CEO Mental Fitness Series: James Hollis Living an Examined Life

Where Are You Stuck?

Chapter 7

We're all stuck somewhere.

Maybe it's that last 15 pounds.

Maybe it's that one department that just can't seem to pull it together.

Maybe it's that habit, relationship, or leadership pattern that just... won't... budge.

It's not what you think it is.

It's a ruse.

James Hollis says the problem isn't the surface issue. It's what's underneath it.

"Under each stuck place there is a wire, so to speak, that reaches down into the archaic field and activates a field of anxiety... strong enough to hold the line against change."

Translation?

You're not lazy. You're not indecisive.

You're protecting yourself from an old fear, one you probably haven't named yet.

CEO Mental Fitness involves the willingness to suffer the loss of the comfort that being stuck provides.

You're choosing a smaller, safer version of yourself.

Instead of the bigger, riskier version that growth demands.

CEO Reflection Audit:

What fear or story am I avoiding by staying stuck?

What's the payoff for staying where I am?

What part of me am I protecting by not moving forward?

CEO Challenge:

Whether in your personal or in your professional life, there is something you're covering up by being stuck. Stop it. Once and for all stop it.

Come Back to Your Task

Chapter 8

Your inner voice always knows what is best for you.

We are continuing our study of The Examined Life by James Hollis.

I am pursuing this line of inquiry because it is essential for CEO Mental Fitness.

Inside, we know what is right for us.

And we have known this from the beginning.

It simply gets clouded by adaptation.

And what is that task?

To show up as we are, true to ourselves.

Oscar Wilde said, "Be yourself, everybody else is taken."

But sometimes it's hard, or not politically or socially acceptable, or whatever.

James Hollis says:

"We forget our task, our responsibility to our talents, to our interests, and to our unique perspectives on the world... Yet something in us remembers and protests... So we diminish the protests, the troubling dream, the fear that awakens us at three in the morning."

We must return to the task of being who we are and becoming the best version of ourselves.

CEO Reflection Audit:

What message are we telling ourselves that we refuse to listen to?

What if we became the person we were meant to be?

Consider trading the comfort of adapting for the suffering of becoming?

CEO Challenge:

Discipline yourself to spend 15 minutes in self-reflection at the close of every day. Did you show up as yourself, in service of your inner soul?

Go Big or Go Home?

Chapter 9

That phrase didn't come from a movie or a motivational book.

It started as a slogan for oversized Harley-Davidson pipes in Southern California in the 1990s.

And it stuck.

Why? Because deep down, we know

we're not here to play small.

CEOs make hundreds of choices a day.

Some are strategic. Some are reactive.

But every single one either enlarges us or diminishes us.

James Hollis gives us a deceptively simple test:

"Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me?"

Often, we take the easy route because it's less painful, safer, or expected.

And no one could fault us for hitting the "easy button."

No one, except our inner soul, crushed by a life of adaptation and crying out for its true expression.

You know the moments:

The meal's wrong, but you smile and stay silent.

You hold back a tough call because you're afraid to be wrong.

You pause, not out of strategy, but out of fear.

Ultimately, to step into the larger, we have to go through our fears to come out the other side. Like

Taking the training wheels off.

Driving for the first time.

Asking someone out.

Firing your first employee.

CEO Reflection Audit:

Where am I shrinking to stay safe or liked?

What's the fear behind the "reasonable" choice?

What would it look like to go bigger, even if it's messier?

CEO Challenge:

Take a walk.

No phone. Just questions.

Where in your life are you choosing comfort over courage?

Then ask yourself:

What would enlarge me right now?

And go do that.