Hi girl, welcome to Soul CEO; a podcast for women who know they’re destined for more. I’m Lindsey Mango and I’m going to show you that you can have it all and teach you how to get it by becoming the CEO of your soul, life, and business. Let’s get started.
Hey guys. I am so freaking excited to be here for another episode of Soul CEO. I think we are coming up on a year of this podcast, which completely blows my mind. Like, sometimes when I think about how fast a year can go, it freaks me out a little. And sometimes it feels like when I look back on the year, I cannot believe how much just life and living and fully living my dream life that I fit into an entire year.
It has been so cool to just watch this community of podcast listeners evolve and just grow and the feedback, I absolutely love it. So I just have to tell you guys, if you hear something that inspires you, that you know your audience or your friends or whoever it is needs to hear, I love it when you guys share my podcast episodes on your Instagram story and tag me.
I do my very best to get back to everybody and share their Instagram story post on my Instagram. So I just love all the support and I don’t think this is the year episode but I’ll have to go back and check later. Doesn’t matter.
Anyway, I’m so excited to talk about today’s topic, which is called extreme ownership. And I’ve talked about this before and I did an Instagram story on this a while back and I got some really amazing feedback, and I wanted to share it with you guys because of how powerful it is.
And when I say extreme ownership, what this looks like is taking your power back. Taking your power back to create the life that you want, to create the experience that you want, to create the way you want to feel in your daily life because something I have found with the most successful people that I work with and in my own life is the people who take extreme ownership are the people that really get what they want in life.
So what does this actually mean? Extreme ownership is taking responsibility for how your thinking and the way that you feel and the way that you show up is contributing to the results that you are getting in your life. It is looking at every circumstance as an opportunity to take ownership and take power over yourself and how you show up to the circumstance to create the way that you experience it.
So when I say this, I fully am aware that we don’t always have control over the circumstances that happen in our lives 100%. But what we are always in control of is taking ownership over how we show up to it.
And so I wanted to tell you guys a couple stories first to show you what this looks like and give you some step-by-step processes to learn how to do this so you can apply it to your own life. Because what I will tell you guys is this, is when you make your boss, your significant other, your life circumstance, your financial circumstance, anything responsible for why you don’t have what you want or why you don’t feel the way that you want, you have no power to change it.
And so I want to give you that power back because that is going to be what allows you to create change. And for me, at every level in my life and business, my life has drastically changed and gone to the next level when I took my life by the horns and decided for myself that I was going to dictate what happened and that I had extreme ownership over myself and the way that I was showing up.
So, couple stories. So I started this thing called takeover Tuesday and it’s something that I love doing with women for both of us to make bigger impacts, to bring in new people to our networks, to connect with more people. And I realized that I have had people, lots of people ask if they could do it with me.
And so I originally set a standard from the beginning that it had to be a mutually beneficial partnership in business, meaning that by me doing it and swapping with them, I gain followers, I gain impact, it adds some sort of value to my business, and that it does the same for them, that they gain something by taking the time and energy and adding value to my audience.
And so by doing so, I’ve actually set some limitations. It either is by personal invite only or there’s an application questionnaire that we have to make sure that it’s a mutually beneficial business partnership. And I was thinking about how saying no to people who have asked or saying that they don’t meet the qualifications, how that could really suck.
And I had my own mind drama about it. I was like, oh my gosh, these people are going to feel really bad. And so as I thought more about it, I asked myself, well, how would I deal with this situation? If I reached out to somebody and asked to partner with them and they said no or they said now is not the time, what thought would I have?
And I will tell you guys, this thought is the thing that had helped me create the life that I have. The thought that I have is, “I have to become so big and so impressive, my business has to get so big that I add so much value that they can’t not want to partner with me.” That was the thought that I had.
And I realized that that is extreme ownership. That’s not making the person that I asked if we could partner responsible for this result. It’s making me responsible and it’s saying who do I have to become in order to be the person that they want to partner with. And I realize that for the people who ask me about my story takeover, or who ask to partner with me, that when they take that approach, that is going to elevate them. That is going to push them to push their limits, to grow their business, to become the person that I am open to partnering with when it comes to story takeover or whatever it is.
And I realized that the other perspective could be, well, that asshole – pardon my language. Hopefully your kids aren’t in the car. But that asshole, right? Who is she to tell me no and isn’t she about supporting women and all the things? But I realized that person doesn’t grow through the experience and they’re going to stay exactly where they are because they’re making me responsible instead of taking ownership and making themselves responsible.
And sometimes it’s a tough pill to swallow. I’ll tell you guys a quick other story, which I think foundationally I have learned this way of doing things from a very young age and like I said, I’ve had to learn new levels of ownership in my life over time that have created such powerful change.
But when I was 16 years old, I tried out for a volleyball team, and for those of you who don’t know, I was a college athlete, volleyball was my life. I played for the most competitive club in the country, one of them. I would say 90% of the girls who played at this club got college scholarships. I got a scholarship to play in college. I mean, volleyball was my life. I’d spend five hours almost every day after school playing volleyball.
I learned a lot of things through this experience, and so I had really big dreams and visions when it came to playing volleyball in college. And so when I was 16, I went to tryouts and I worked so hard and I did everything that I could, and I used to practice extra after practice in high school to make myself better, and I will never forget walking out – and I’ve told this story on social media.
But I’ll never forget walking out from tryouts and I had made basically the B team, so the second team. And for me, my goal was to make the first team, period. That was what I wanted. And so I didn’t hit that goal and I’ll never forget getting in the car with my dad and I was bawling my eyes out, just disappointed, feeling all the feelings of failure. All the things we have to deal with in life and business now, just on a different level for me as a 16-year-old.
And I looked at my dad and he said – he assumed how it went and he said, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” And I think in that moment, my life changed. My parents have done such an amazing job at really giving me power and giving me ownership and holding me accountable and it would have been really easy for my dad to say like, “Well, the coaches are wrong,” or, “I can’t believe they did that,” or, “She’s not better than you,” even though she probably was, the girl that beat me out at the time.
But instead, he did the best thing he ever could have done, which is give me power to do something about it. And we had this conversation about how can I make myself so good that they literally take me on the first team, either that year or the following year. How can I make myself so undeniably pertinent to a team that they would look ridiculous and it would be silly to not have me on the court? That they know by not having me on the court, they would lose games because I wasn’t there.
And that empowered me in a way like, it makes me emotional actually to talk about that I’m forever grateful for because that made me who I am today, and that year I was on the second team the whole year. Sometimes they would move people around but I went into every single practice with that mentality. I went to the coach and said, “What do I need to do to make sure that I make the number one team next year?”
And I worked on that skillset and I did everything that I could. I would spend my own money that I didn’t have to hire a coach to give me individual sessions, and I tell you guys this story to tell you that I want to help you take that kind of ownership over your life.
So you grew up in a crappy situation, or life maybe didn’t hand you the best cards or whatever that saying is, or your boss is someone that you hate working for, or that your husband or significant other isn’t showing up the way that you may be expected or whatever it is, my question to you is what are you going to do about it?
Because when you can take ownership over that, you will get to create your life. The moment I stopped making my external circumstances, my significant others, my job, my whatever, my business, anything, responsible for how I felt in my happiness is the moment that I started attracting and creating the results that I really wanted in my life.
So I want to ask you guys, what’s the thing that you’re blaming right now and it’s okay, you’re a human, we all do this. What’s the thing that you’re making responsible? Who are you making responsible? This even happens by being triggered. Who is triggering you that you are making them responsible, that they need to change or be different for you to be comfortable or happy? And how can you take responsibility and ownership and ask yourself, what am I going to do about it?
If I can’t change these specific circumstances, how can I change and grow myself? And as a byproduct of that, you guys will make different decisions. Eventually, when I started creating my own happiness, my past relationship wasn’t in alignment anymore and I left it. But when you run away from things because you’re making it responsible, your lesson will show up again. The lesson of you being responsible to create your life, your happiness, all of the things will show up again.
And I want to give you guys the power to take extreme ownership over the life that you create. It doesn’t mean you have to blame yourself that aren’t your fault, but what it does mean is saying, how can I not make my kids, my circumstances, responsible for where I am and how can I take ownership so I can create the reality that I want?
And that is going to inspire action, just like I talked about. I practiced extra, I paid money out of my allowance to hire someone to coach me individually. I stayed until 10 o clock at night and passed volleyballs over and over and over again. And guess what happened the next year? I made the top team. I became an all American. I got a scholarship.
And I will tell you guys, that moment was such a pivotal moment in my life and at every turn for me now and at every level of growth, I have to take extreme ownership and I want to give you guys that opportunity. So you don’t like where you are, you don’t like what’s happening, you feel like you’ve been dealt a hand that doesn’t work, your significant other isn’t showing up the way that you want them to, what are you going to do about it? How can you take responsibility for your part in this and create change?
I love you guys. I’m sending you this message from the most loving place and from a place of knowing that if you show up for this lesson, you are going to drastically change your life. So I love you guys, I cannot wait to talk to you next week and I hope you have a beautiful day. Bye.
Thank you so much for joining me for today’s episode of Soul CEO. If you want to go even deeper into how to create a vision of the life you really want, how to become the woman in that vision and how to deal with the roadblocks we all face along the way, head over to lindseymangocoaching.com/high-vibe-formula to get your free training of my High-Vibe Formula.
