Ep 10: Master Responsibility, Mindset & Passion (The 12 Traits of the Greats) | Book Club

What if the life you’re living right now… is a direct result of the choices you’ve made—and the ones you’ve been avoiding?

And what if that doesn’t mean you’re stuck…
but that you’re more powerful than you’ve ever believed?

In this first-ever Quiet Courage Book Club episode, we’re diving into The 12 Traits of the Greats and unpacking three life-shifting themes: Responsibility, Mindset, and Passion.

This isn’t just a book review—
it’s a call forward.

Because if you’ve been feeling stuck, playing small, or quietly knowing you’re meant for more…
this episode will meet you right there—and gently challenge you to rise.

✨ Grab my upcoming book (join the waitlist):

A Shy Girl’s Guide to Conversation & Friendship

📚 Resources mentioned:

• The 12 Traits of the Greats by Dave Martin 

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why staying in a victim mindset quietly keeps you stuck
• The truth about responsibility (and why it’s actually freeing)
• How your thoughts are shaping what you see—and what you miss
• Letting go of other people’s opinions so you can step into your calling
• Seeing yourself through God’s perspective instead of the world’s lies
• How to recognize your true passion (hint: it moves you emotionally)
• The subtle ways we lie to ourselves—and how it’s holding us back

Transcript

Welcome To Quiet Courage

Speaker 0:06

Welcome to Quiet Courage, the podcast for anybody ready to show up and be seen. I'm Kaycia and here we explore self-worth, courage, and personal growth with action steps, personal stories, and encouragement to help you claim your power and live confidently. Remembering, your worth isn't something you have to earn. Here, we practice living in it every day. So let's take small brave steps together and start building the lives we've been dreaming of.

First Ever Book Club Episode!

Speaker 0:41

Hello and welcome back to the Quiet Courage Podcast. I'm Keisha, your host, and today we're doing our first ever book club. That's right, we're doing a book club episode. So if you love the kind of conversation that calls you to something more, that challenges your limiting beliefs and tells you that you have greatness inside of you, this conversation that we're having today is for you. Book club episodes are a cross between a friend recommending you a book that transformed her life and a book club, getting the insights on what topics really stood out to me and challenged and changed the way I think. Basically, I'm giving you what I've learned, loved, and took from a book and what can be applicable to your life, all the while giving you enough information to decide if this book is worth your time, which I promise you it is.

The Airport Book That Hooked Me

Speaker 1:33

I found this book in an airport. I had just been on a week trip of hiking through national parks, camping in a van and driving countless hours. The hiking trips each day were amazing, but yet my body felt completely exhausted as my friend and I reached the airport. We had a few hours to wait, and my friend quickly sprawled out on the floor to take a nap. I definitely needed to do the same thing, take a three hour nap that my body was begging for. But I had a problem. I had just found this book in an airport store, and each chapter was taking me deeper and deeper, and even though I knew I needed sleep, my spirit needed this book more. It was one of those transformational books, the book where you can't stop reading, and each page reveals something that you've been hiding from, and once you read it, you have an aha moment and feel slightly called out. Because how do they know you so well, right? How do they know exactly what you need to hear? So I kept reading, I kept highlighting, I kept underlining, I wrote in the margins, as my body ached with exhaustion, yet my mind yearned for more of the book. It's a book worth reading, and it's a book worth rereading, and it's a book worth talking about. So today we're talking about the book The Twelve Traits of the Greats by Dave Martin. There are twelve chapters in his book, but today we're gonna talk about the first three. And then you can decide if you if you want to read the rest of the book, which I'm sure by the end of this episode you will. I'll link the book in the show notes in case you get hooked, just like I was. So the chapters that we're gonna talk about are responsibility, taking ownership of yourself, mindset, dealing with your belief system, and passion, the engine that drives your life. Now, as I started reading the book, there were several different points within the first chapter that I had aha moments, and he was putting into words things that I didn't have words for yet. And so as I was reading, I was like, oh my goodness, this is me. Oh my goodness, I need to step up here. And it was like a continually learning, and just I it was a book that you just can't stop reading. At the point when I found this book, I had been doing a few different I had been through a few years of personal growth, like just trying to figure out myself, trying to change my mindsets, trying to go and achieve and reach for something higher than where I was at. And as I read through the first chapter, there were several points that spoke to this journey, and that's what we're gonna get into

Responsibility Over Victim Mindset

Speaker 4:22

today. Within the first few pages, Dave Martin said this we have been conditioned from birth to look everywhere for the root cause of our difficulties, except for the most logical and most realistic place, our self. And when I read that, of course, in my book it's highlighted and it's underlined, and there's a circle around it because it was so key that described the journey that I was on. I when I started my personal growth journey, I started from a very strong victim mindset. It's not like anybody told me my life, oh, you need to be a victim, but it's just the way I started thinking, and I didn't know better. I just assumed that things were outside of my control. And as I was going through this personal growth journey and learning more about myself, more about what achievers do, more about how to develop into the best version of yourselves, it kept coming back to you're not a victim of your circumstances, you are actually in control. And this is what he's talking about in this chapter, is that we often have a habit of looking outside of ourselves for the reasons why something can't be done, right? Um, I'm too busy, I don't have enough support, my friends don't understand, like there's all these reasons I don't like I can't get there, like all these different reasons we have around us for why things don't work out, or I was never taught those skills, things like that. Um and sometimes those reasons are valid, right? But if we keep giving our power to places, situations, people um that are outside of us, then we really don't are actually giving up our power to change the situation. So instead of focusing on, well, I wasn't taught the skills, or my mind doesn't think like that, or any other situations where you're not in control, focusing on what you can do, what you can change, is so key. And it also speaks to our mindset too, when he says the root cause for our difficulties, and we're if we look in the most logical and realistic place, it's ourselves. And it just speaks to me mindset, right? If you think you don't can't suc succeed, then you probably won't, right? If you think that, for instance, if you think that you can't get this job, a job, then you're less likely to apply for the job. You're more likely to recognize the different reasons why this job isn't aligned for you, you're um just more likely to fulfill this limiting belief that you have about this job. Kind of the same thing in all aspects of our lives, right? So the really cool twist here in the responsibility aspect is that if we choose to take responsibility, yeah, we too do take the fall of situations, but also you have control, right? You can you can take the steps to make your life better. You don't have to wait for somebody else, you don't have to wait for a situation to change. You can actively take steps to make you better. The second point that I loved in his chapter, and I quote, the cold hard truth is that you're living at this moment the results of your past choices and your past decisions. Alright. That one can sting a little bit. If we are wrapped up in this victim mindset, the thought that we don't have control or that everything is out of our hands, it can also be a form of hiding and a form of like, well, if if everything's out of my hands, then I don't have to take responsibility for it, and then it's I don't have to do the work to change. But if we look at it as your life is the result of your past choices and your past decisions, right? Your past actions. It's a combination of those. And if we sit with that, and that is true, then what we choose to do, what thoughts we choose to think, and what action like actions we choose to take can create a totally different outcome for us in the next few years. You have control over your choices and your actions, so why not take this responsibility for those actions and create this dream that you've been waiting or this life that you've been waiting for? It's really outlining this outlining the fact that the life that you want, the outcome, can be created by you. Sometimes that's hard to hear because we're so far off track, but it's also relieving to hear because that means that you get to make those decisions, you get to make those calls. Yep, it's gonna be hard and it's gonna be a lot of effort, and sometimes you're not gonna know what step to take next, but you get to do it. What a privilege. Another thing that he stated on this topic is when you accept the premises that there's nothing that you can do about your plight in life, you become chained to the life you have.

unknown 9:50

Right?

Speaker 9:50

So it's basically like thinking you're a prisoner to your situation, and things are happening to you instead of for you. And this was a really big mindset switch that I had earlier in my girl journey. The victim mindset is mostly, okay, everything's happening to me. But if you just pivot that thought of like, okay, what's happening for me? These things are happening for me, and it's slight twist on how you're looking at things. It's the same exact situation. But if we're looking at it with that lens, then we can look at okay, what am I gonna grow from this? What am I gonna skills am I gonna develop from walking through this hard season? It doesn't change the season, it doesn't change what you're going through, but it definitely does change how you see it and how you show up. For instance, I've had some pretty darn hard things happen in the last few years, and if those things would have happened to me 10 years ago, I would have been the word that comes to my mind is decimated. I would have sunk so far down into a depression and into this like helpless state that I wouldn't have known it would have taken me a long time to dig out of that state. But those situations now, since I've had a few years of growth behind me and I've reframed how I think of those things, when that hard situation happened, I'm like, okay, this is gonna be part of my story. I'm gonna tell this from a stage. I walked into that same exact situation, but with totally different energy. I walked in there being like, yep, I'm gonna walk through this and I'm gonna figure it out and I'm gonna grow through this, but I'm gonna take every single lesson I learned on the way, and I'm gonna turn around and I'm gonna share it with people someday. And I'm definitely not through that season yet, but I can tell you that doing the past work of like reframing situations would enabled me to step into that situation and be willing to walk through it and find situations and find solutions that helped, versus if I were to just get into that situation and sink down into depression and loneliness and helplessness. Same situations but two totally different outcomes. And a lot of that has to do with your thinking and taking responsibility for the action. The situation still sucks, but your outcome is gonna be so much better because your focus is on the right things. Your focus is on the actions and the thoughts and the decisions that you can make to continue and move through and to get to a place where you want to get to, versus your focus is on, like if you have a victim mindset, your focus is on why did they do this? They betrayed me, like not I'm not gonna get to do the things that I wanted to do, and why is life so hard? And those like those thoughts aren't really leading you to a good destination. It th those kinds of thoughts usually lead us down this little spiral to to a place where we can just find ourselves feeling despair and feeling really depressed. Because then we feel like those situations are inescapable because we never know when somebody else is going to create another situation like this and mess our whole life up, right? Versus thinking about it like, okay, I'm gonna walk through this, but I'm going to learn and I'm gonna grow and I'm gonna be a better version of myself at the at the end of this and I'm gonna continue. This is part of my story now, and I will have a victorious ending. Totally different mindsets. It is some pressure if you are choosing to not stay in that victim mindset because then the pressure to win or lose is on you. But also you have the freedom to make the actions and the choices that you want to make. You don't have to sit around and wait for other people to create situations that are best for you. You can go and create those situations. So, overall, he's speaking about responsibility and how you need to take responsibility in your life. And these kinds of conversations, I absolutely love them because it is far and few between when you get the friends who are actually gonna call you out. And personally, if if somebody says, Hey, Keisha, you could do this better, or hey Keisha, I think you need to adjust your mindset here. When somebody is bold enough to call me out, I personally have way more respect for them. I love that, and I cherish that friendship even more than somebody who might not have the hard conversations. And so this first chapter on responsibility felt like somebody being willing to have a conversation, a hard one, and being willing to call some people out, which it I was reading it, so it called me out, but I absolutely loved that because then I can take what I learned and I can change and I can grow and I can pivot and I can take it to live the best life that I want to live.

Mindset

Speaker 15:03

His next chapter was on mindset, and you all know I love mindset work again for the same exact reason because I've been on such a huge journey that and I've learned that the more that I can work on my mindset, the more possibilities open up to me. And it's not even like those possibilities weren't there before, but it's because my mindset is open to it, then I can see them. I'm looking for them instead of looking for the reasons why things don't work out. There is a system in our brain that tells us what to focus on, because otherwise we have so much input. But when we are adjusting our mindset, we can actually tell our brain to focus on other things. And the reason why mindset is so important is because sometimes, like I did, you can accidentally tell your mind to focus on the bad. You can accidentally tell your mind to focus on all the reasons you don't measure up, to focus on why other people are better, to focus on why you shouldn't do your dreams, to focus on how you don't have the skills yet. You we can accidentally do that. So focusing on the right things is so key, and that's what his second chapter was about. And a statement he said in his mindset chapter was the man who can recognize the way his mind shapes him, who can bring his own mind under discipline to proper thinking, is the man who can do almost anything. And it's so true, it's so powerful. Our thoughts really do dictate the quality of our lives. Another thing that he talked about in the mindset chapter were people's thoughts and opinions about you. He explained how their thoughts of you shouldn't affect you at all. And that was something that I very much deeply struggled with, and I was fighting for. It doesn't really make sense. God created us all unique and so different and with special dreams in our hearts that it's not meant for other people to understand. People will understand once your goals and your actions and your dreams have been realized, once they've been completed, then people can see it. But until then, they just they don't have the same vision and understanding of your vision that you do. He also spoke about viewing yourself through the eyes of God. And he said, to see yourself the way God sees you is the only accurate way to grasp your true identity and your potential, which I absolutely loved this because that is something that I've struggled with, and maybe you struggle with it too, is seeing yourself as less than and not recognizing all of your skills. But if you just take a moment here and think about it, God created you, the creator of the universe wanted you here. And the dreams and the goals and the aspirations that you have in your heart, he placed there for a reason. They're part of his plan. He gave you special gifts to develop and to grow and to chase after, and he knows what makes your heart happy, what makes you truly happy. And I believe what should make you truly happy is tied to your goals, your dreams, and your ambitions. Sometimes it's good just to take a moment and look around, look around at the amazing creation and the world that we live in, and grasp that he sees your true identity and your true potential. Have you ever looked at a little kid, like say like they're five or six, and they have this great skill, like whatever it is. Sometimes I see kids and they have a really good skill of conversation, or they're really bubbly, even the skill of laughter and bringing joy to other people, and I can look at them and I can see their huge potential that they have for their lives and the impact that they can make. And it's almost like we don't take that view upon ourselves. We kind of look at ourselves and see the way we don't measure up. So I think it's a really cool concept to think about like, okay, God's looking down at me, and he sees my potential and he sees my worth, and he sees these huge goals that I have that are gonna just build me into the person that he wants me to be, and look at yourself from that perspective, and know that God sees your true identity, he doesn't see the lies that this world masks us with, he doesn't see the lies that people have told you, like you're not good enough, or you're not pretty enough, or you're not you don't speak well enough to make an impact, like any of those things that the lies that people have spoken to, that's not truly who you are. Okay, and the dreams that you have in your heart and those goals, God has created those, and God knows your true potential, and He knows your true identity, and they're all in alignment. And here's the thing you have the power to choose to believe in your own potential, and you can choose what you think about yourself and what you think about your life. You get a choice. Why would you not choose to think the best about yourself? If you're gonna base your life off of guessing off of scenarios, like why would you not pick the best scenario for your life and go for that? And it's just a choice. You're the way you see yourself is a choice. The way you you choose to have a mental attitude is a choice. And the beautiful thing is that it is a choice. Because that means you get to make that choice. You get to choose how you see yourself. You get to choose how you see your dreams, if they're achievable or not achievable. You get to choose if you listen to the lies that people say that you're less than. You get to choose. And I know that you can make the best choice. I think part of the reason why this chapter spoke to me in such a way is because I do have really big dreams and goals for my life. And the concept that God placed those dreams and goals in my life. And if it is such a passion, like why would he not give you the skills and the s the seeds of of skills to develop and grow to achieve it? Like of course he would. If he wants you to do something, he's gonna give you the ki the capacity to do it. So it just really excited me that I I wasn't off track. And for you, if you're out there with big goals and dreams and but you're a quiet person and you have this kind of like internal conflict, like you want so much, you're yearning for so much, but you have a lot of skills, like you know you have a lot of skills to develop, that's okay. That's part of the process. This leads us perfectly to the third chapter.

Passion

Speaker 23:42

The third chapter that Dave wrote was all about passion. And one thing that he explained was that passion should be easily easy to recognize because it will grip you emotionally. I usually tell people when they're trying to figure out their life passion or their mission and their goals in the in their life that if it doesn't make you cry, you're not there yet. And I've walked multiple people through this process of creating a mission and a vision statement for their life. And oftentimes by the time that they have refined their vision statement, they cannot read it without crying. I also have a vision statement for my life that I cannot read without getting teary-eyed and and crying a little bit. And what I found is as I read it to groups of people, they also are experiencing my passion and get a little teary-eyed, even though it's not even their vision, because they can just feel the energy and my passion towards the vision that I have for my life. I believe there's so much power in taking your passion and your vision for your life and refining it, and refining it down to one paragraph, because the more you refine it, the more you have to cut out the fluff, and then you have just this powerful statement that will move you to action and it will also move other people. Now, I mentioned earlier when I read a good book, I will underline, highlight, make arrows, write words in the margins, and this thing that he said in the third chapter about passion, I drew a surprised emoji face in the margin, like, oh my goodness, what? Like, you know that face? Yeah, that's what's sitting in my margin. So what I have underlined here is living your passion essentially means living the truth. But I have come to realize that most people are living a lie. The one who lies to you the most is yourself. What? Oh my goodness, that is so true. We have like we all limit ourselves and we lie to ourselves about our potential and about what could happen, and all these like fears that we sometimes surround ourselves with, or the safety and being mediocre, and the safety and not being seen and staying quiet and hiding essentially in our own lives, those are all lies. And the crazy thing is we're the biggest liar. We are literally lying to ourselves the most. That like that gave uh that gave me surprise emoji vibes in my book. Um, but like really it did I had to think about that for a while and think about where in my life am I lying? Because sometimes our lies can be so close to us that we can start believing them as actual facts. I wrote about this concept in a book that I'm releasing soon. The book is called A Shy Girl's Guide to Conversation and Friendship. But I wrote about this concept of us believing our own lies because in that aspect, I was creating a lot of lies to avoid connection, and I said them to myself so much that I really started to believe these lies, and which made it easier and easier and easier for me to avoid conversations and avoid connection. Because if I dug deep down, it made me uncomfortable. But me telling myself those lies was much easier. So coming back to this concept of our passion, are we believing lies about our life that's not serving us? And as we talk about the passions in our lives, a lot of the passion that God gives us should be used to serve other people. I think if we just focus on serving ourselves, we get to a really lonely state. I know that we're all created for community, but also like how much can you focus on yourself? I mean, people can do it a lot, actually, but it's not going to bring the fulfillment behind it unless you're lifting other people up.

Wrap Up

Speaker 28:28

That is a quick wrap on the three chapters that we're that I was talking about today: Responsibility, Mindset, and Passion from Dave Martin. And they are also applicable to your life. We do have responsibility to make the best choices for our lives. And the more responsibility that we take in our life, the more ownership and we have, and the more that we can drive our life to the destinations that we want our life to be at. And the mindset plays a key role. How you think about your life dictates what your mind will see, it dictates how you show up, it dictates your behavior, how you think is so, so important. And that also ties into your passion. Are you out here trying to chase something that you're not passionate about and then wondering why you feel like ho-hum and like depressed? Our passion is God-given. Like, and in a sense, there's a freedom to that because you don't need to explain to other people about your passion. All you need to do is chase it and go for it and go for those big dreams that you have inside of your heart. Um, if you loved this book, I would absolutely love to have a book club and like go through every single chapter. So if you want that, um send me a message underneath the podcast and we'll get something like that set up if there's enough interest in it. And I will have, again, I'll have the book linked below. If you want to check it out, it's called The 12 Traits of the Greats: Mastering the Qualities of Uncommon Achievers. And the book was written by Dave Martin. And thanks for listening in to the first ever book club episode. I absolutely love personal growth books and books that challenge my thinking and help me to see the world in new ways because there's so many benefits from reading someone's life work. Usually when people write a book, it's the experience that they've gained over years and years of their life and looking back and gleaning all that knowledge. So if I can take what they've learned in 10 years and I can learn it in a few hours, and then f focus on implementing that into my life over a few weeks, like that's so awesome. So I just love reading and learning and and seeing what else is out there in life and how I can grow and expand. I have not decided if I'll be doing book clubs monthly or bi-monthly yet for these book club episodes, but you will for sure see more of these. I'm just bringing the best of the best books up here so you can hear about them and decide if you want to read them as well. Because if I'm taking time to talk about it on this podcast, I am for sure convinced that it is worth you reading because you're gonna glean so much knowledge from it, and it's gonna be so applicable to your life that you're you're gonna get good results from it. So until next time, remember that I see you, I love you, and I'm cheering you on every step of the way. Thank

Final Encouragement

Speaker 31:45

you for joining me on today's episode of Quiet Courage. Remember, courage is the first step to confidence, and together we practice showing up, taking brave steps, and building that confidence every day. If this episode encouraged you, I'd be so thankful if you'd share with a friend. Keep taking those small steps, and I'll see you on the next episode.