The Wound Quietly Running Your Successful Life

Machine transcribed from the episode audio, lightly cleaned. Timestamps are approximate.

0:00
You can build discipline, faith, and strong work ethic on top of a cracked foundation and still have everything crack under pressure. Because the foundation is what determines everything above it. I watched a man go from the absolute brink of divorce to a marriage that was fully alive. But he didn't do that by learning better communication skills. He did that by letting God rebuild the foundation that his identity had been sitting in for nearly 40 years. In this video, what I want to do is I want to show you what the wrong foundation produces, what the right one looks like, and then the specific process that bridges the gap between those two.

0:46
But before I go there, if you've been watching this series, you've heard me share this before, but I'm going to encourage you to do it again if you have not yet. And that is go down into the description, into the show notes, click the link for our free gap check. Now is the time to do that. It's going to show you which area of your own foundation is most cracked before we walk through what to do about it. Seven questions, about 10 minutes. Again, links down there. You don't have to put an email address, nothing like that. It's totally free. I won't even know that you took it. But I highly encourage you to do that. It makes these videos a lot more practical when you do do that. So hopefully you're going to do that.

1:25
Whether or not you do, let's move on. I want to talk first about what the wrong foundation produces. All right. So a man has such a hard time leaving a foundation that he can't see. We don't really know what's under there a lot. We haven't spent the time to really uncover what that foundation has been built on. And so what we end up doing is we end up building on top of the wrong foundation. And we do that for so long that it just starts to feel like the right one. It just starts to feel like that's just who you are. That's just what you do. And then we feel the cracks. Maybe even see some of the cracks.

2:12
And we start to take that as a personal failure. And when that happens, man, that just causes us to freeze up, to get stuck, or to run in the other direction. But I need you to know that that's not a personal failure. That's a foundation problem. And that's good news because that can be fixed. And that doesn't further attack an identity that is already struggling. So what does that look like? What does the wrong foundation look like? There's a couple of things here that I think are really helpful for you to consider. One of those is we need to look underneath the foundation. And some of you have seen this visual before of these two houses. And so underneath the foundation, when it's the wrong one, you're going to see a foundation that's built on wounds.

3:01
It's built on false identity. It is built on fear. These are not abstract. They're the origin of an identity that turns into performance, which is why you hustle so hard, which is why you work so hard, or one of the reasons why you do those things. What you'll then see on top of that is performance, approval, hustle, trying to prove your worth. This is real effort. And from all of those things, like you'll see, those are actually really good things, most of them. The problem is, is when they're built on the wrong base, they really send you sideways without you even really realizing it. And as it shows up in your life, it starts to show up as hollow winds.

3:47
Like you crush it, you do something really well, and it just doesn't feel great. It just doesn't feel fulfilling to you. Sometimes it looks like growth that plateaus. You can kind of struggle through it. You can kind of grind through it for a long period of time. But then eventually, you just kind of flatline. And if you're at a place in your life where you were killing it for a while, and then you flatlined, this could be part of the reason why that's the case. And then lastly is, most of us perform at a high level because we want to get to this place where we feel freedom. Really, it's this sense of peace. But that peace never arrives because, again, we're performing for all the wrong reasons, even when we're not intending to.

4:24
And then once we start to feel pressure, that foundation begins to reveal itself. We have a health scare. We have a personal or professional failure. We have a crisis in our marriage. And all of a sudden, we start to feel those cracks. And I've been there. I understand this. Lookit, we were trained to build this way. This is what the outside influences of this world have taught us to do it this way. Culture rewards it. And we've never really examined the foundation in the first place, again, because we just haven't really been taught to do that. And so we just end up continuing to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. And so as you'll see here, I mean, house one, right, it's just built.

5:09
And again, these are potential good things that we're building on top of. But on this cracked foundation, it's just leaning over and it's getting really, really weak. The other house, though, as you can see, and I've talked about this one before, and this one's a really important visual to look at. When you build on top of a strong foundation, when you build on top of a bedrock, which I'm going to get to talking about more in a minute, you are building on the sonship that you have in Jesus. You are building on the fact that your worth has been settled in Christ. You are building on the fact that you are living out a calling. You are not just pursuing for the sake of achievement. And that type of house, that house is unshakable.

5:49
It cannot be moved. And that's good news. Every single person that's watching this video right now, you're standing inside of one of those two houses. And you need to decide which one you're standing in front of. And so a couple of questions that you can ask yourself that would be really helpful before we move on to talking about what the right foundation looks like. So a couple things that I would ask you to consider here. Number one is, what is my sense of self-worth actually tethered to? Not what I want it to be, but what is actually true? When I start to feel really worthy, really valuable, what does that look like? What is giving me or producing that feeling? The second thing is, I encourage you to identify the wound that's most likely still writing the narrative in your life.

6:39
For me, for the longest period of time, I had this father wound. And so therefore, I was pursuing everything to prove to the whole world that I was worthy to never be abandoned, to never be left, that I was good enough, that I could be accepted. Look, this is not about becoming a victim. This is about becoming a detective. This is about understanding where the root cause is so we can start to fix it. And I'm going to talk about that in just a couple of minutes here. And the last question that I would ask you to consider is, what story have you been telling yourself about who you are and where did it come from? So I am because is a really good prompt for you to think about. So through all those questions, you should be able to come up with the wound or the false identity that's really underneath all of that stuff that's creating those patterns for you over and over again.

7:31
Know what that is and write it down. It's going to help you in this video, but it's going to help you much farther along than just that. So if you've named that wound, if you've named that false identity and you feel like, man, it has. It's just been running my life. It's just been ruining my life in one sense or another. It's been keeping me up at night. It's been stressing, frustrating me. This is what that gap check is for. So again, if you haven't done it yet, I'm going to keep encouraging you to do that. If you have done that, go back and reread what the findings were for you before you move on. That's going to be really, really helpful for you. Okay, so now I want to get into what the right foundation looks like because it's one thing to understand that something's off, that something's wrong and identify it.

8:19
But it's another thing to figure out like, okay, so what should it look like? What should I be rooting my life in, grounding my life in? What should I be building on top of? So I want to say this, like a man will not do this painful work of rebuilding unless you can clearly see what the rebuilt version looks like. Stephen Covey says, begin with the end in mind. Once you understand what the end is, then you can build a pathway to get there. So I get that. It's going to be really hard for you to change, sometimes very radically, unless you really know what you're changing for or what you're changing to. This is why this bedrock foundation is so important. We want to make sure that we are documenting the outcomes that we desire once we build on this new foundation.

9:11
So a couple of things, you saw this earlier when I showed you that graphic that we put together. But there's a couple of things that are really, really important for us to consider in that foundation. So the first one is, and I rattled these off earlier, but a sonship. So your identity must, and this is an absolute emphatic, no options, no questions asked. It must be rooted in the fact that you are a child of God that has been saved by Jesus as the result of his sacrifice on the cross for you. That you did nothing to earn or achieve that. Everything was given to you. That's first and foremost, what needs to be our foundation.

9:59
Then that leads to the second piece, which I say that your worth is settled. We no longer need, once we can agree to that, we no longer need to achieve in order to feel worthy. We no longer need to achieve more to feel better. The worth of our lives, the value of our lives that was established at the cross. That doesn't mean that then we rest in our laurels, though. That actually means that that fuels us to go out and relentlessly pursue what God has called us to. Which is the third thing, is that we must build our foundation on calling. We need to know what we are here to do. I just spent some time with a group of Christian professionals talking about identifying unique

10:47
vocational calling. If you want to learn more about that, hit me up. I'd be more than happy to share with you some ideas there. But this is something that Martin Luther, during the Reformation, wanted to help people to identify was what is vocational calling and how do I figure that out for myself? So we need to make sure that we are rooting our life in who God has created us to be, what God has made us for. That's Ephesians 2.10. We are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand. So we need to know that we are living from that place. If those three things are in order, then we will recognize that that foundation is load bearing and it can handle a heavy, heavy load.

11:33
When you write out your covenant, when you write out and create your legacy blueprint, which are all things that we do for our clients, when you create a purpose statement, when you declare your identity, these are all tools that we offer to private clients, to our group coaching clients. When you create those things, they hold weight because your foundation is right. You can create all those documents, but if you do those on a weak foundation, they're all going to come crumbling down anyway. And all of that is set with this reminder, Romans 12.2, which is at the bottom of the identity foundation stat graphic that you saw earlier. And it's Romans 12.2, which says that we have been transformed by the renewal of our mind.

12:16
It's not about reforming. It's not about improving. It's about complete transformation, that we are transformed by the renewal of our mind. It's a totally different way of thinking that gets us to a totally different stratosphere of outcome potential. And this was my client that I talked to you about earlier. When he came to me, his marriage, right, it was just, it was on the verge of death. He was a Christian. They were going to church pretty consistently. Unfortunately, he was doing really well at work, had multiple promotions, but he was just getting crushed. And his wife came to him and said, hey, after 18 years, I just want a divorce. And he had tried therapy. He had tried books. He had tried groups.

12:57
And none of it just ever went deep enough. None of it really hit the root of what he was looking for. And he would admit that he was missing the Christian depth of understanding who he was and what he was called to do, that he was struggling with his worth. He was struggling with his identity. And he was hiding behind professional performance, even though he wanted to be a good husband and he wanted to be a good father. Once we rebuilt his foundation, he started to recognize, and these were even words from his own wife, that they were living in the best season of their marriage ever. His faith was driving decisions for he and his family. And his professional life grew even more as the result of that.

13:36
So it was really incredible to see all these things happening. And so if you're like, yeah, Ryan, I want that. Like, I want to build on the right foundation. Then I would encourage you to go back and read Romans 12 too. Read it slowly. Read it over and over and over again. And understand that this requires complete transformation of our thinking, of our being, of our doing. Can you do that? Are you willing to do that? Is this what you're pursuing now? Or are you just pursuing better performance? Because you feel like if you just do more, that you will feel better and look better. So first is read Romans 12 too. The second thing I would encourage you to do is figure out where a strong foundation would

14:29
most impact your life. Like, what is the thing that is really struggling right now as the result of just a warped or a distorted or an incomplete identity? And what would change? Like, what would you desire to change? And then lastly is, what's it going to take? Look, this foundation cannot be rebuilt in a moment. It is going to be built through your wounds, not around them. I wrote a book, Wounds, How Hurt, Heartache, and Tragedy Become the Keys to Unlocking Greatness. We can't ignore these things. We actually have to address them. And I'm going to get to that in just a second here with our wound audit. And we're going to go step by step through this. So I'm going to give it to you right in the video.

15:11
So before I move on, though, I just want to encourage you to do this one thing. I want you to name one decision. I want you to name one decision that you would do differently. One effort that you would make differently if your worth and value was fully settled and you had nothing to prove to anybody anymore. If you had absolutely nothing to prove to people, how would you operate differently in a specific role, with a specific task, pursuing a specific goal? That gap between the decision and your current default, that's this diagnostic that I want to go through right now. That's what this wound audit is going to produce for you.

15:57
So ready for that? We're going to step into that right now. So I believe that there is a bridge between a crack foundation and a strong, solid foundation, and it is through this wound audit. Look, most men, I would argue, understand at least intellectually that they need a better foundation, that they have been struggling, that things are a little bit shaky. They can't figure out what it is, but they really do start to see that there's something deep down that they're struggling with. But they don't know how to get from this place to this place. They just don't know how to get from here to there, from A to Z. And so we've developed this wound audit. I wrote about it in my book. It's called The Wound Analysis Framework.

16:40
And I've just paired and narrowed it down to call it The Wound Audit. And it's going to help you go through that wound. It's going to help you figure it out. So three things in there. If you've read my book, you're going to have heard these things before. But, and I'll link my book down in the show notes if you want to check that out. But there's three things. Number one, you have to acknowledge the hurt. We have to name the wound honestly. We're not trying to wallow in our tears. We're not trying to own a victim identity. That is not for us. We are trying to get to a place where we stop pretending that it's been running our life, that it's been negatively impacting us. Sexual trauma, abandonment of a parent, a massive loss, epic failure, infidelity, whatever it may be.

17:29
Name it out loud. You have to own that. Two is to realize its effect. Trace the wound to the patterns that it's created in your life. Has it created a false sense of identity? That was me. Has it created a drive for even more performance? That was me. Has it created a desire, a need to hide from people, not letting them know all of who you are? That was me. Is it created a need for you to distance yourself from certain things and people? That was me. I mean, all these things were totally my life. And if I'm not careful, I can fall back into a lot of those old patterns. And then the third thing is, is unlocking your greatness. What was God doing in and through the wound? The wound, it's not the end.

18:13
It also wasn't on accident. God had purpose by allowing you to step through that season, whether you did it or somebody did it to you. But this is the beginning of you unlocking the greatness that God has created you for. Look at, let me pop this back up so you can see this. So you're going to look back here at this graphic. And one day I'll have some better technology around how to show some of this stuff. But there is just this simple little audit, right? Going from here to there. And it's the wound audit. Going from the shaky, cracked foundation to the solid, sturdy foundation. You can see right there in the middle. And what that's intended to do is to let you know that you don't need to go for more therapy.

19:02
And I'm not saying that therapy is all bad. But what I'm saying is, is it's about rebuilding a foundation. It's about going back to the root cause and understanding so you can rebuild in the way that God has created you to be in the first place. Also, the reason why there's a directional arrow there is because you are not going back to the wound to live there. You are not going to be that person. You are no longer that person. The Apostle Paul says, and such were some of you as he's talking about sin. But God says we have been transformed. We have been made new. Book of 1 Corinthians says we are a new creation created in Christ Jesus for good works. And so we need to accept that. So we're not going back to live in the wound.

19:48
We're going back to rebuild from there. The men that I've worked with in retreat setting, in group setting, privately, men who have done this don't just feel better. They lead differently. Everything in their life begins to change. So how can you do this for yourself? I'm going to try and keep this as simple as possible. It's a lot more complex than this and it takes a lot of work. But here's a good place that you can start. Number one is go back to a wound. Start with a specific moment in your life. Something, an event, an occurrence that you did or somebody did to you that shaped how you see yourself. And then I want you to work through the three components to the wound analysis framework, this wound audit, which are to acknowledge it.

20:36
It happened. To spend some time understanding, realizing how it affected you then and now. And then see if you can figure out what it's unlocked inside of you. And it's not about raging from a place of anger. I'm going to show everybody how wrong they were. This is about understanding why what happened back then actually opened us up to who we can become now. Who we can become in the future. That's what we're after here. I would highly encourage you, by the way, to work through that, the wound audit, with somebody else. You're welcome to join our Men of Greatness Brotherhood.

21:22
You can do that in there. Go find a buddy, another believer that's on the same journey as you. You definitely are going to reap a lot more benefit by doing this in community. And the last thing that I want to remind you of as it relates to this. So again, start with one wound. Work through the three steps of the wound audit, the wound analysis framework. And then finally, you need to be reminded of this. And this is an important piece of this. So one is to name it. Two is to work through it. And three is to make sure that you don't forget this. This is not about your past. It's about your foundation. Too many people live in the past. The therapy culture that we have today is sucking people into identifying with who they once were

22:08
and living there for long periods of time. That is not only not necessary, but that is not what God has for you. And I know that because the Bible speaks to it over and over and over again. I mean, think about the Apostle Paul and the fact that the guy called for, maybe he committed, but we're not 100% sure to that, but he at least called for the murder of Christians all throughout the time of the early church. And yet he would become the greatest evangelist, one of the most inspirational, impactful people to ever walk the face of this earth for Christ. And he says, like, I was, I'm the chief of all sinners. Meaning that that's my old identity. That's who I was, but that's not who I am anymore.

22:51
That he's been given the power. He's been given the gift. He's been given the clarity to understand that he is something so much greater in Christ. And you can be that too. So name that wound that you've been working around instead of working through. That is where the unlocking will start inside of you. If you want to step into something that's going to help you, this is what our Men of Greatness Brotherhood was created for. It's free to join. We're not about performance culture, though. We want to perform at the highest level we possibly can. This is about serious men that are doing everything they can to build on the right foundation together. Link is down in the description. You can check that out.

23:28
So here's what I want to leave you with. You have been transformed by the renewal of your mind. You are not reformed. You are not improved. You are transformed. You must accept that. And that starts at the foundation of who Jesus has created you to be and who he is making you into. Go do that.