GTM Zero to One: Mastering Our Internal State

One of my most powerful tools for navigating life and leadership's ups and downs

Day 21 of writing daily.

Dall E 2 via ChatGPT4o (a little Avatar: The Last Airbender inspired, esp. with the chakras)

Today’s post has nothing directly to do with GTM Zero to One, but everything indirectly to do with it.

Because behind new businesses, products, organizations, brands and movements is a human.¹

And often the biggest barrier standing in our way is ourselves.

This surfaced as a dear friend and leader messaged this week, mentioning that they’ve been grappling with imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome² is a manifestation, and like most deep seated insecurities it often ties back to fear.³

So I sent this to them, and realized every time I’ve shared this it’s been powerful, so it seemed like a perfect time to do so here.

🧐 A Tool For (Daily) Reflection

Everyday, find a consistent time⁴ to reflect on or answer 4 questions:

• 🙏🏼 What and who am I grateful for? What brought energy/was energizing?

• 🧐 What did I learn?

• 😫 What frustrated me, what was I down about?

• 🧘🏻 What are my intentions for today/tomorrow?

As an added bonus, record or write this down so you have a log/history/journal capturing your state of being/feelings (and possibly so you can use ChatGPT for extracting insights and patterns in the future).

💪 Why It Has Been Powerful

You’ve actually probably seen some version of these questions, whether in:

• Life design/career/workshopping sessions

• Therapy

• Annual reflections/planning

• Journaling

Now imagine that you do it every day! Amongst other things, I’ve found that it:

• creates catharsis and a way to empty the cache for your emotions and mind

• compounds your insights and learning/growth

• allows you to explicitly have an outlet for processing your emotions, and process things that came up that day

• can help you diagnose or acknowledge when things like imposter syndrome arise, and go deeper on why

• (esp. setting intentions) is a powerful way to commit to overcoming fear

• allows you to flex and cover different time spans easily, e.g.:

  • at the end of the week, reflect on the last week

  • at the end of the month, reflect on the last month

  • quarterly, annually, etc.

📖 The backstory (if you’re so interested):

I started this habit weekly after fucking up serially with romantic pursuits (situation-ships if you will 😅💔) thanks to some tough love and radical candor feedback I received.

With care, two people (to whom I’m still incredibly grateful) told me:

• I didn’t know how to be alone — to really sit with myself, my emotions, etc.

• I lacked self love.

• I should read 📕 Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown.⁵

Here are three direct outcomes I attribute to this habit (amongst many, many others):

1. Back then, after this feedback, I started this practice on a weekly basis thanks to the suggestion of one of the people and reading Brene Brown. My intentions for nearly 6 months were to not let fear and especially fear of rejection stop me from doing anything. During this time, I ended up chatting up someone at a rooftop event who (lo and behold) ended up becoming my life partner and wife.

2. There was a phase (as a new parent) when I wasn’t doing this ritual at all and that chapter felt particularly challenging — of course parenting itself is the challenge, but not making space made it doubly so.

3. I’ve reinstituted this practice about a month ago, and it’s been so helpful <> and likely also not a coincidence now that I think about it that it coincides with my current state of flow with my partner and little guy and daily writing ritual.

1. Our AI agents/bots/overlords not withstanding.

2. Some useful tools my dear friends and collaborators Karn Sun, Jocelyn Logan-Friend and I put together on Imposter Syndrome around self diagnosis, archetypes, and initial ways to combat below in the final footnote.

3. Related deep rooted emotions or challenegs: shame, anger, loss, deceit, illusion, lack of self love, self worth, self confidence.

4. During dinner, at night before going to bed, first thing in the morning, etc. You can do this by yourself, with a partner, etc.

5. I absolutely read it, and it felt like doing 20+ worth of therapy sessions and inner work to diagnose hustling for perfection and worthiness is an endless cycle; that people who embrace self-love and worth fundamentally just believe they are worth it for being human, imperfections and all. That flew in the face of everything I knew and had done to build myself up, and so I’ve been in process of tearing down these deeply ingrained patterns/mental models/versions of myself and rebuild myself up ever since, through how I lead, through how I show up as a partner, through a vipassana retreat, through therapy, through how I show up as a father, and (most of all) through how I show up for myself.

🛠🥸 Some tools specifically for Imposter Syndrome: