IDENTITIY: WHOY(Work Harder On Yourself) and the Mirror

Second Wind isn’t physical — it’s mental.
In episode we talk about WHOY...Work Harder On Yourself!

It’s the belief that lasting change in life starts with personal growth before external success.

The WHOY principle teaches that:

•  your mindset matters 
•  your habits matter 
•  your discipline matters 
•  your emotional health matters 
•  your leadership matters 

Because life gets better when you get better.

WHOY is about focusing less on blaming circumstances and more on developing the man or woman in the mirror.

This is about re-aiming effort, honestly, not grinding harder. What happens when effort is no longer the problem — but direction is?

We talk about why more men over 40 are becoming fathers, why we’re not anomalies, and how that realization forces a different kind of self-examination.

I share a moment with a boss that changed how I think about effort, introduce WHOY — Work Harder On Yourself — not as grind culture, but as a mindset about where you aim your effort, and explain why there’s nothing worse than becoming a cheap copy of a great original.

Second Wind isn’t about starting over. It’s about picking up where you left off — mentally.

Truth with oxygen. 

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 #TheWeightMenDontTalkAbout
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 #FatherhoodJourney
 #MasculineGrowth
 #LeadershipPressure
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 #WHOY 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

When we think about second win, normally we think about athletes. First athletes that come to my mind when I think about or hear the term second win or basketball players, track and field, or swimmers. These guys understand and know what second win feels like. It's that time when you have to push through what you have to push through when your body sends a signal to you that says, Hey, I'm exhausted, I'm tired, I want to stop. But if you keep going, if you keep pushing, then you get that second breath that'll allow you to keep going even further. I'll give you an example. I told you last week we do push-ups. A hundred every other day. And there's always a point when I get to 20 or 25, my mind sends me a signal, or my body sends me one, I don't know who, that's respectable. You've done 25, you're good. You can stop. But if I keep going, I notice I can do another 15, sometimes 25. Does that make sense? So second win is when you just decide I'm not going to quit. I am going to keep going and not listen to my body. One writer says that you'll renew your strength and mount up on wings of eagles. Fly and not be weary. Run and not faint. That is second win. Interesting enough, men know what that feels like. They know what it looks like. And it has nothing to do with a stopwatch. There are many times when you want to walk off a job, you want to stop, you want to quit, but you can't. You keep going, and you find that you get that second win. I bet you did not know. This is how important men making decisions about life really, really is paramount. I was reading the other day that 40 plus men who are 40 plus make up nine percent of childbirths in the U.S. And men who are 50 plus make up one percent. What that says is hey, as men we've decided, some didn't decide, they started early. I get, I get it, I get that. But there are some who started late, but you're really not late, you're right on time because by then you have developed, you've lived a little bit, you're a little bit more polished, and it makes you move a little bit differently with your child. You're a little bit more affable, a little bit more pleasant, a little bit more wise, a little bit more educated. So you handle them differently. And hey, make no mistake, uh some of that wisdom that we have gotten by that age, we paid for it through experience. No doubt about it. But it makes you a better father. And when you do that, when you wait on fatherhood, sometimes there are questions that come up, questions are raised. I had one of those questions posed to me at the age of 27, 26, 27. I was on a work with my first corporate job, and my boss's boss, he decided he wanted to get out in the market, and they paired him with me. Well, we worked half a day. He takes me to lunch. And at lunch, he tells me, Mr. Henderson, do you have an education? This was his lead-in. I didn't understand or didn't have a clue as to where he was going. I said, Yes, sir. He said, was it hard to get? I said, absolutely, sir. He said, well, why wouldn't you work just as hard on yourself? Now at that time I didn't understand the language or the landscape for that matter. But I put it on file. And I started thinking, man, did he just call me out? He just checked me. Why wouldn't I work just as hard on myself? I mean, hey, we work hard on everything else, don't we? The job, the relationship, the car, the house. But we never take a moment of pause to say, hey, I need to do some work on myself. I need to become better, more developed. So when he tells me this, I put it on file, and I realized at that moment he was referring to effort. But later, years later, I coined it, the acronym WHOY, work harder on yourself. Whoa. Well, what does that mean? Whoa is when you're saying, I'm going to develop me. I'm not going to sit down and say, hey, the learning curve is over. No, the learning curve is never over. We're always expanding, we're always growing. We don't wish things were easy. We get better. So that's what woe stands on. It's not about effort. And it's not about talent. I'll give you an example. I recently watched the movie Ray with the boys. And in that movie, there was a scene where he took his girlfriend, future wife, they went to lunch. And he made the comment about the hummingbird, could she hear? But then he asked her, had she heard his music? And her response was, and I'm paraphrasing, I've heard it. It's okay. And he was kind of taken back by it, but her next statement, she said, it's okay. It sounds familiar. I'm wondering what the real Ray Charles sounds like. So now we move from, I mean we seem to move from effort, talent to originality. And originality is powerful. I was having coffee with a partner of mine some years back, and we were talking about, we're all athletes, so we were talking about athletes. And this came up about one in particular, I won't mention the name. You can use your imagination. But anyway, I said that there's nothing worse than a cheap copy of a great original. And when you decide not to work harder on yourself, then you've made a decision to become a cheap copy of a great original. No one else. You. So second win tells you it's not over. Keep going. And then whoa, work hard on yourself, gives you the direction in which you need to go. I watch my 13 and 11 and three-year-old boy. They fight all the time. Those of you who have boys, you know what I'm talking about. Not physically, because I won't allow that, but they fight over chores and they fight over the dog and they fight over the clothes and cleaning the room. They fight over everything. And when you stand back and listen to it, really, they fight over nothing. They never take a moment to say, you know what, I'm gonna stop looking at him and I'll start looking at me. I'll develop me. I'm not worried about him. And the thing is, identity requires work. This is why originality is so important. Because life holds up for you and me a mirror. It holds up a mirror, and we can either ignore it or we can pay attention to it. It doesn't hold grudges because it's polite like that, right? But life does hold receipts, it keeps them. So in our 20s, we can ignore the mirror. We can ignore our development, what we look like. In our 30s, we'll we'll negotiate with it. But in our 40s, you get over 40, now the mirror just it's on the wall and it's saying to us, you know what? Is this what we decided to do? Is this what we decided to become? We're settling for this. So now the mirror starts talking back to us. One thing that I've learned about Second Wing is it shows up and it's available. It's available when you're frustrated, it's available when you're tired, it's available when you don't know what to do. It's available when you have nothing left to give. I promise you, you can find a second win. You're not late, you're right on time. We're talking about reassignment. I know you thought you were done. I know you felt like it was a rap. You had older kids, but all of a sudden now you have new kids. You had a wife, and now you look up and you've got another wife. But don't look at it as starting over. And don't look back in the mirror. You're picking up where you left off. The mindset. Not the physical activity, but the mindset. That's what second win is. Truth with oxygen. I'm K. R. Henderson. This is Second Wind.