Michael Gervais

Or you might say, yeah, I know that's true to me too.

But some of our closest people in our lives, they have an opinion about who we could become, about the choices that we make, the behaviors that we take, and they don't necessarily want the best for us.

What they want is to feel comfortable.

They want us to be in our station in life.

They want us to be exactly who we are now, not exponentially better, not going from $100,000 a year to $100 million because we might leave them behind.

We might create an environment where they don't feel as good about themselves because they're doing pretty good relative to you.

And so sometimes the people that we think ought to be the opinions that matter are actually the ones that are keeping us stuck.

So the deepest way to think about whose opinions matter is to have at least two criteria.

And I think about it like a round table.

And my round table is not very big.

It's got eight chairs on it.

It's the people who care, who have invested in my well-being, who have demonstrated that my growth arc, independent of their growth arc, matters to them.

So it's those people who really care, who have put time under tension with me to get to know me, to get to understand my unique challenges in life, my pain points, my traumas, and my wonderfully

you know, ambitious vision of who I want to become and how I want to contribute to the world.

They've spent the time to know that.

And the second criteria is that they've been in the arena.

They have tested themselves.

They know what it's like to work from a place of pressure where stress is real in their environment, too.

So they understand that intersection.

And those are the opinions of others that matter to me.