Sports and athletics require hard work, sacrifice and a focused mindset. These are the same things that you need to grab on to business success, and former Top 10 in Women’s Racquetball, Dr. Jo Shattuck has these in spades. In this episode, Stephen Jaye and Dr. Shattuck share insights on how the qualities necessary for sports also translate to business. Dr. Shattuck talks about getting her late start in racquetball and bucking that to climb up to a top 10 rank in the sport in the US. We also hear of the creation of PantherTec and the Kinesthetic Awareness Training system based on her experiences as an athlete. Listen in and be inspired by Dr. Jo Shattuck’s journey.
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Athletics, Sacrifice And Mindset: Setting Up For Business Success With Jo Shattuck
Pursuing and realizing our passions takes some hard work and sacrifice. The things that are important in life, bring satisfaction, actualization and all the like are going to take a little bit more effort and even some sacrifice. Some people in some pursuits naturally lend themselves to understanding that sacrifice. One community that I’ve found that understands the idea of sacrificing for something is the athletic community.
I trained and completed Ride The Rockies, which here in Colorado was a 6-day, 400-plus bike ride up and down the mountains in different places. It’s one of those experiences that you work hard for and get a certain feeling of that reward for that hard work. My guest, Jo Shattuck, understands that particular aspect of working hard and training for a passion as she is a former racquetball champion and has started a business called PantherTec, which helps people with techniques as well as some other things about their athletic pursuits and everything.
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Jo, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, Stephen. This is great.
First of all, I’m going to start by talking about your racquetball days because not everyone is an athlete or has an athletic pursuit. Athletic pursuits do have that whole air of you’re following a passion and working hard for it. What brought you to racquetball? What was the process of training to become a racquetball champion like?
If you put yourself in some other experience that you have no idea what it is, you don't even plan what it might be like, that's how you get some of the extra sensory inputs and different ways of perceiving concepts and ideas and things in the world. Click To TweetI don’t know how far back you want me to go but I had a lot of energy as a kid. In the ninth grade, my mom saw the writing on the wall. I was getting in some trouble, staying out past curfew and stuff. She signed me up for 100 different things, Girl Scouts some basket weaving and whatever else. At the local club, I went, played it and lost every game, 21 to 1 or 21 to 0. That was way back in the day. I went on to undergraduate at Louisiana Tech. They had thirteen beautiful glass back quarters. In those days, being a teenager, you could drink, study or play racquetball.
I did the 1st and 3rd. I decided I wanted to be good. I remember the exact moment I decided. I was hitting the ball and it went where I wanted it. I went out to the hallway and asked the fellows. I was like, “This could be something that I might get into. Are there racquetball contests?” They laughed at me because they’re not called contests. They’re called tournaments. I went to my first tournament with my glove. I won a Ladies B tournament in the middle of Louisiana by myself and all that. I was probably still smoking cigarettes at that time and doing all the things that teenagers do. I did not take the normal path to elite athleticism like some of my other colleagues did.
You tried hundreds of different things. Do you feel like that’s a common story as far as people finding that thing that they’re truly passionate about? You’ve tried a bunch of things. Maybe some things didn’t work out at all and maybe some things you’re like, “This is cool.” You eventually find that one thing and feel like you were meant to do it.
As far as personal development, everyone’s different. In my case, it was my mom saying, “We got to find something for you to do so you don’t end up in trouble.” I was a teenager so I’m not driving yet and all that. People, in general, need to pursue a lot of different things. I often say this to people I’ve met in Colorado. You can’t get there from here. You can get there from somewhere. If you sit still, you’re not going to do anything. What I mean is going out and taking a tennis lesson or learning Spanish. It’s information. You’re not marrying somebody and committed. I tend to filter my thoughts through, “Is this reversible or not?” Almost everything in life is reversible, aside from wrecking a relationship, that kind of thing. If it’s reversible and you can learn something, say yes.
This applies not just to teenagers but if someone’s reading who is already in their 20s, 30s started a career and didn’t necessarily like it, you’re saying it should be the next step. One of the ideas of my previous guest described it as being in a situation where you say, “I don’t know what I want to do but I can’t keep doing this.” If someone’s in that position, the next step you would recommend is to try something or a bunch of things.
There’s a lot of different lessons that tell that story. One of the times I quit college. Oddly enough, I’m a PhD but it took me a long time to get there. Mom and I were having a moment. I was like, “Mom, I don’t think I like what I’m doing anymore.” She’s like, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I don’t know.” She goes, “What do you like to do?” I said, “I like to play racquetball.” She said, “Why don’t you make a living doing that?” I noticed those 5 or 6 words. I was like, “Oh.” I love my mom to death. I say thank you to her a lot because she’s that kind of woman. She would say, “Don’t do anything you don’t want to do for longer than two weeks.” That’s a metaphor for life’s too short. If you’re exploring a lot of things, if it’s reversible, it’s information. You can’t get there from here. You can get there from somewhere else.
Once you decided that racquetball was your future and it is what you wanted to do, what process did you undergo to make yourself successful?
You can't get there from here, but you can get there from somewhere. If you stay still, you're not doing anything. Click To TweetI don’t think I took the typical road. A lot of the racquetball starts younger. They have coaches, go to Junior Worlds and start planning as early as 6 to 9, all the way up to collegiate and all that. I started late. I would not recommend the way that I did it to people, which is to throw myself in. When you teach a boxer, you don’t want them to get their butts kicked too early too often. You want to gradate your success. There is this theory of performance that success builds on success. The first two years, I played the pro tour. I lost every game. I don’t even think I won a game. In 1991, I played Caryn McKinney, who was number one at that time because another girl got injured. I spent every nickel I had to go to Atlanta and lost 1 and 2 or some ridiculous score like that. Good or bad, it made me want it more. I probably had no business trying to do it.
You had a couple of years on the tour and lost every game. What I’m wondering is what kept you going? What did it take for you to get to the place where you were more successful in that endeavor? What sacrifices, changes, attitudes and things like that?
This is real deep. I came from a position of being an underdog. It’s not a therapy session or anything but I identified much with the fight, struggle and underdog of it. Without that ingredient in me, I don’t think I would have continued. Bon Jovi’s like, “You live for the fight when that’s all that you got.” On a side note, I give performance speeches as an athlete but that held me back in some ways because I identified with an underdog and not ever being above that.
Some self-sabotage subconscious allowed me to get to number 6 in the world but not to number 5. Oddly, number five was my goal and I never got there. I got the number six for a quarter of a season. The idea is that I should have been more flexible enough to change my identity. I don’t always have to be the underdog fighting. It would be nice to be on top and I can defend my successes. That’s about what’s inside of me.
I loved competing and every second of it. In the court, you can control yourself, ball, breathing, emotions and all that. It’s your way to manage your environment. Everything else in the world is beyond your control. The other thing that was so exciting is it’s 10, 10 and you’re serving to make the US team represent the Pan-Am games. You have the ball and nobody knows what’s going to happen. Not you, not the ref. It is so exciting to know that it’s competing against yourself or another person. I love that and the underdog part, even though it stood at fault.
You talk with the underdog part about being flexible with your identity in a way. If a reader out there is struggling, say they launched something, not getting success or getting that standard rejection, that standard delayed gratification, even starting with a failure and having to go back to the drawing board, what do you think a lot of people need to do with their flexible identity to be able to withstand something like that, rejection, initial failure and still want to keep going?
That is the part that you can’t get there from here, except if you always relied on something, you’re much more comfortable keeping that something and not giving it up. A little bit of success can hold you back and might make you hold onto something that’s not quite working for you. It’s working a little bit but it doesn’t get you past. The not holding onto your identity, I’ll tell you a little story about how I retired. We were planning a season. It was in Arlington on December 18th, 2010. I was not feeling not myself for a few months because the season starts in September. I was like, “Maybe I have some weird disease, cancer or something.”
I don’t know what it was. I just didn’t feel right. I bolted out of bed around December 16th, 2010. I realized I would rather be somewhere else and talked to Anthony, my training partner. I said, “Anthony, I don’t know who I am.” “ You’re Jo, the pro.” I went and played that game. My heart wasn’t in it and I talked to my other friend. I don’t know if you know anything about racquetball but you take timeouts and it was close to the end of the match.
My friend came to the door and her name was Angela. Chile’s number one player for a long time. She said, “Jo, you’re struggling here but if you go out, wouldn’t you rather go out on fighting tooth and nail, as hard as you can and all that?” I remember saying to her, “I don’t care.” That was the switch that went off. In the next six months, I don’t know who I was. I cried all the time. I couldn’t watch any competing on TV, not even poker or Family Feud. It was bad.
Have you been that poker stuff where they have the percent odds of winning at the bottom of the screen?
Like ESPN Poker or Lawn Mower. I couldn’t watch any competition because it was wrong. It wasn’t good to stop and wasn’t good to keep going. I was stuck in this place. That identity eventually took a few years to get out of that and into myself. I’m not Jo, the pro anymore. I was Jo, the scientist. I went, got my PhD and evolved into Joe, the athlete, neuroscientist and entrepreneur. Adapt or die, that’s the deal.
Let’s talk a little bit about that adaptation. You’re the entrepreneur and your company PantherTec helps people with their form across multiple sports. What made you decide that this was going to be your path at this point in your life?
It comes back to racquetball roots. It’s that competing that some of my competitors did. There was also no money in pro racquetball. You had to do other things like sell lessons, coach and run a program. I remember the housing crisis in 2008. With my interest rate on a tiny little house, I scraped together to afford and it went to 11%. I couldn’t afford to live there and play the tour at the same time. I bought a little camper. I don’t know if you know anything about Denver but I lived on the edge of Soda Lakes there. It was $470 in hand. You could see Red Rocks from the camper site.
I paid this lady $100 a month to park my camper without electricity. I had a little generator there. At night, it was so cold sometimes. I would take a cast iron pot, heat it, wrap it in a towel and then hug it. Looking back, I’m like, “I was a crazy person.” I did that for two years. On the coldest days, I would go to my friend Dave’s house. You would leave it open knowing it was cold and I’d go crash on his floor. The point of that is I had to become a good teacher to make money to be able to feed my racquetball habit. I spent a lot of time one-on-one in a court with another human being trying to get a move in a certain way.
You find yourself using metaphors. Pretend that you are a Black, your racket is on a rope, be heavy on this leg and all these words and metaphors to try to get someone to experience the sensation of movement, then replicate and repeat it. That’s where the seed lies. I was a pro at Denver Athletic Club for seven years. People would come and train with me. They fly in. We’d do 2 days for 6 days, train, go home and come back a few months later. It was like nothing happened. They forgot all their muscle memory, which as a neuroscientist, that’s technically a misnomer but that’s the way it is.
Muscles don’t have memory. Your motor cortex, your brain has memory. I wish there was a way I could capture my instruction, freeze and then have them take it with them. That was the beginning. My dissertation was exactly that. How does the brain change when learning going through a motor sequence from not knowing how to do anything at all to being relatively proficient at it in a short amount of time? Muscle memory happens in minutes or months. We did about a week of absolute intense training to draw tasks. That’s how it started. I wished I could capture my instruction and have my athletes capture the sensation of movement and self-correct at home when I wasn’t around.
If you've always relied on something, you're much more comfortable keeping that something and not giving it up. Click To TweetWhat I love about the story is your experience. First of all, you had to have an experience because of the nature of your sport. That was probably like a sacrifice that you had to make for racquetball. Living in the camper and dealing with all that heating up but also the component of pursuing your passion with racquetball. You not only lived in the camper for a little while but there’s no money in it so you were teaching all these lessons. A lot of people are going to approach something like that. Some people might say, “This sucks. I can’t believe I have to do that. Why do I have to do that? All these basketball players and golfers don’t have to do that because their sports get all these promotion deals.”
That experience and hardship you endured of having to do all this teaching inform what will become your business idea later on because you were watching people with their technique and saying like, “I need you to learn this technique. What’s a better way to do it.” “You could do it through all this rigorous training or I can build this device.” What made you connect the dots into saying that this is an idea that applies not just to racquetball but to any other sport whether it be golf, basketball or anything else that you’re dealing with PantherTec?
I want to direct my attention to correction to the shoulders. It all begins in the hips, the kinetic chain from the feet to the shoulders and arms. I would correct a lot of different things. In my head, I was moving my instruction from the arm to the shoulder, hip and foot. That stuck with me. If I was to build an imaginary something, I would need to be able to move it around the body or put it on a support. It turns out that everyone in the world moves. Everybody moves and learns from the time that you learned to crawl to the time that you learned to use a walker and everything in between.
Motor learning is a universal ambiguity. It wasn’t too far of a leap to know that I didn’t build it with the intent of having it be used for sports therapy, military, space training, vocational and all that stuff. I built it for this but a few years ago, people were saying, “That’s a good idea. Have you thought about using it for this?” “Yeah, but I don’t know. I thought about using it for this.”
We have seventeen people on our experts and ambassadors team. They’ve all tested various iterations of the device in different sports and applications. We had our first clinical trial starting in a neuro rehab center in Omaha. That’s exciting. When I left racquetball, I threw myself into science as part of my coping mechanism for not being a racquetball player anymore. I was a research assistant at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. I said, “I want to have a product in clinical research one day.” Here I go.
One important thing that story points out is the idea of being out there and having conversations with people. One of the misconceptions about ideas is that this idea that someone’s sitting on a bench, conjuring, that pose with your fist in front of your face and light bulb pops off like, “That’s the idea when a lot more benefit comes from talking with people.” The idea for my show came about when I was talking with other attendees at a Ted Conference and they were saying, “I’m so inspired by these talks and the people I’m meeting with. Monday and Tuesday, I’m going to go to work. Wednesday, I’m going to talk to my risk-averse friends and family. Before I know it, I’m not inspired anymore. I’m back to being in a position of fear and feeling stuck but it wouldn’t have come about without that whole talking to other people.”
Science, especially academia, lends itself to silos of knowledge. Some part of it is so specialized. For example, a person’s doctorate, maybe on what neuro-electrical chemical processes on this molecule, in this protein fiber and their whole dissertation is about that. That’s not a kitchen table topic. They’ll know more about that molecule than anybody else in their field. Motor learning, fortunately, is broad. Everybody does it. Sports is pretty broad, especially with the explosion of women’s sport and all that. I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s probably one of the things I’ve learned over the years. There are no new ideas. There are new combinations of old ideas.
If someone is out there feeling stuck in that position like, “I don’t want to do this anymore. My heart’s not in it. I don’t know where my passion lies,” what would be a good way for that person to get out there and engage with the world in a manner in which they’re going to find out? Not all conversations are equal. There’s going to be 100% upfront with that.s Some conversations are never going to lead you to, “This led me to the idea that I want to pursue, the business I want to start or the passion I want to realize.” What would you say someone should do to get to the point where they’re having those conversations? They’re putting this out there in a way that might get them to that eventual a-ha moment like, “A-ha. This isn’t just about racquetball. Every movement sports of basketball, tennis, golf could do it and everything else.”
Part of human behavior can be in psychology. Studying psychology is you like to be around people that are like you because you immediately feel welcomed and have some commonalities that you would feel included, all the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you go to the library to study, you probably will meet people who like to go to the library to study. If you go to the skate park, you might meet people that like to go to the skate park. The problem is you can’t think about, “I’m going to go do this and have this experience.” It’s because you’re going to bring yourself along with you. If you put yourself in some other experience that you have no idea what it is, you don’t even plan what it might be like.
That’s how you get some of the extrasensory inputs and different ways of perceiving concepts, ideas and things in the world. In group, think if you watch CNN. You’re going to get a lot of ideas from people that watch CNN. I equate it to the silly thing of, “Drive home a different way from work.” That’s the metaphor. You don’t know where you’re going. You get there in a different way. The other opposite of that is, “Drive anywhere. I want to see what’s up that road.” “Do I know that there’s a library with people in it like me or a skate park?” No. You go somewhere different.” That’s part of learning for me. It’s information. You can get to the road and say, “It turns out this is a cooking class. I don’t like that. I’ll turn around and come back.”
It makes sense in the context of what you were saying before about trying 100 things before landing on a racquetball. You try the whole bunch of things. This is like almost a meta version of it where maybe someone doesn’t even know what to try. They’re having the conversation of, “I don’t even know what to try. I need to meet people.” To meet people or expose yourself to any different ideas, you have to try to do anything different. Change up your morning routine, wake up earlier or later.
I’m a proponent that there’s no one formula for success. It’s not like those infomercials where it’s like, “Wake up at 4:30 and you’ll be successful beyond your wildest dreams.” Maybe that’ll work for someone, staying up until 2:00 will work for someone else, finding different groups of people or a different place. Even if you take a different route home, maybe you’ll see a different storefront, a different image of something or encounter a different thing that inspires you.
As a neuroscientist, your thoughts are all about different associations that come to you as you navigate yourself in the world. Listening to podcasts led me to be here. Not listening to the same radio station every time. Listen to some music that I hate. It’s crazy. It keeps your mind open in a very non-scientific way. Do something different. In fact, in training racquetball, we always like to practice things we’re good at. It feels good because we’re good at them. It feels like this cycle. Going through life, it’s the same thing. You do what feels good and it’s the same thing.
In the training, we spent twenty minutes every hour. Whatever your worst skill was that day, we would dive into that. It doesn’t mean it’s bad and you were awful at it but it was your least favorite or worst thing to do. You did and sat in that for a while. The same thing as I was going to say to eat some food you don’t like but that’s not what I mean.
There are no new ideas. There’s just new combinations of old ideas. Click To TweetOne of the things that have been on my mind is the idea that we all get into ruts. Every once in a while, there’s that uneasy feeling that brought. You’re doing what makes you feel good, you’re enjoying or what comes naturally to you. Before you know it, you’re only doing the same thing. You need some differentiation. I’m not saying preventing it because it’s probably tough to prevent it. It’s going to naturally happen. What’s the key to identifying a rut at an early stage before it leads to some degree of short-term depression or anything like that?
Self-awareness is huge. There’s a theory about depression that says it has a function. Physically and physiology when you get depressed, you stop and think. It makes you reflect on whatever the thing is you’re depressed about. It’s cyclical. If you are happy all the time, you wouldn’t be depressed. The symptom of depression makes you slow down and reflect. That’s maybe like, “How do you stop it before it gets there?” The urge to reflect and awareness are good starting points to try to prevent a rut.
Maybe depression’s the wrong word. I don’t want to sound insensitive to people that are dealing with chemical depression. That’s a lot harder to solve than throwing out there and meeting new people or trying something new. I always think about something along the lines of being in a funk or something like that. What you opened my eyes to is the idea of not thinking of that as a failure as your psychological mechanism to understand, “I need to reflect on this as opposed to keeping myself busy. I’m enjoying this. I’m lit but it’s not leading me anywhere.” Eventually, something needs to come in and say, “As great as this experience was, it’s time to vary it up and for something new.”
I’m smiling because what you said on a meter scale would be my career racquetball story. It’s that going and going. I loved every minute and wouldn’t trade it. Keep in mind that I stopped in the middle of the season. I was top ten of the world at that time. I couldn’t even watch competitions for a few years. When you watch cartoons, there’s the big red circuit breaker switch that the cartoon character pulls down then all the lights go out. It was like one of those went off inside me and I realized I would never train for racquetball the way that I did before. The reason I’m saying that is it occurred to me that what you described being stuck and then finally quitting in the most ungraceful way. That’s what I did.
You talked about the training for racquetball. How intense was that training? How intensive was your brain alluded to playing catch up because a lot of people started when they were 6 or 7 and you didn’t get into it until a little bit later?
A couple of stories come to mind. One is it’s a sport you can play for a long time. I started at seventeen. I played for another 23 years or so. It’s a young sport so it’s still evolving. Technically, it’s so much different than it was when I first started. When I first started, I was one of the few people that dove on the court and then everybody dives. The game’s harder, the ball’s faster and the rackets are lighter. One of the training things I remember is being 26 or 27, thinking that was a little old. My friend Sarah will have a table and would train. We’d be doing sprints. Whatever your weakness was in your head, the other person would whisper or yell that at you as you were doing your training.
Looking back, you couldn’t do it with somebody else but I was like, “Are you sure you want to do this? You should quit. You’re 26.” You’re trying to do whatever workout you’re doing and said, “You’re old. You should quit. Whatever your weakness is, you don’t have that service. You’ll never have that.” This is going to be very anti psychology to a lot of the performance people out there. In this situation with my training partner, we had agreed that this is what we will do as far as motivation. Part of that is pre-planning. I never felt old and still don’t. It must’ve been a worry of mine some time but in a match, if those doubts start to poke their head in, you’ve already beat them 1,000 times because you did it in practice when you were doing wind sprints.
It almost reminds me of the way vaccination works, where you expose yourself to little amounts of something. You’re building up your psychological immune system to your own systems of self-doubt.
“Jo said you should always announce all your negative feelings.” No, that’s not it. Sarah’s a real close friend of mine. We agreed that this is what we would do for this training session. Hers was some, “Not experienced enough,” because she started even later than I did. “You’ll never catch up to these people.”
One thing I’m wondering is this whole building up your psychological immune system to your negativity. Is this something you’re bringing to PantherTec?
Yes. I might have a gift of attention span. If I liked doing something, I don’t hear the noise. “This work, I want to do it. I like how I spend my time.” The most valuable currency a person has is hours in the day. I might have more years than you or you might have more years than me but we all only get twelve hours a day. How you spend that time is irreplaceable, which lends to being in a rut.
Fortunately, for whatever reason, I’ve been able to turn what I love to do into making a living of sorts, even if it’s cleaning carpets at night and living in my camper so I can play tournaments during the week. Like a long way round, I was saying a short attention span almost being short-sighted. I don’t see any of that. I am still having that long-term vision, which I don’t know how happens.
Some of it is about breaking things up. You have a long-term vision of where you want to go but then the question is, “What do I need to do this week to make that happen?” You want to break it up in small segments so that you can have a manageable chunk as opposed to a nebulous sea of work.
A lot of things are happenstance, right place, time and person. That also lend to leaving where you are and getting somewhere else because you can’t get there from here. Anywhere else is better than here. Everybody moves and able to use for a lot of different things. Business-wise, we have 3 or 4 different verticals after sports, physical therapy, military, licensing, even space training. You’re inputting an auxiliary proprioceptive input into your sensory-motor space and then learning from it. If it was a one-trick pony product then maybe I would have a little more doubts but so far, we’ve been successful in a lot of different areas.
Here’s a somewhat loaded question. You alluded to our most valuable currency being our time. Would you say that there’s anything that represents an extremely poor use of that currency of our time in the world in general? What do you think people do that is a bad use of time? If that’s too broad, you can say for you too.
I’m not a very good typist. If I’m typing an email, I have 20 minutes of conversation and 20 minutes of content in my head and. It’s so inefficient to type it. That’s probably not where you are after.
That makes perfect sense, though because it’s the idea of doing the things that you’re not good at as opposed to passing them off to someone else.
We all only get 12 hours a day and how you spend that time is irreplaceable. Click To TweetThis is going to sound sexist but in the old days, a woman was the secretary and a man was the CEO who’s saying, “I need you to take dictation.” They don’t do that anymore and that’s good news but the technology exists out there. You can talk in your microphone and say this and this. I bet at least 3 or 4 times a week, I talk into my phone to record audio about what I’m thinking and saying. On the drive home or I listen to it later, a few more associations can come in. By the time I know it, I have a concept and action on what to do.
It’s being more efficient with your time and finding ways that work. When you’re experiencing frustrations with a task, you’d be aware. When you’re aware of those frustrations, you’re like, “I need to figure out another way to do this or something more efficient and effective whether it is a good place to hire someone to do this or use the technology we have.” Even if you decide like, “I’m bad at searching for songs on Spotify so I’m going to yell, ‘Alexa, play this song.’”
Your athletic pursuits gave you the ideas in your head or the understanding of what passion and sacrifice it takes to start up a business, see it through its fruition, make everything happen, coordinate everything, market and get through some of these other setbacks that we all experience. For anyone younger, what other experiences would give people that understanding of what it’s like to pursue something beyond that 5,000 liked picture? It doesn’t necessarily have to be like, “I have to sacrifice day in, day out so I wouldn’t have to live in a camper van?” Some of the sacrifices are as simple as, “My friends were all partying last night. I had to stay home and work on an investor pitch.”
This thought to dive into the racquetball but every day it feels like you make the Olympic team and then you get fourth in the Olympics in the same day. It’s an incredible rollercoaster. I heard that story when I started like, “It’s going to be an adrenaline rush.” Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?
It’s on my list. I don’t want to say bucket list but unfortunately, I have never made it to that particular. I’ve been to Yellowstone and a bunch of others.
You see it and your brain can’t even process what you’re seeing because it’s so big. It’s so overwhelming and amazing. What it’s like the ups and downs here? It’s the Olympic thing. There’s learning and everybody has different words to say that but there is no failing. If your goal is the process, you’ll never lose. When I mean lose, in the broad like they use in the analysis. Your process is to wake up, be open-minded, work hard, seek new adventures, try to learn something every day and listen more than you talk. One thing I was going to add too is if you have a Twitter, how many people are following you and how many people do you follow? That might say a lot. I never had to follow someone that had a nugget of something.
That’s an interesting take on it because a lot of people especially those who were trying to be influencers, the mark of success is that if you’re following more people than people that follow you, it means you’re, in a digital sense, listening more than you’re speaking.
I was thinking about leadership. I’m not a leader of people. I played an individual sport and coached individuals at a time. I’m a leader of my thought. I’m free to flow that way to come up with things, ideas and that kind of thing. Two people can be walking alone in a separate field. One is a leader because 1,000 people follow them. One isn’t. I don’t know that that’s even the right comparison. What I mean is you can be a leader and not have people follow you. You’re just doing your own thing. You can be a leader that says, “Come on, everybody follows me. We’re going to do this.”
Being able to see a little bit beyond because someone that wants to get recognized as a leader or feel validated as a leader in the traditional corporate world will think of, “How many people do I have under you?” In some other sense, “How many followers do you have? How many people liked your photo?” Oftentimes, the leadership and impact that you have on people tend to take on a little bit more subtle of a form. A great example would be this show. If, as a guest on this show, you inspired someone, you may never hear from the person that’s reading that read what you had to say and it helped them tweak their business in a way to make it gain some traction.
That’s a much better way of saying it. To me, you don’t have to have people to know people are following you. You’re being true to yourself and being a leader of your own life. Maybe by example, other people will do that too.
There really is no failing. There's only learning. If your goal is the process, you'll never lose. Click To TweetIt tends to be way more effective to lead by example than to lead by some form of coercion. I’ll leave that as a broad activity. Jo, thank you so much for joining us on the show and telling us the story about pushing through, training hard and loving racquetball so much. You’re willing to live in a camper van and do all sorts of crazy points.
It wasn’t even a van. It was a 1968 Holiday Rambler.
You can be a leader and not have people follow you. You're just doing your own thing. Click To TweetThank you to the readers out there. I want to encourage you to read again for some more episodes with more interesting people that have a story to tell and some great tidbits that’ll hopefully help you get to the next level wherever you are on your journey.
Thank you, Stephen, for having me. It’s been wonderful. I enjoyed this.
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About Jo Shattuck
Dr. Jo Shattuck, formerly known as Jo the Pro, started racquetball at 17 years old, and played for 23 more years. She competed on the professional world tour and peaked at a world rank of #6. After her competitive career, she earned a master’s degree in sport science, and a PhD in neuroscience focusing on the brain-behavior relationship of motor learning.