and I just feel stuck and I'm not sure how to move forward. Speaker 2 (0:20) People really idolize the people that I work with, but what they don't realize is that I spend most of my time with miserable millionaires. The best possible life. It's one foot in joy and one foot in suffering. Speaker 1 (0:39) Jim, it's great to have you on the show, man. Thanks for taking the time. Speaker 2 (0:41) Yeah, thanks for having me. Speaker 1 (0:42) Yeah, so one of the things that initially connected, you know, being a former athlete yourself and, you know, falling in love with psychology and now this is what you do for people every day, high performers. I've always been shocked. Shocked might not be the wrong word. Intrigued by the fact that. When you talk to individuals like yourself who have been and work with high performers, when you hear them in interviews, mindset, the psychology that they use to get to these places is oftentimes like the very first place they want to go. Speaker 1 (1:21) The rest of us that so many other people, right, who struggle to ascend that next level, it's like the last thing they think about. Why do you one, do you agree with the premise that the vast majority of people who find themselves underperforming, it's in large part because they don't work on their mindset? And two, why do you think there's that gap? Like, why isn't the very first thing we learn? mindset, psychology, like the stuff that you teach every day? Speaker 2 (1:51) Yeah, good question, Hanley. So when you say mindset, what I think of is the reason you're doing something. Like, Speaker 1 (2:01) what Speaker 2 (2:02) am I pursuing right now? Like, what's my mindset for my performance? Or if I'm giving a speech, like, what's my mindset going into the presentation? Is, you know, why am I doing this? And what am I really going for? And to me, your mindset is the foundation of mental toughness. We live in a world that is... Speaker 2 (2:29) As humans, we're led around by our eyes. We see a beautiful sunset or sunrise and we're in awe. We watch a great movie or see a beautiful person. We stop in our tracks. And if we see something scary or traumatic, then we're scared and traumatized. And so humans are easily caught up in their circumstances. And yet, if you want to live an extraordinary life, you have to constantly... pull yourself out of the temporary situation you're in and into the bigger picture or what I think of as the realities of heaven where anything is possible. And so I think what the greatest do is they continually see a longer horizon and a much greater vision than the average person sees. And that's because they're pursuing something much more than a temporary result. Speaker 1 (3:22) And is that innate? Like if I'm not born with that, then I'm screwed? Or is this something we can develop through practice and work? Speaker 2 (3:32) We're born with a self-centered nature. And so it's something that needs to be trained. Every human is born self-centered. When I say self-centered, I mean everything that we do as humans is naturally going to have ourselves in the center of it. What do I want to do today? What am I going to eat? What are my goals? What's going to happen to me and my family and my career? This is the normal. Speaker 2 (3:57) inherent way of living in the world. And it leads to fear and comparison and anxiety. I think of anxiety as a mind of too many thoughts and too many concerns. And so, but if you want to live the best possible life, you want to be the best performer, the best speaker, Speaker 1 (4:13) then Speaker 2 (4:14) you need to get out of the way. We need to get out of that fear, that self-centeredness that leads to fear because selfless is fearless. And when fear is gone, love remains and love is fearless. Speaker 1 (4:25) Is this kind of the concept of detaching from the outcome? Is that like, is detaching from that self-centered nature or the outcome of every action and how you apply like your own self-worth? Is this the exercise? Like, is this what we're trying to do when you say like, you know, moving away from that self-centered nature? Yeah, that's part of it. However, we're not going to detach from the outcome unless we have something greater Speaker 2 (4:49) to attach to. Speaker 2 (4:53) Nothing really great happens without passion, and passion is the willingness to suffer. That's the literal definition. And in fact, one of the five skills of inner excellence is to compete and live or lead with freedom and passion. And so we have to be willing to sacrifice, and we're not going to sacrifice except for something that's very, very Speaker 1 (5:20) important to us. So I've been doing this show for five years, done over almost 500 interviews now. And the concept of detachment, the outcome has come up dozens of times. No one has ever followed it with, it doesn't work unless you attach to something greater. And I'm very interested in that. Speaker 1 (5:42) Because, you know, when I was coming up and we both played baseball, you made it professionally. I did not. I got the whammy button from the Pirates a couple times on some show me tryouts, but that's as far as I made it. That being said, you know, even like hitting coaches, et cetera, it was like, you know, all you can do is control the controllables. You know, what happens after that doesn't matter and all this kind of stuff. Speaker 1 (6:08) You know, in these skill sets, in these activities that we care about, how do I, like, if I'm detaching from an outcome to attach to something greater, how do I make sure the same, like, level of... self-worth and anxiety and fear doesn't just get attached to that next bigger thing. Does that question make sense? Speaker 2 (6:28) Yeah, that's a good question. The thing has to be so great that even if you don't get it, you're still going to be willing to pursue it your whole life. Speaker 1 (6:41) Because, you know, it's funny, and I don't mean to take this down a sports analogy path and provide too much context, but even in my own sports career and we'll just use baseball since we both played um like my career really didn't take off until I was able to stand up at home plate and and and remove the idea of like it's not that I don't care if I get a hit but if I don't get a hit I'm not going back to the dugout crying like I'm obviously trying to get on base I'm trying to execute an outcome but there was no Speaker 1 (7:20) value or like personal self-worth attached to that individual activity. However, my performance over the course of a season mattered to me quite a bit. And is that kind of like, I mean, again, this is a microcosm. We're just trying to break it down into something smaller. I know, you know, your single performance as a junior on a varsity team doesn't necessarily matter that, you know, over the course of your lifetime. But, you know, is that kind of the idea is expand your viewport? And then the individual things that happen in the middle, you can detach from because what you're really trying to do is create this longer, larger outcome over the course of time. You Speaker 2 (8:01) know, Henley, as I listen, I have so many thoughts that come to my mind. And I've been studying this for a long time. And sometimes it's hard to get lost amongst all the thoughts. So I hope you can help me simplify everything. So you're talking about... as a high school baseball player and the desire to get a hit versus the ability to... Try to get a hit, but not be attached to it. This is where we're at, right? And so this is kind of like the difference between a teenager and an adult is the ability to see the bigger vision. Someone who's mature can see a longer vision than temporary pleasure. And it's also similar to the difference between confidence and belief. Speaker 2 (8:54) So when I'm as a performance coach, most people come to me because they're underperforming. It's one of the most common reasons why at least an athlete would come to me. And they often want more confidence and confidence is great, but it's not nearly as powerful as being fully present or having beliefs. And so I think of belief as a subconscious comfort level of what you feel is possible in your lives. And so beliefs are running our lives. Speaker 2 (9:26) And confidence is like the feeling that you can achieve what you want to achieve. I can make this putt, this free throw. I can give this talk. That's confidence. It's a short-term positive feeling about achieving what you want to achieve. Belief, the power in belief is... It doesn't matter if I make this putt or screw this talk up or make this basket. I'm still good. It's all going to work out. Very big difference between the two. How do you cultivate one versus the other? Well, I don't really think about confidence. That's something we're trying to get. We want to develop belief and presence. Those are the two big ones. Confidence is so fickle and there's so many things that go into it and it doesn't always guarantee a good performance, whereas belief and presence is far more correlated to a better performance. And so both of those are very... correlated to how you feel when you're fully present. And when I think of fully present, that always needs to be explained on what I mean. It's like thinking of peace as the absence of war. To me, peace is far more than the absence of conflict. And being fully present, I think of it as far more than just not thinking about the past or future. What I really