The One Thing All Successful People Know

Everybody wants the hack.

The pill. The shortcut. The version of success that happens while you sleep.

I get it. I've wanted it too.

But after years of researching motivation, self-esteem, and what it actually takes to reach a goal, here's the truth most people don't want to hear.

There is no hack.

The one thing every successful person has in common isn't talent or luck or some secret system. It's that they run toward the hard thing instead of away from it.

In this video I tell you about the headache that wouldn't quit for two and a half weeks, the 18 needles it took to finally fix it, and why that pain taught me everything about how people actually change.

Avoiding the hard conversation won't save your relationship.
 Working around the problem won't get you the promotion.
 The thing you're most scared to face is the exact thing standing between you and what you want.

The obstacle is the way.

I'll also walk you through the PIES framework. Physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual. Four areas to look at honestly so you can find the one that's quietly holding you back right now.

Stop trying to go around it.

Go through it.

I'm Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes. After a decade transforming marriages at Marriage Helper, I've realized that the greatest tragedy isn't a failed relationship; it's the person who stays stuck and never experiences the fullness of all God intended.

The Way You Show Up is for the high-achiever who is tired of "fine."

We're dismantling the average life to build an exceptional one—using the science of the PIES: Physical, Intellectual, Emotional, and Spiritual health.

If you want to save your marriage, go to Marriage Helper. If you want to master yourself and lead your legacy, stay here.

New episodes every Tuesday.

Don't just exist. Show up.

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Transcript

Redefining Success Beyond Money

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's one thing true of every person who succeeds in life, but the truth of the matter is that most people don't do this thing. They run from it. They try and find any easier way around it. And I'm going to share with you what that is. But first, I want to define what success is. Because most of the time, when we hear the word success, we think financially. We think someone who has a lot of money, who drives a nice car, who lives in the nice house. And that is not what I'm talking about. In fact, I think that really dilutes the whole meaning of the word success because ultimately, success is a person who has achieved a desired outcome, goal, or purpose. It doesn't have anything necessarily to do with money. Success is you being able to achieve the thing you want to do, to have the relationships you want to have, to have the health that you want to have, to have the mobility in your life, to have the career, to have whatever it is fill in the blank. Have you been able to do it? What most people do is try and find the hack. They try and find the pill, they try and find the easy way, something that's going to allow them to do it in their sleep. They try and find the injection, whatever it is, in order for them to look or feel or be the person that they ultimately want to be. But the thing is, it doesn't work. My name is Dr. Kimbrilli Beamholms. I have my PhD in performance psychology. And I've done a lot of research into what does it mean? What does it take for a person to achieve goals? And I've done a lot of research with motivation, with self-esteem, with body esteem, all of those kinds of things. And so this area is one that I know well. But there's one habit, there's one thing that all successful people do. And it's the one you need to do with whatever you're trying to achieve, whether you're trying to have a better relationship, whether you're trying to move up in your career ladder, whether you're trying to feel better in your body, whatever it is, this is what it is. Let me tell you this story. A couple months ago, I had a really bad headache, and it lasted for two and a half weeks. Nothing that I did helped this headache. I would come to work and it was just always, just right here, just always there. And by the end of the day, it was even worse. Sleeping made it worse. It seemed like everything made it worse. I tried taking lots of medicine. I took lots of ibuprofen, lots of Tylenol, and nothing even budged it. I got to the point where I was, I was hopeless. I got to the point, honestly, where I was like, am I gonna have to live the rest of my life with this kind of headache pain? But I knew that it was coming from my neck because when I would move my neck, it would make it even worse. And I had had headaches that felt like this before that were stemming from my neck. And so I went to the doctor and I said, You've got to do something for me. You've got to give me some medicine, you've got to give me an x-ray, you've got to figure out what's going on. Did the x-ray, nothing. Did the MRI, came back that I had some disc degeneration, which is basically arthritis, but they literally said, You're too young for me to call it arthritis. But it wasn't even where my pain was coming from. What the MRI showed wasn't even where the pain was originating from. So finally I went to my trusty physical therapist. His name is Jay, and he's helped me through every injury I have had in the past five

A Headache That Would Not Quit

SPEAKER_00 3:31

years. Jay is amazing. He has a gift for just looking and feeling around the human body and understanding where the pinpoint of pain is coming from. And so, Jay, even though my MRI showed that like all my neck and arthritis stuff was down at the bottom of my neck, what Jay found through manipulation and through doing all the work on my neck was that actually I was having a ton of tension in these muscles way up here. And I had a joint in there that was kind of getting it easily gets knocked out of place. And there were these sub-ossucipital muscles up here that were incredibly tight just from all of the tension. But what actually he found was it was mostly coming from the fact that I had super tight traps. Like my upper back was incredibly tight, which was which was pulling on everything else and leading to these terrible headaches. And this one that I had had for over two weeks that was just not going away until he needled it. Y'all, I pass out when I see needles. Literally in junior year of high school, there was a blood drive at my high school, and I remember giving blood and immediately passing out as soon as I was done because the sight of needles, the feeling of needles, I'm not an, I forget to breathe when there's needles in me. So this was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. But I trusted Jay. I trusted that he knew what he was doing, that he had found the source of my pain. And honestly, the pain of what I was living in in the moment, the thought of whatever the cure was, even if it meant putting needles all in my back in my neck, I was willing to endure that over staying in the pain I was currently in. I want you to think about whatever situation you're experiencing in your life, whether it's that you wish you had a different health status or situation, or that you wish you had a promotion at your work, or you wish that you had the gumption to start your own business, or you wish you had the ability to have that difficult conversation with someone in your life, that your relationship is just fading away. Until the pain of staying where you are and not doing anything is bigger than the pain of doing the uncomfortable thing that will hopefully and probably get you out of that situation, you're just gonna stay stuck. And that's what successful people understand that there's no magic pill. You can't avoid

Facing Needles For Real Relief

SPEAKER_00 5:57

conversations in order to actually have good relationships. If you want to have successful relationships, you have to go into the eye of the storm and have that really hard conversation. If you want to get that job promotion at work, you can't just work your way around it. You have to work your way into it. You have to show that you are able to do it. You have to do the hard thing in order to get what you want. There's no hack. You may have heard the story about the woman who she outsourced all of her work. It was very smart, but she outsourced a lot of her work. She was working remotely. She just found people offshore that she could outsource it to, and she kept climbing the ladder. But as soon as they found out what she was doing, she got fired. She tried to hack the system and ultimately ended up losing everything that she had built. Sometimes you just have to do the difficult thing. If you want to look a different way, if you want to have more energy, if you want to feel better in your body, you can do GLP1, which is forced anorexia, or you can just eat right and go to the gym. There's literally no hack for this. And I'm not saying that there's not things that can support you and are still good and healthy for your body, but I will argue all day long that the more people try and just finagle their way around a situation to get their outcome that they want so that they don't

Why Shortcuts Keep You Stuck

SPEAKER_00 7:19

have to do the work to get it, they've wasted a lot of time and effort that they could already be halfway to their goal and they're still trying to figure out how to not do the hard thing. They're just, they're just trying to put life on autopilot. But that's not how you achieve the goals you want. You need to put in a certain amount of effort, a certain amount of dedication and motivation. That's actually how motivation stems. Motivation, if you're lacking it, guess what? The way you get it is by doing the thing that you're avoiding doing and continuing to do it. And it builds more motivation because you will eventually get that positive feedback within yourself from doing the thing, which brings more motivation, which brings more positive feedback and keeps you more motivated. That's what successful people know. So I found myself on Jay's table, the therapy table, laid face down with him putting 18 needles all the way up my neck and into my hair, through my hair, into those subocipital muscles in order to decrease the tension. He put them in my traps. When he put those needles in my trap, his goal was to get into the belly of the muscle. Like this is doing the hardest thing. The whole time I'm reminding myself I have to breathe. I can't pass out. I have to breathe. The whole time I'm having him remind me, I'm not, you're not going to paralyze me accidentally, right? And he's walking me through. No, I'd have to intentionally want to try and paralyze you. They're not in my stomach.

unknown 8:50

No.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

But he, as I'm sitting there, as I'm laying there with all of these needles, up the hardest, most tender, most tense parts of my neck

The Real Source Of Motivation

SPEAKER_00 9:02

and my upper back, it's painful. There's nothing about it that's enjoyable. It is achy. It's dull and achy. It recreates that headache that I hate having. But the longer that they stay in there, the more it hurt. It never, it never let up. But here's what ended up happening. He finally leaves them in there for a while because what he's doing is he's getting the needle all the way into the middle so that it can release in a way that nothing else can release those muscles, in a way that medicine can't, in a way that just like massages and things like that can't, in a way that heat or taking a hot bath can't. It's actually getting into the area that it's tensest. It's getting into the hardest part of what's going on. It's going into the ire of the storm. It's having the hard conversation you don't want to have. It's going to the gym when you don't have time. That's what was happening in my neck. Doing that hard thing by the next day. In fact, since then, I mean, I've been needled every, probably about every four or six weeks now at this point. But my headaches are I might have one every four to six weeks. My neck has felt amazing since the last time he needled me. And it hurt while it was happening. But it's felt amazing since because sometimes you have to endure the short-term pain for the long-term gain. And when we try and hack that system, we take away, honestly, the thing that gives us motivation and a feeling of accomplishment in our life. I think one of the reasons that so many people struggle with motivation is because we've been taught as a society to like biohack our way through life, to do the easy method, to do what makes us happy. And if anything makes us slightly uncomfortable, we avoid it. What I want to encourage you to do is run into the eye of the storm. And in fact, I have four ways that I want you to think about this because there's something you're avoiding doing in your life. Maybe it's something physically, maybe it's something intellectually, maybe it's something emotionally, maybe it's something spiritually. That's the Pies framework that I talk about all of the time. It's the four areas of life that I constantly think about myself through. What am I doing to grow myself, to feel the best that I can for my age and situation in life physically? Intellectually, what am I doing to continue to grow myself, grow my mind, grow my capacity, grow my capabilities? Emotionally, what am I doing to make sure that I'm managing my emotions well to where I'm in a healthy emotional spot? And also, what am I doing to evoke emotions within other people that they enjoy feeling? What are the relationships in my life that I need to be cultivating? And then spiritually, how am I living in line with my beliefs and values? Now, here's what I want you to do. I want you to think about those four areas of your life. And I want you to think about the one that gives you the most of a gut punch. The one that you're like, mmm, yeah, there is a situation in my life where I really have it out with a friend or I really have it out with a family member. And we haven't talked in a while. And I don't, I don't want to talk to them. I don't know how it's gonna go. The one area that you felt the most when you heard about it, that's the area that you need to focus on. Maybe

Finding Your Block With PIES

SPEAKER_00 12:16

it was physically, you're like, oh, I don't want to hear about that. I don't want to think about going to the gym. I don't want to think about having to eat healthier, but that's the area you're most constrained right now. Maybe it's spiritually, and you're like, I've been distant from God and my faith. I don't even know how to go to church right now. I'm angry at God about some things. Maybe that's where you need to focus your time because that is what's holding you back the most right now. Or maybe it's intellectually where you're like, I don't know what my purpose is. I don't know how to grow myself or my capabilities. Well, that's the one that you need to focus on right now. The one you're most scared of and that you're avoiding, that's your breakthrough. There was a book written a couple of years ago by a guy named Ryan Holliday called The Obstacle is the way. And he basically went back into history and looked at all of these different historical events where there was a big obstacle, a big fight, a big war, something that was the obstacle. And the only way for the person to get ultimately what they wanted was to go through it. The obstacle was the way, not figuring out how to go around it, but figuring out how to work with it, how to go through it. Your obstacle in you becoming your best self is the way. So, where is it that you need to focus on now? And if you need help with this, I have a free assessment that you can take. You, it's about, I don't know, 40, 50 questions, and you can go through it. And at the end of it, it'll tell you where your biggest gap is in your pies, physically, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. You can find that by clicking the link in the description. Totally free. I'm calling it the show up assessment because it's helping you see how you show up and what you can do to show up better in your day to day life. So I would love for you to take that, click the link below. And until next time, stay strong.