The Story You Call Wisdom

You can be brilliant, experienced, and driven, and still be stuck for a reason you do not want to name. The hardest traps rarely sound like fear. They sound like wisdom: “I’m being careful.” “The timing isn’t right.” “I just need to refine it a bit more.” “I can’t trust them, so I have to hold the line.” 

I’m Mark Walker, and I walk through a pattern I keep hearing on discovery calls and strategy sessions with high performers, founders, and leaders. One builder with decades of tech experience has a hard drive full of apps that never shipped, each delay explained with a reasonable story. Another leader describes a culture of micromanagement, then drops a truth that cuts to the root: “I just don’t think we trust ourselves.” Different worlds, same mechanism. When we do not trust ourselves to handle what comes next, we reach for control, perfectionism, and postponement and call it strategy.

We slow down and map the real leverage point using CFTAR: Circumstances, Feelings, Thoughts, Actions, Results. Most people try to change the outside world first, but the real work happens in the middle, where feelings and thoughts quietly drive behavior. Along the way, I bring in Viktor Frankl’s reminder that between stimulus and response there is a space, and in that space is our power to choose. That pause is where freedom lives, and where “earned caution” can finally be noticed and retired on purpose.

If you feel this tug, listen through the end and sit with one question: what story are you running that you have started calling wisdom? Subscribe to Fierce Encouragement, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review so more leaders can find the tools that actually help.

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Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey there. Welcome to Fierce Encouragement. Uh my name is Mark Walker. I just had a sip of water and a mint. I think I'm ready to go. To introduce myself if you're new here. I'm a certified coach. I'm a speaker, workshop instructor, and I've been working with leaders, executives, founders, even people who are really good at what they do in their entrepreneurialship and maybe privately wondering why something still feels off. So this podcast is about tools, about how to encourage yourself to use real tools and real encouragement, the kind that you can kind of use yourself today without uh having to go to a doctor appointment or read a book or go to a weekend retreat. We're about, gosh, I think I'm over 75 episodes into Fierce Encouragement. And if you're new here, again, this is what I wanted to share with you. I try not to do fluff. I don't really try to go into the hype. I do one idea per episode. I record it myself, and I really try to make it land somewhere real for you. Some thing that you can use. So thanks for listening. Today I wanted to call this episode the story you call wisdom. And if that means something to you, or maybe it doesn't, that's fine. I think it will in the end. One last thing before we start, I keep having a lot of conversations lately, discovery calls, strategy sessions, and people reaching out, and I really keep seeing the same thing in different clothes. It's leaders who are smart, really capable, super driven, and they feel quietly stuck in some places. And it's not for the reasons that they think. Now if that's you or someone you know, I want to talk. One conversation, no pitch, just let's actually see what's in your way. Check out the show notes, or you can find me at markwalkercoach.com. Okay, let's jump into the episode.

When Delay Masquerades As Wisdom

SPEAKER_00 2:12

I wanted to ask you something before I start telling anything or doing any talking. When was the last time you did something or didn't do something, and then you told yourself it was a smart move? The practical move, um the responsible move. Maybe it was some project you kept refining instead of just shipping. Um maybe it was a conversation you kept postponing, one of those crucial ones you were just waiting for the feeling or the timing to be right. Perhaps it was uh a version of your work or your life, uh, or something you've been holding back on because you just don't feel you have things quite in place yet. Now here is a real question. Was that wisdom? Or was that delay a story that you've gotten really, really good at telling? Again, this is what I'm learning and what I'm seeing, and this came from a couple conversations I had this past week. It's this that the most dangerous stories we tell ourselves, and the ones that are sound that sound the most reasonable can do the most damage.

The Builder With Unshipped Apps

SPEAKER_00 3:32

So I had a strategy session with someone recently, and I'll call them a builder tech background. They went through the dot-com boom and bust, and they built AI and LLMs and other digital products uh before you know the AI boom. They've had over 25 years of building things, authentic things, and being alongside of some of the founders in Silicon Valley. They are genuinely brilliant. Uh, they're really the kind of person um who was working with the tools uh the rest of us didn't even know existed. And listen, this this person had a hard drive full of apps that never shipped. Now it wasn't because they weren't capable, and it certainly wasn't because the ideas were bad or sour. Some of them were ahead of their time, some of them might have been right on time, um, but they had a reason for all these delays. The market wasn't ready, the partner wasn't aligned, um, the whole timing was off. And he called them casually kind of out like this, like it was just some fact about himself. Oh, that's my golden handcuff stories. And I wrote that down in my notepad, not as a judgment or being critical. I see that in myself, of course, my delay and hesitation. But this was a signal. Because when someone names their pattern that easily or nonchalantly, that casually, it can usually mean one thing, that that pattern has been running for a long time. Long enough that maybe it doesn't even feel like a pattern anymore, or they don't even know about it. It just feels like who we are.

Control Culture And Self-Trust

SPEAKER_00 5:27

A few days after that, I had another conversation with an IT leader, uh different world, uh, same foundation, same route. Um they were describing more of a struggle in their job around the culture in a big organization, uh, the control, the micromanagement, the sense that no one could be trusted to do the work without someone needing to hover. I asked them where they thought that came from, and he paused and then he said something I really haven't been able to shake. He said, I just don't think we trust ourselves. There it is. So whether you're a founder uh sitting on that hard drive full of apps or a leader who can't let go of that control, this mechanism is similar. We don't trust ourselves to handle what comes next. So instead, we manage those circumstances, right? And we might call it strategy. We might call it uh SOPs or standards, we might call it even being careful. But really underneath it, it's it's the same thing. Stephen Pressfield calls this resistance, and he shares this quote The enemy is not out there, it is in here. Unquote. It doesn't show up wearing a mask, but in fact it can show up dressed up as wisdom, at least how we look at it. And here's where uh some of the conversations kind of got interesting because near the end of the session with the builder, I asked him a question I ask a lot of people when I think the moment might be right or it might fit, and I asked him, What happens if a year goes by and nothing changes? What does that cost you? Now most people I meet with uh when you ask that type of question, they'll go to something that's uncomfortable, they'll go to the pain points, they'll talk about the pressure, um, maybe tiredness, exhaustion. They'll talk about that gap between where they are and where they'd like to be. But this builder didn't. He went straight to his kids, to this vision he has around what he's building and what he wants to do and how he wants to hand it over someday and do it with his kids. He talked about um the dream, not the cost, not the things that would be left alone. And I really let that soak into the ground soil of our conversation because on the surface it can just look like uh some type of resilience, maybe even optimism, like someone who has claimed the North Star. But I wanted to just think about this in a different frame if you're open to it. What if that uh inability to feel the cost is itself the blind spot? What if that move towards uh a vision before you actually sat down with what's not moving and what's not uh what is cost what's it costing you? Maybe that can be its own form of avoidance. So Victor Frankel wrote this, and I wanted to share this quote. Between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space is our power to choose. Now that space between the the question and the answer, well that's where most everything lives, and for a lot of us, especially people push themselves, high performers, people who listen to this podcast, well, we've all gotten really good at skipping it so that we don't even know we're doing it in a sense. We go straight to the dream because sitting with the cost of it is really uncomfortable. And we've trained ourselves over years and years to be very, very efficient at uncomfortable feelings and dismissing them. Here's a model

CFTAR And The Space To Choose

SPEAKER_00 10:00

that I work with and that my coach has taught me, and I wanted to bring into this session here to give you something again, give you something tangible and make it real. This is called CFTAR, CFTAR. Circumstances, feelings, thoughts, actions, results. Now, here is how it works in some plain language. Hopefully this lands. So something will happen, and that's a circumstance. You have a feeling about it. Usually that happens very fast, right below the surface, often, and then that feeling can generate a thought, and then of course, our thoughts drive uh the actions we take. And then, of course, as a final thing, that action produces a result, which kind of loops around back to that circumstance we find ourselves in. So most of us live at the level of circumstances and results. That's the things we see, right? Oh, the market wasn't ready, the app didn't ship, uh, we don't have the time, um, the team underperformed. We'll look at the inputs and the outputs and then try to adjust variables to change them. But honestly, the real work happens in the middle. It happens in the feeling and the thought. Because here's where cognitive behavioral scientists are telling us through studies where the ancient wisdom has been telling us for forever. It's this that our thoughts are not facts. They're just interpretations. And these interpretations and stories, well, they can be changed. So the builder's thought, right? Timing isn't right. That's an interpretation. It might be partially true, but it's also doing something else. It's protecting him. It's protecting him from having to feel the discomfort of shipping something and maybe watching it fail or succeed. Either one carries a risk, right? Or maybe it's that IT leader's thought, right? I can't trust them to do what's right. That's also something that keeps him in control in a distorted way. It keeps him quote unquote necessary. It's fear. It keeps up this anxiety of uh being too vulnerable at a managed distance, right? It keeps you away from it. Frankel again. The space between stimulus and response is where our freedom lives. The CFTAR, that's a map of that space as well. And when you can slow down long enough to ask, what am I actually feeling right now? What is this thought that keeps you know coming up and perpetuating? What's this feeling generating? When we get curious about that area, getting in that gap, we get a little room. And in that space in that room is where that change starts to happen. Not because you forced it, because you saw it, because you became aware. So let's bring this in for a landing.

Retiring Old Caution On Purpose

SPEAKER_00 13:19

The title of this episode is called The Story You Call Wisdom. And I wanted to be extra careful at this point because I'm not sitting here saying that your stories are lies. I definitely am not saying that the you know timing was never ever wrong or a partner was never ever fine. That's not true all the time. And even the teams that we can find ourselves on can't always be trustworthy or great. Some of this is real. Some of the caution is definitely needed. But here's the thing about earned caution. It doesn't automatically expire. It doesn't have a sunset provision on it. You have to get in there and retire it yourself intentionally. You have to see it, you have to identify it and retire that. Otherwise, that just keeps running long after the original threat and problem is gone, because hey, that's what our brain does. It learns patterns, it runs on autopilot, and this really isn't a weakness. It's more about neuroscience and setting up a system that benefits you. William James put it this way, uh, one of my favorite quotes The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. What William James is describing is the same stuff Frankel was describing. It's the same space that CFTAR was mapping out. It's that inner attitude, right? Um, and this isn't a feeling. Uh, it can even be that story we get stuck on, and maybe when that story finally gets old enough and boring enough for us, and maybe this podcast helps you do that, we stop calling it a story and we call it who we are. We we step towards, get into that gap and build something different. Because that builder called himself the guy with the cold golden handcuffs, right? Like it's something that he can't get away from. And even the IT leader called himself a thorough, careful, high standards performer. And really, again, both of them are right, and both of them are using some sense of rightness to avoid looking at what's really underneath it. Now, this isn't a character flaw, this is a common human reflex, but it's also something once you see it, it becomes completely workable. And here's what I wanted to leave you with as we go out this week. Again, this isn't a to-do list, it's not another goal setting course or exercise. I just want to ask you this one question. What story are you running that you've started calling wisdom? You don't have to blow it up, you don't have to kill it, you don't have to be brave enough to overwhelm it. But you just have to step towards it today and just notice it. The next time you hear yourself saying something like, Well, hold on, not yet, or once I get this in place, or I just need to be careful, go ahead and pause. Invite yourself to pause for a second. Get curious, get into that gap, and see what you might be protecting yourself from. Because really, that pause, that small gap between thought and the next action, that's where our freedom is. And sometimes even one conversation is enough to find it. Now, I've watched that happen over and over this season. Someone comes in thinking they have a real strategy problem or a time problem or a market to pro a market problem or a marketing problem. And literally in one conversation, the real thing starts to surface. Not because anything was magical or I did anything magical, it's just because there is space for this person to actually look and reflect back.

One Conversation And A Simple Ask

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Now, if you'd like a conversation like that, I'd love to have it with you. MarkWalkercoach.com or check out the application in the show notes. Zero pitching, zero pressure, just a real honest, authentic conversation for you to see what's actually in the way. My name is Mark Walker. This has been Fierce Encouragement. And if this landed, please, please share it with somebody else who might need it. Um, no pitch on that either. Just if it helped you, please pass it on. Help me get to those hundred episodes, and I'm really glad you're on this trip with me. Thank you for listening. Take care of yourselves out there wherever you're at. Have a good day, a good evening, and we'll catch you next time on Fierce Encouragement. All right, bye bye.