Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Moment 71 - Why You SHOULD Take Personal Responsibility: Matthew Hussey About this episode In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. In this weeks moment we uncover exactly how you can take responsibility in every area of your life. Matthew Hussey walks us through how to take a step back, reflect, and see our own actions from the perspective of others. Taking the wider view is always a good idea - for ourselves, in our relationships, in our friendships, and in our careers. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/xK3A11jtBsb Matthew: https://www.instagram.com/thematthewhussey/?hl=en https://twitter.com/matthewhussey? Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 Steven Bartlett? One of the through lines of like, I guess, business, but life in general, and also with relationships is, and I really wanted to ask you this because it's something that I'd seen in my DMs from people. People sometimes message me about relationships. And one of the things that I find concerning when I meet someone in their personal development journey, or in my DMs talking about their boyfriend, or in other facets of business, is when I identify a lack of personal and self-responsibility. You meet certain people in life where they just can never seem to take responsibility. They never want to like, look in the mirror and ask themselves the question, what role have I played in this? And I sat with Lewis in London on this podcast about a week ago, or two weeks ago, something. And one of the things that really astounded me about Lewis was when he said something
0:43 Steven Bartlett? about his ex-partner, even if it was, it seemed like a fault on the surface, he would say, and that's on me. And then end the little, the paragraph with why he was responsible. Even if it was like, you know, she wouldn't let me have females on my podcast, or something like that, then he'd say, and that's on me. And I remember thinking, damn, this guy's going to go far. So what role have you seen that taking personal responsibility has on the positivity of your outcomes in dating, life, business, and everything in between?
1:17 Speaker 01 Well, I think that to start with, it makes you a much more likeable person.
1:22 Steven Bartlett? Amen.
1:23 Speaker 01 The idea of extreme ownership is in some ways powerful, but we all know there are things that have happened in life that are not our fault at all. There are things that we, trauma, we have experienced, that it would be insulting to say that we have to take responsibility for these things. It would be sinister in some cases to suggest that.
1:53 Speaker 01 But if we can get into the habit of genuinely saying, you know, how this is affecting me is something I can take responsibility for. And if I do, it actually gives me a shot at feeling better about this thing. It actually gives me a chance of improving it. Because if I say I'm powerless, then I can't have it both ways. I can't say I'm powerless and I have no responsibility over how I feel and then make it better. I have to say, okay, this thing is happening. That it's happening is not my fault.
2:37 Speaker 01 That someone is making my life really, really difficult right now with what they're doing, their behaviour, their abuse, their whatever, that is not my fault. But I want to get really curious about how I can handle this in a better way, in a more productive way. And one of the things, our mutual friend Lewis Howes, who you're talking about, one of the beautiful things about him, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, is that Lewis is not a complainer. Lewis is someone who, he'll talk about the things that he's struggling with right now, or he'll talk about the things that he's trying to work on,
3:23 Speaker 01 but it's never from a place of being the victim. It's always from a place of what can I do? Which I think is different. People, I think, what part of the problem for a lot of people is they conflate the idea of ownership with fault.
3:40 Speaker 01 And that takes us into some really dangerous territory. It's not your fault that something's happening, but you can take responsibility for how you turn that into art.
3:58 Speaker 01 I thought about confidence a lot in my career.
4:06 Speaker 01 And the injustices of confidence, right? Because we are not distributed things equally in life. We are not distributed things equally at birth. We're not distributed opportunities equally. You know, it's super easy for anyone who's objectively decent looking to talk about, you know, how easy it is to go and approach someone or do this or do that. And you're like, you cannot even imagine what it is for someone who has been rejected their entire lives. They are starting from a completely different position than you in their confidence. It's so easy for someone to say, you just need to be confident. Okay, start from where I'm starting from and then tell me that.
4:51 Speaker 01 You know, the confidence is a really, again, it can be a very insulting concept. But I do believe that there's a TV show called Chopped. And I'm probably, I'm not familiar with the show. But so I'm probably going to get wrong the concept. But in my head, the concept of this show is very, very interesting from the point of view of confidence. I think the chefs get given different ingredients. So you, it's like just lucky dip. What do you get? What's interesting is if you get a basket of ingredients and I get a basket of ingredients,
5:36 Speaker 01 we're both getting judged on what we make of those ingredients. In that format, it's what are you able to do with what you have? And what am I able to do with what I have? And I think there's something really fascinating about that. Because we spend so much of our lives mourning our ingredients, really being upset or frustrated about what the ingredients are that we were given. Imagine that you're not being judged on anything but how great a chef you are. Because that show isn't about ingredients, it's about chefs. Or imagine life isn't about ingredients, it's about chefs.
6:17 Speaker 01 Don't aspire to have the best ingredients. Aspire to be the best chef. And the best chef is going to be the one who can be the most creative with the ingredients that they have. I I'm fascinated by that because if I apply that to my own life, I just go, whatever thing that just happened, I wish didn't happen. Whatever thing that's happened to me this year that is so painful, so devastating, so whatever, whatever that thing is, it just became a new ingredient in my life. I can either judge myself on my ingredients, which if I do that, I'm always at the mercy of the next thing that happens in my life.
7:02 Speaker 01 Something cataclysmic could happen in my life and and I lose everything. And then what? I'm going to judge myself and my life on my ingredients. It to me, it's always how great of a chef are you? Ingredients are luck of the draw. Being a chef is something we can continue to get better at our entire lives. And it's actually the antidote to whatever happens. If you're a great chef, you can cook something out of whatever you have.
7:35 Steven Bartlett? It's such a such a powerful analogy and it really, really did like, yeah, I I sort of do what you probably do when you hear an analogy, you kind of test it from multiple scenarios and it really stands up. And I was thinking then again about when we look into that basket of the ingredients we're handed, if we if we believe that the ingredients we were handed are inadequate or inferior to the chef stood next to us, we're probably also going to prepare the meal with a certain level of pessimism that's going to result in a worse dish anyway. And the the agony also of looking over at someone else's basket of ingredients and going, fucking oh, they got the ribeye, look at me. And that, you know, because we we both know the negative power of comparison and how it can drive down performance, belief, confidence and all those things. But it's a beautiful, beautiful analogy.
8:13 Speaker 01 And sometimes imagine if you took pride in being able to still make, even if you knew like this ingredient is, this one sucks. Like, there's no getting around it. These ingredients I have right now suck. But you took pride in, look what I can make.
8:32 Steven Bartlett? Out of.
8:33 Speaker 01 Out of this. I get you made something amazing with your truffle salt and your, you know, your caviar and your uni. Like, I get you did something amazing with that. No shit. Look what I just did with kelp jerky.
8:52 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, it's a, it's a real powerful analogy for privilege as well, isn't it?
8:58 Speaker 01 A hundred percent because you, then you realize I'm in a different game altogether. This is why comparison is so insidious. Because what, what am I gonna do? Compare myself to someone who got a completely different basket of ingredients and say, and by the way, the basket of ingredients isn't just what you got in life in terms of circumstances or parents or whatever, education. Your basket of ingredients is also what you got here. You have a sharp mind.
9:36 Steven Bartlett? Thank you.
9:37 Speaker 01 Now, you've no doubt honed that mind. You've respected it. You've honored it by reading and by educating yourself and do all of these things. But you also started with a sharp mind.
9:49 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, probably. I'm really, it's funny because I'm really bad at maths, English and everything. I'm good at the thing I honed, but you're right. I definitely had a predisposition.
9:56 Speaker 01 But your speed of like, you hear something and you, I've watched you in, in, in interviews and when you talk, your speed of how you assimilate information and draw patterns, you're good at pattern recognition, which is why from a philosophical standpoint, there's a strength there, right? Because you're good at pattern recognition. These things, you just won the lottery on that one. Like with your brain, you just happened to win the lottery on that one. Right?
10:27 Steven Bartlett? This is gonna be my confidence button.
10:31 Steven Bartlett? You won the lottery.
10:32 Speaker 01 It's a 60 second emotional button.
10:36 Speaker 01 Those ingredients extend to everything. They extend to everything. You couldn't have grown up in the most dire circumstances, but have a sharpness of mind that other people can't even relate to. And for that reason, if you know how to double down on that thing, anything can happen. I love the idea.
11:01 Speaker 01 And I think that everyone could benefit from a kind of acceptance of just, I'm starting from where I am. Forget starting from when you were a baby and you know, all of the circumstances you were born into and so on. I'm talking now. Forget what's happened. Forget everything you've done. I had a great brain, but then for 10 years I did a bunch of drugs and then I hurt myself and then blah, blah, blah, whatever. Doesn't matter. I think about it like this. Imagine that you woke up into your life right now. And your only job was to make the most of that life. So forget the years that Stephen has already had, you're 29 right now. So forget the 29 years that have already happened.
11:43 Speaker 01 You, this brand new soul is waking up this morning into Stephen's body at 29 with whatever his opportunities are and whatever his problems are. It would be awesome. You'd be so happy for the opportunity.
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