Recap: Kevin Riddle From Overwhelm To Authenticity

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the recap episode of How to Be a Real One Percenter that we just had with Kevin Riddle, who is a co-owner of the computer culture IT company in Christchurch, and just a real awesome guy who's come and shared some really fascinating things with us. 

I just want to give a little bit of a background to this particular recap, in that the whole reason for this podcast is, you know, I woke up after having a real dark period of my own life and being fortunate enough to have a breakthrough, an epiphany of understanding that life didn't have to continue to go downhill like it did, and I could live a great life. I could live the greatest life possible for myself. 

That epiphany led me on a journey, and I had no idea how to reach potential. I just knew that I needed to, and I wanted to, and so I started to learn. I went to the library and the bookshop, and I started to learn from people, the teachers that were out there, but I can only share my own journey that after a lot of that, I felt really up and really down, and I felt like I could do anything, but I just wasn't, and my life wasn't changing. 

And, you know, the sad realisation. The sad realisation that I had is that, really, when I started to look around, only 1% of people seemed to really genuinely be happy with their lives, to really be alive, to be loving the experience of their life, be it the successes they were achieving, the relationships that they had, the way that they felt. And I thought it's really, you know, tragic that with all this knowledge that we have out there, why is only 1% of people or less, you know, enjoying and having the greatest experience of their life? 

And so, I started to get really discerning, and that's when I know now that when we get really committed to something, then the right teachers will show up, the right teachings will show up, and that's what happened for me. You know, some amazing teachers and teachings started to come my way. It wasn't the mainstream. It wasn't the posters on the wall. It was insights that I hadn't heard before. You know, I call these now the hidden keys to success, and this podcast is really about sharing those. It's what I’ve worked with clients. Be they individuals or businesses or, you know, athletes. I just work with so many different kinds of people in groups, and it's applying those. 

And I had the idea, well, what if we got people that are on this 1% pathway to share some insights? And I wanted to give that because Kevin shared some things on this last one that are quite profound, and it's not things that we talk about or think about or even in the psyche for most people. And one of those is about creating the story, you know, and I think he gave us such a profound insight into how that works, you know, sharing the, if you haven't seen the episode, please go back and watch the episode with Kevin. Where he shared about an incident that happened when he was five years old, dropping a toy down the stairs and making noise and waking everyone up in the house when there was a rule in the house to not make that noise, to not, you know, to not wake people up. 

And even though he didn't get into trouble, he just felt so guilty and so, you know, that he was going to be in trouble, he just broke out crying on the stairs. And basically, he created a story of his life that day. That's kind of a hard stretch or a big stretch for people to get that that's what's happened. But he just describes how from that moment forward, that story impacted everything in his life, you know, trying to please people, trying to make sure because he decided he was a bad boy. All of a sudden, he went from believing he was a good boy to a bad one. And then he spent the rest of his life since that time trying to prove that he was a good one. 

It's a big thing for people to see. But that is one of the key things that we can take from Kevin's episode of the podcast is that that is what we do. You know, we do create a story about who we are and a real gold nugget. I love that word because there's a lot of gold being shared on these podcasts with the fantastic guests that we have like Kevin. They're gold. And, you know, one of the things that he shared was this insight that he did create the story. You know, he created the story. And then and after that, every decision that he made, everything that he did was to try to make sure that people knew that he was a good boy, that he was actually a superhero. 

And that sent him on a pathway of having these motives to, for people to look at him a certain way, you know. And he just shared some amazing things like how as a business owner that led to him doing things like trying to do everything in the business, you know, instead of delegating things and having other people do it. He took over, you know, a lot of control. And for someone who's worked with businesspeople for a lot of years, it's something that's rampant in businesses and really holding them back is that we won't let go of control. You know, we feel we have to do it. 

And people sometimes wonder, well, why am I like that? You know, I’ve had people come in and ask me, why am I like that? And Kevin just did such a great job of explaining that, because why we're like that is we have some hidden motive or hidden story. You know, we might be afraid of failure, or we might feel that we have something to prove we have. You know, it's not that the work has to get done. It's that we have to do it. Because underneath it, then we'll look good. We'll be good. You know, people will look at us, but we don't see the damage that that's actually causing. So, it's not just in a business context, but there's so much gold in that. If we start to understand, you know, it's a process and starting to dig in and say, well, look, I do have a story. What is it? 

And one of the ways that we can do that is to start looking at how is it impacting us. So, if we start looking at the impacts, you know, how am I disempowering people in my life? How am I, you know, am I really thinking about them or do I want them to succeed because it makes me look a certain way? And there's just certain things if we look at it, we'll see the motives. I call them hidden motives that we have, and that can lead us to the understanding of the story. 

It's a big thing to say, and I know it, but that's what this work is about. And it's why it's called how to be a real one percenter if we're going to do that. And to me, a real one percenter is simply a person or a group that's living their greatest possibility. And for me, it has to be genuine if we're going to do that. And if we, if we're going to be on that path, we have to really wake up and understand that that we have stories that we created about who we are. And we have motives that are, you know, propelling us and driving us to try to prove ourselves or to do things. And it's just not necessary because that story that we created, it didn't happen. Kevin was just never a bad person. He just dropped a toy. End of story. But our minds make up what it means. 

Because we want to protect ourselves from pain. And when we feel those painful experiences, we want to protect ourselves from ever feeling them again. So, we create a whole identity to prevent us from that. So, I'm sure that, that will unfold in further, further episodes of the podcast and further recaps. It's a big thing to look at and to understand. But if we're going to live our genuine path and even really know what it is that we want in our lives, it's something that's really necessary to do. And I'm hoping that more people will be like Kevin on the podcast and share and some of the previous people that we've had who've already started to do that and really share the impacts of those stories and what can happen when we wake up to them. And when we question them. 

Kevin mentioned turnarounds. It's a process where we really question those stories at quite a deep level, not so that we can mentally shift them, but so that we can shift them on a really deep level, realize how much they're impacting our lives. And. It's a process where we really connect with who we are and turn that around, which we can do with any challenge, turn that around to something that helps propel us forward instead of holding us back. 

The other thing absolutely worth mentioning, there's so many things worth mentioning in Kevin's podcast. One of the things that really strikes out to me is when he spoke about visualization at the end, it's one of the things that we do in the work is to talk about focus, you know, and how important focus is. If we focus. On what's going wrong, it will multiply that, and we'll get more things going wrong. So, if you ever wonder if you know those people in your life or hopefully not, but maybe you might have been one like me in the past where you, you kind of ask the question, why are always things happening to me? You know, why do things always happen to me? And you just find, you know, that person that you know that's got everything is always happening to them. If you really, really look at their mindset, it's because that's where they're focused. That's what they're resonating on is that things are always happening to them. So, they do. 

And what I’ve seen in the work for over 30 years now with myself and so many different clients is that when we start putting the focus on what's going right, what we're doing well, then that grows too. And it builds our momentum to towards achieving greater success. So Kevin shared a bit about a process and for me, visualising isn't just getting some pictures in the mind because that hasn't worked for a lot of people, but it's getting ourselves into actually feeling what it's like to be where we want to be or to have what we want to have and to regularly put ourselves there. And then gauge our progress, right, train ourselves to look for the little things or big things that are happening. Because most often we'll be so focused on what's not going right. We will, sorry, what's going wrong. 

I'll say that again. We're so focused on the things that are going wrong because we are conditioned that way that we don't see the things that are going right. And if we train ourselves to actually put the focus on even the small things that are working out for us, we'll actually build momentum. It's like I shared the experiment with the, it's a childhood experiment where you have a magnifying glass and on a sunny day you take a leaf or a piece of paper and you put the magnifying glass onto it and it takes the heat from the sun and concentrates, concentrates it, focuses it on a focal point and it builds the temperature so that the leaf burns, you know, it smokes or it burns due to the buildup of the pressure. 

Well, that's how creating happens. And the more focus that we put on something, the more that it heats up. And basically, I guess you could say catches fire like it. It gets on fire. It helps us to achieve what there is to achieve. So those are two golden nuggets I wanted to expand on a bit from what Kevin shared. Again, it was an amazing episode. If you haven't seen it, please go watch it. And thank you for watching this. And I look forward to seeing you on the next how to be a real one percenter podcast with another amazing guest.