When Authenticity Becomes Performance: "The second this podcast becomes performance, it's over. Because I have no interest in playing myself on a loop." - Perry Maughmer

I’m inviting you into a deeply personal reckoning about the future of this show.

Rather than making decisions about continuing the podcast in silence, I’ve decided to speak my way through these questions, one episode at a time, bringing you along for every honest step.

This episode isn’t an announcement, a rebrand, or a refresh. It’s about examining why I started this podcast in the first place—and whether it still serves its original purpose.

For me, it was never about chasing attention or algorithm-driven success. The podcast has always been a container: a place where I could speak what couldn’t be said elsewhere, confront myself, provoke thought, and wrestle openly with the questions that matter.

It’s not about easy answers or performance; it’s about real friction, reflection, and growth.

As I look back on nearly 80 episodes, I’m confronting whether continuing makes sense—not out of obligation, but because I can’t not do it. And I’m asking myself, and you, what are we holding on to that no longer serves us? This series is for anyone willing to sit in the tension between answers and wrestle with what’s next.

If you’re still here listening, you’re one of the relentless few willing to be confronted, not comforted. Join me as I navigate this honest evaluation, seeking whether to renew or release the podcast—and inviting you, as always, to stay relentless.

If you have thoughts, feelings, opinions, snide remarks, whatever you want to throw at me, you can email me at Perry@therelentlessfew.com.

Relentless Moments

00:00 Podcast Reflection and Reassessment

03:45 "Self-Reflection and Connection Journey"

07:51 Podcast Strategy and Download Analysis

10:00 Rethinking Self-Promotion and Purpose

13:52 Podcast's Personal Impact

16:46 "Share Your Thoughts with Perry"

5 Keys You'll Learn in This Episode:

1. Momentum vs. Meaning: How easy it is to confuse forward motion with actual fulfillment (and why Perry refuses to settle for just keeping the wheels turning).
2. Podcast as a Mirror (Not a Mask): The reason I started this show was never to perform, but to speak honestly—confronting himself and bringing listeners along for that ride.
3. The Power & Risk of Consistency: Why showing up just for the sake of it can steal authenticity, and how Perry’s challenging himself (and us!) not to let things go hollow.
4. Deciding What Still Serves You: I open up about evaluating what we build, and whether those commitments are still worth the energy—an invitation for all of us to pause and reflect.
5. The Value of Provocation Over Comfort: This series isn’t about giving easy answers but about stirring the pot for both my audience and me. Growth happens where there’s friction, not comfort.

Perry Maughmer believes the world deserves better leadership; that in every human interaction there is the opportunity to either build others up or tear them down; and that leadership is the choice we make in those moments.

These beliefs led Perry to create the Potential Leader Lab. He wanted to offer those who share his beliefs the space and safety to explore transformative ideas, experiment with new behaviors, and evolve into the leaders they were meant to be and that the world needs.

This is a framework he has used again and again with his Vistage peer advisory groups and companies like Turn-Key Tunneling, Convergint, Haughn &  Associates, I Am Boundless, Ketchum & Walton, LSP Technologies, and Ahlum & Arbor.

Perry lives and works on the shores of Buckeye Lake in Ohio, in the mountains of northwest Georgia, and on the beach in Anna Maria, Florida with his amazingly creative wife Lisa. They have 2 rescue dogs and are intermittently visited by their 3 wonderful children throughout the year. Perry & Lisa are living life in crescendo and focused on exploring, experimenting, and evolving their vision of a life they have no desire to retire from.

Copyright 2026 Perry Maughmer

Welcome to The Relentless Few podcast. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer, and we are going to start today another three part series. I kind of got a thing for three part series. I just finished one, now I'm going to start another one. This one will be quite different. This one is titled if this is the End. And the title of this particular podcast is the point was never the podcast. So this isn't.

It's not an announcement, not a rebrand, and it's not a pivot or a content refresh. It's. It's none of that. It's really a reckoning. And my definition of a reckoning is an unraveling that makes becoming possible. And so this is going to be a three part reckoning because I owe this space and you more than a clever title or a repackaged format. And I've actually been circling this question for months. And the question is, should I continue to do this? And instead of making that decision in silence, I'm going to speak my way into it one episode at a time.

Because that is the very core of what I believe is we have to speak our way through things. We have to act into the way. We have to act our way into becoming. So there's three episodes coming up. There's. There's the, the. This one is the point was never the podcast. And there'll be two more after this and after that, I don't know, we'll see.

We'll see what surfaces and whether it's still worth holding on to. So this is part one. So let's get started. So there's. There's a lie I've been close to telling. And it goes like this. Keep going. People are listening.

It's working. But then I had to ask myself, what if that's not the point? What if the podcast working is irrelevant? What if motion, even forward motion, is the very thing keeping me from the truth? So I think it's easy to confuse momentum with meaning and to let consistency become a crutch and just to keep talking because there's a mic in front of me and I kind of refuse to do that. So I'm putting. I'm going to put this podcast on trial, I guess. Not because it's broken, but because I'm committed to not letting it become hollow. That's what I don't want to happen. I don't want it to become hollow. So in order to go forwards, we got to go back.

So I actually didn't start this podcast to get attention. I didn't care about algorithms or value driven content. I started because I needed somewhere to speak what I couldn't speak anywhere else. The podcast was never the point. It was a container. It was the ritual for what I was wrestling with. It was a place to bleed out questions, to think in real time, to confront myself. To confront myself in the presence of all of you.

It's not about thought leadership, it's actually about thought friction. And when that friction starts to disappear, when it starts to feel easy, that's when I know I'm in trouble. So every time I sit here and Brett says, okay, we're good, start recording, I ask myself, is this still a mirror or is it becoming a mask? Because a mirror shows you what's real. It reflects your edges, shows you reality. A mask smooths those over and it tells you the story you want to believe. The second this podcast becomes performance, it's over. Because I have no interest in playing myself on a loop. And that's why we're here in this three part series.

We're here to find out, is this still a mirror worth looking into and if it isn't, am I willing to let it go now back? You know, we're still going to look back a little bit. And I think that over the time I've been doing this and I think, I think this is going to be episode 79, I think so. Over the last 78 episodes, there's been varying reasons for all of them, but I keep going back to the podcast wasn't the point. It was a way to connect, it was a way to share, it was a way to potentially, hopefully provoke others as I was provoking myself in real time. So this isn't just about me trying to provoke other people. You're actually just hearing me being provoking myself and hoping it lands with somebody else out there at the same time. So this was never directed at anybody, at any of you. I'm not sitting here.

This is not, you know, they say, and if you write, you know, autobiography, it's not a memoir from the mountaintop. I don't sit here telling you got all this figured out, because I don't. I actually, I'm actually talking about all this stuff because I'm trying to figure it out. You just get invited into that conversation I'm having. But I have to ask myself now, is it, is it worth it? Is it worth the return on energy? Does it fit into the. To the bigger ecosystem that I've built, that I am building and kind of evolving for myself? And again we're looking back. We're in, you know, explore, experiment, evaluate, and edit. Right.

There's four E's now, but this is kind of the evaluation stage, and I just covered that in the last episode on Evaluate. We're trying to do that without stories, without layering stories on top of it. This isn't about is it good or is it bad? This is merely about what purpose is it serving. What purpose is it serving for me and for everybody else that's involved? That's what I have to figure out, because I'm not interested in sustaining something just because it exists. To me, that's the. That's one thing I have a hard time doing. I actually do have a hard time with consistency. I have a hard time doing stuff over and over and over again on a schedule because after a while, for me, it starts to feel like.

It starts to feel performative. Now, I will tell you, I enjoyed getting ready for these podcasts myself. I enjoy coming up with the idea. I enjoy doing the writing. I enjoy doing the thought around. How do we talk about this? How does it mean something to somebody other than just me? I enjoy all that. So it isn't performative from that standpoint, but it gets performative when it shows up on a calendar for me. And now there's.

Again, I'm not labeling it. I'm not saying it's right, wrong, good, or bad. I'm just sharing what's boiling inside. Now, I'm absolutely not afraid to walk away, but I also don't want to end something that still has weight just because I'm either tired or afraid or bored. And I don't know if any of those things even apply. So I'm doing the only thing I know how to do. I. I'm just going to talk my way through it.

So this series, the three episodes, are the experiment. They're the confrontation. They are the reckoning. And at the end of episode three, I'll decide, and I'll be honest about it, because if we keep this thing going, it won't be out of obligation. It will be because I can't not do it. And that's what I want everything to be for me and I hope, for everybody else. I want things to become something you can't not do, because then you don't need motivation, right? We don't need to think about it. We don't need discipline and motivation because we can't not do it.

And that's what I want all the stuff I do to be. Now, some of this stuff is in conflict with some of the stuff that I'm thinking, the podcast itself recently. So just to share, I looked at the numbers and, and I realize that downloads aren't the only thing. In fact, Brett tells me that's a, It's a very kind of superfluous, superficial way to look at how well your podcast is doing, which I agree, I understand. But my, the pot, the, the recent, like this 30, 60, 90 day downloads are down now. One of the reasons they're down, and I don't know if you've noticed this if you listen, is I no longer send out weekly emails telling you that the last episode is dropped. And I. That's on purpose.

It's on purpose because I don't want to keep sending out stuff. I've got to the point where just, I don't want to. I don't want to just weigh down people's email inboxes with another reminder of something you need to listen to. I figure that if it's something of value, you'll put it on your calendar or whatever and you'll do it. I don't want to keep waving the flag every week saying, hey, hey, look over here, look over here. There's a new. There's something you need to listen to. I don't know if you need to listen to it.

You decide if you need to listen to it. If you do, you'll probably put a. You'll probably subscribe and you'll get an update from Spotify or Apple or whoever, but you're not going to get it from me anymore. I just don't have the intestinal fortitude to see those things every week because I got copied on them too, and I got tired of them. I figured if I'm tired of them, everybody else must be tired of them. Now, I know I, and I don't. I don't care if everybody else sends them out. Again, I want to be clear.

I'm not saying everybody should, that I'm making some judgment on good or bad. I'm saying I am determining for myself what I want to stand for, good, bad or indifferent. And it's obviously not. It's not helping any issues. It's not helping. It's not helping downloads, it's not helping the thing become, become more popular. But, but again, I just, that's my thought process right now. So it isn't.

I don't know where it's going. I don't know if, if I'm, if I'm unwilling to do those things, if I'M unwilling to be promotional, which I, you know, if you were around, we did a, we did a three part series a while back about marketing and advertising. But if, and self promotion. But if I'm, if I have no interest in or desire to self promote, then what's at all, why would I do any of this? Because I said earlier it's in conflict with some of the stuff and, and a couple of the things, I have a couple of different, you know, thought processes. One is I want to do deeper work with fewer people as I, as I continue down this road. Because it's in deeper work for me is more meaningful, transformative work with people and organizations that truly provide them the space and the opportunity to make the changes they want for the people they care about. And so in that mode is, that is, does this fit into that? You know, you're, you're all these things, you know, your values and your, all of the things that we, the stakes we put in the ground for ourselves. They don't really mean anything until they cost you something.

And that goes for all of this stuff. A strategy, a plan, values, your culture, all of those things, right? It's not going to, they're not really working until they cost you something. Until you're willing to say no to something. That's when you know you have them. That's when you know you actually have a stake in the ground. It's when you, when you said no, when it did cost you something. So what is doing the podcast done to me? Well, it has changed. It has changed what I do not because it gave me a voice.

I already had one of those. But it also, I tell you what it did, it forced me to listen to it and that was different. It forced me to face what I believed and also what I was avoiding. And there is something brutal about speaking into the void. You don't get. There's no feedback. You don't get nods or applause or approval. You don't get people nodding their heads.

Like if I'm with a group of 20 people and we're talking, I can tell they're engaged. I can tell it's landing. I can tell when it's not. I can't tell that here, right? And we can tell after the fact, we can tell on how many people listen to it. But now it's just silence. And the silence is really honest and unflinching. Right there's, it's just data. It doesn't tell you what you want to hear.

It reveals whether you mean what you say. And I will say from that respect, personally, in my efforts over the last. I'll say year, as I do this podcast in. It's been very helpful for me to further clarify for myself what I think, because I do. I'm a paper person. Like, I know lots of people use, you know, screens, but I have to. I have to look at paper. So I.

I put. I make my notes and then I. I print them off and I have them in front of me here. And I will tell you that it's quite a clarifying process because oftentimes we think things and we think we believe things, and then when you actually write them down and start to talk about them, it becomes something different. So I actually learn. I have learned a tremendous amount about my own thought process and what I believed and the rhythm of what I believe people need to hear. And the whole E now, E4 process, the E4, the rhythm. It's not a process or a framework that in and of itself, those things would never have happened with.

Without this podcast. There are evolutions for me personally, that probably never would have happened had I not been doing this podcast. So there have been many things that have spun out of this for me. One being just a clarification of my own thinking, which is something we all need because it helped me decide and decide, by the way, root word, the side is to kill off, right? So really, when we decide something, we're killing off options, you know, like homicide, patricide, genocide, it's the kill off, right? So when we decide something, we're killing something off, we're cutting something off. So it really has been helpful for that. But I want to be clear about this. This was never for a wide audience. See, this is.

These are the things I had to think about. The very. The relentless few. The very. Name now, for years, it was years. For a year and a half, potential leader lab, right? And again, I could go into a whole podcast about how that came out and why I listened to other people and why I did not follow my instincts on what I believed I wanted to do and represent. But it's always been the relentless view. It's been the relentless view for, in my head, for, I don't know, probably eight years.

Like, I came up with that eight years ago, and it's just now seeing the light of day in any meaningful way. So this is never about reach. It's always been for the few, the ones who choose the harder path, who'd rather be confronted than comforted. If you're still here, if you're still listening. That's you, I guess. And this series isn't just my reckoning. It's yours too. Because I'm not the only one who needs to ask, what have I built that no longer serves me.

This is not just a question for me about this podcast. My hope is that it's a question that lands for everybody in some way, shape or form about something that you're experiencing right now. So here's where we are. Part 1 of 3. It's not a farewell, but not a guarantee either. So it's just the first step into whatever's next, whether that's renewal or release. The next episode, we go deeper. We sit in the space between answers.

We name that tension. Don't flinch. And until that time, carry this with you. The podcast was never the point. It was the part of you it provoked. And actually it was the part. It was the provocation, both of you and me. And if that still matters, if that provocation in some way, shape or form still matters, I'll see you in Part two.

And I'm going to ask you this. If you have thoughts, feelings, opinions, snide remarks, whatever you want to throw at me, you can email me at Perry at therelentlessfew.com. Perry at the relentlessfew.com. I welcome all your thoughts on this matter now and over the next two episodes, so I'd love to hear if you have something to say. Until then, stay relentless and I'll talk to you soon.