In episode 69 of the Potential Leader Lab Podcast, we're going to explore the idea of how the most effective prisons have no bars.

🤔 Our Discussion 🤔

Your reality is negotiable, and your chains won't break themselves. It's time to take one small step to prove you're not on autopilot. Embrace the discomfort and start creating a better version of yourself today. What is something you've accepted as just the way things are? This might reveal an invisible chain you've been unwilling to see. That's the challenge we'll discuss in the episode.

★ Key Topics ★

00:59 Are You Truly Free?

03:09 Embracing Life's Spectrum Balance

08:37 Self-Imposed Behavioral Barriers

10:08 "Radical Freedom and Excuses"

14:09 "Crisis: Catalyst for Change"

16:38 Questioning Beliefs for Growth

21:11 Action: Antidote to Despair

25:56 Embracing Discomfort in Personal Growth

27:04 "Message for the Relentless"

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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 potential leader lab. I'm your host, Perry Maughmer. And today on episode 69, we are gonna talk about the chains you don't see. The the chains, not change, as in change in your pocket, but the chains you don't see. Now so we're gonna start off by talking about the concept of what you don't resist, you accept. And I think there is, for us, kind of an invisible nature of our constraints because the most effective prisons don't have bars. They're actually built from routine expectations and unconscious compliance. So think about that.

Routine, expectation, and unconscious compliance. Most of us never question the structure of our lives because we mistake it for reality. We we say things like, well, this is just the way it is. And that's true if we accept it. So it that is the way it is because we just accept the way it is. But here's the problem, and I want you just to think about these three words. Reality is negotiable because your perception of normal is just a collection of learned behaviors reinforced over time. Now think about that.

If we define your perception of normal as a collection of learned behaviors reinforced over time. And so we've kind of built our own prison. And I use the term prison. I know it's a little could be a little harsh, but I'm just saying constraints. We build up our own constraints. We create our own chains over time. And we have this delusion of freedom. We we like to think we're free because we don't see the handcuffs.

We don't see the chains. But ask yourself this, when is the last time you did something truly unexpected? Some something completely outside the script of your life. The one you've settled into. The one you've written for yourself however many years ago that you just continue to follow. Now if the answer is rarely or never, then I'll ask you, how free are you, really? Now I don't wanna judge. So if this is comfortable for you and you wanna and you wanna maintain that, then please do. But, again, I'll go back to the question, is it serving you and those you care deeply about to the best of your desires and ability? Is that is are the is that script satisfying your your needs? Is it and also to the next step, is it putting you in a position where you're pursuing your highest best use and that you are becoming the best version of yourself to serve those people that you care deeply about? Because there is a there is a line here. I don't wanna say we should never be comfortable, but we shouldn't always be comfortable.

And so that line, that spectrum of discomfort and comfort is when we move up and down. There's no there's no either or. There's no black or white. There's no dichotomous thinking here. It's we'll we'll do both, but are we too much on one side or the other? Because on either end of a spectrum isn't always great to live. Right? So we can't be comfortable all the time. We also wanna be discomfortable all the time. I mean, that's not a great place to live either.

But I think if we acknowledge it as a spectrum, and I think most of the things in our life are, I don't wanna digress, but if if you look at these things on a spectrum, they're not disparate points. It's how how do I move up and down that spectrum in certain parts of my life at certain times? Because in some areas, I might wanna be comfortable. In some areas, I might wanna be discomfortable. And so just acknowledging that we don't have to be one or the other, we can be just comfortable for a little bit and then slide back into comfort to to rest and recoup. Because, and I think I've talked about it before. I love the term retreat because retreating is necessary. It's very interesting when you talk about it from the military standpoint because I heard, a gentleman talk one time from the military, and he said strategic retreats are required to advance. See, the reason that we retreat is we cannot just advance, advance, advance, advance, advance.

We advance to a point, then we have to retreat. And retreat means we're gonna restock, we're gonna rest, we're gonna revitalize, we're gonna renew ourselves in order to move forward. So we don't retreat to give in. We retreat to resupply and reinvigorate in order to move forward. So we advance, we advance, we advance, we retreat, then we advance again. So I I don't want you to think that there's no rest. There's no comfort. That's not the point.

The point is, what's the balance for you? So for me, I I can tell you this, how this, the this worked for me, you know, over the course of years, and I and I think I've shared this with you before, is that, for the first I don't know. Lisa and I, let's see. It's March 14. So in in, nine days. In nine days, Lisa and I will have been married thirty four years. Alright. So we're gonna celebrate our thirty fourth anniversary. Happy anniversary, my love.

I'm blessed to have you with me, and I'm thankful every day I get up that I get to spend it with you. And I can tell you for the first, I, well, I don't know if she'd say the same thing, by the way, but I hope she does. But I and she didn't for a certain amount of time I don't wanna talk about. Because for the first twenty years of our marriage, we didn't I didn't take a vacation. And vacations were a, they were anomaly to me. Like, I didn't understand them. They were outside of my understanding because as a child, we never went on vacation. I'm not gonna belabor you with my story, but due to the some circumstances in my family, we just never took vacations.

So to me, I wasn't raised taking vacations, so I knew what they were. I I'm not I wasn't I wasn't raised by wolves, so I I did know what they were. I knew other people did them. I just never did. So when the we had kids and and she's like, oh, let's go on vacation in the summer. I'm like, why would I do that? So I would begrudgingly go. I wouldn't I would work most of the time, or I would say I have to work and I would go out for a weekend wherever they were and then come back. I mean, there was a there were a number of vacations she and the kids took by themselves.

And they probably enjoyed them far greater. They had far more enjoyment with them if I wasn't there because I was not I couldn't get into a vacation mindset. Like, I couldn't let go of things. To me, it was about work, until I don't know how. I'm not good with time, but let's call it ten years ago. I I started to understand the value of vacations as a strategic retreat. Right? As a time to, you know, refill and refuel and spend time, un unfocused time with people that I care deeply about. And I I I figured that out somehow along the way with with Lisa constantly helping me with that because she understood the value of them for me.

And so we had this ongoing conversation, and, eventually, I came to embrace it to where I'd you know, I wouldn't wanna leave our current vacation until we had the next one scheduled because I looked forward to them so much. I looked forward to the to the rest, and and the the the rec the recreation recreation. If you say it differently, it's actually recreation. And so I look forward to that. And now, I truly understand what they're for and the value of them, but I didn't see that before. Those were changed. Those were just those were just invisible change that I didn't that I didn't challenge. So if if you can experiment with movement, right, the the fastest way to expose a constraint is to test them.

So you have to find them. So do something like this. Try to disrupt your routine. You know, you know, skip work. Take a day off. Delete here's what I would do, which I've actually done this. Delete social media. Like, just as an experiment, just delete it.

Change your mind about something, something fundamental. Like, change a belief that you have, or even if you don't change it, challenge it. Actively challenge something that you view as a core belief. Revisit it and think about, is it true? Is it serving you? Because if you do that, you're gonna notice how uncomfortable it feels, and that that in and of itself isn't freedom. That's withdrawal from the sedation of structure. Freedom comes later. And the relentless few people, the relentless few as I define them, understand this. Because if you wanna find the walls of your cage, start moving in unexpected directions, and you'll bump into them.

Now this is this is not imposed by others. This is self imposed. So when I say you're gonna bump into them, you're gonna get uncomfortable. You're gonna get anxiety when you bump into these these walls you've created for yourself because we have all these behaviors that we have are are a result of our beliefs. So we talk a lot about wanting to change our behaviors, and we talk a lot about actually, we talk far more about changing other people's behaviors. But we talk about changing our behaviors, but we never dig into the belief that that is under that. And that's where the real power is. So, I I wanna give you a couple thoughts around this from other people that are far more intelligent about it and and wrote about it than, than I am, and that one of them is Jean Paul Sartre, which you, you know, you've heard me talk about before.

But he talks about this as being in that we live in bad faith and that we we play these roles instead of embracing our personal agency. And and we tell ourselves we, word choice important, we tell ourselves we have to do things, when in reality, we choose to do things. But acknowledging that we are choosing means we have to own the decision, so we don't wanna do that. We wanna we wanna negate that responsibility, So we say we change the word from we change the word from choose to have. We we have to do it, not we choose to do it. When in reality, almost everything you do, you choose to do. Because as they say, we always have a choice even if it's not the choice we want. So there's always a choice there, but we don't exercise that.

Because the fundamental challenge from Sartre was the moment you realize you're free, you lose the ability to make excuses. I mean, just think about that. That's radical freedom. That's dizzying freedom when we accept the fact that we have no room for excuses in any part of our life. And I'm gonna you can tune in, to the next episode after this one because I'm gonna dig into failure, which is why we do that. Why we have excuses is because of our fear of failure, which I'll get dig into much deeper in episode 70. Now Albert Camus talked about the absurd. He says we can we construct meaning to justify our inaction and that we create these stories to explain why we can't change.

You know, I need stability. I have responsibilities. I'll start next year. But but he reminds us of something, and and the absurd that I talked about is this. The universe doesn't care about your reasons. There's no cosmic permission slip for change. You either act or you don't. Right? And and the reason that happens is because the universe doesn't have inherent meaning.

We give it meaning through our actions. We make sense of it for ourselves. We can't we can't give that responsibility or power to somebody or something else. We have to create that meaning. And then, Frederick Nietzsche and the will to power. Now this gets a bad rap, and I wanna be clear about this. Nietzsche had a got a real bad rap around this thing called the will to power, but it's not about domination as some people would make it out to be and try to justify it to be. It's about overcoming self, which is directly in line with existentialism.

And and the old Pogo cartoon, we have met the enemy and it is us. Right? So this is all about overcoming ourself, not not domination of others. Again, existentialism is all about what's in here. It's all about what's inside. And I just realized I'm saying in here and pointing to something, and if you're not watching a video, then you wouldn't see that. So I'll say it. It's about what's inside. It's about it's about our internal struggle.

All the stuff I talk about, we everything I wanna be clear. Every single thing I talk about starts with you. And if we would just focus on that, we would be way ahead. But our default is to focus on everybody else because that's safer, and they're all wrong, and we're right, and they should do this, they should do that, but we don't need to. That's where our that's the first error in in our thought process. The first thing we need to do is accept the responsibility. Let's work on us. Let me internalize all that stuff.

Let me show people what's capable, what we're capable of. Let me show them what's possible. You wanna motivate other people. You wanna inspire people to change? Stop telling them. Start showing them. Start showing them what radical responsibility looks like. Start if you I cannot tell you the number of organizations that I work with where they routinely say, we have an accountability problem here. I have a leadership team telling me, we have an accountability problem here.

Well, if here means in this room, then I agree with you. If here means in your company, I don't. Because if you have an accountability problem in your company, it starts with who's ever running the company. It starts with those people. If I model accountability, guess what? I'll see people be accountable. This ain't rocket science. I don't have any there's no secrets here. There's no there's no mystical, magical thing that we have to worry about.

It's simple, but not easy. Like everything else meaningful in life. Simple, not easy. So here's the relentless the the the the perspective of those that are the relentless few. Movement is the only way to wake yourself up. So you either gonna be either gonna disrupt or you're gonna be sedated. You you can't wait. Well, you can, and we often do.

Wait for a crisis to force our evolution. And I I see it all the time, and and here's how it plays out. Well, that's the way we've always done it, and things are pretty good. Why do we have to do anything? The worst thing for anybody is success because success makes us fat and happy. I won't say I won't say it does that all the time physically, but it sure does it metaphorically. Makes us fat and happy. Because the more successful we are, the more we buy our own press, the more we believe we're sick the more believe we're just that good and nothing could ever happen and we're great and blah blah blah. So we just we become sedated because we're waiting for a crisis.

And that's why the old saying, don't wait till you're thirsty to dig your well. And I know some great leaders and organizations that right now, they are they are forcing evolution on their organization. And their organization is hitting on all cylinders and has been for several years, but they know it's gonna end at some point. And they know the time to to drive this evolution is now when they don't need it, but they want it. And those relentless people, those relentless few people intentionally disrupt their lives to ensure they're not sleepwalking. We always wanna wake ourselves up. Just to and think about this. If your life never presents you with friction, you're probably following someone else's script.

So if your life never produces friction for you, and you're like, well, I don't know what you're talking about. My life's great. You're you are acting someone else's script out. And here's why most people stay stuck. There's a fear of uncertainty is greater than the desire for freedom because prisons are predictable. The reason that people prefer prisons metaphorically is they prefer that over the unknown. I like predictability. We as humans like predictability.

That's how we're built. We have to fight our biology. So here's what I'd ask you. What is something you've accepted as just the way things are, quote, unquote, I was doing air quotes again. You can't see me. Air quotes. Just the way things are. There might actually be a chain you refuse to see.

Just think about that. And, again, I'm not telling you to do a one eighty. I'm not telling you to do some radical transformation. Just just push the edges. See where the edges are. Just start start taking some actions. Start thinking differently. You can do this without physical actions.

Just thought. Think about something, a a closely held belief you have and think something about it that isn't that. Think to yourself, is this true? Like, do I is it is it serving me? Like, do I why why am I so comfortable with this? Like, why is this Why do I get upset when somebody says something contrary to that? Think about that. Think about that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about a we're talking about thought exercises. So now you have to choose to move because there is a cost. You don't have to change, but if you don't change, you will pay for it. Because the cost the cost of inaction isn't seen, but it it accumulates in regret, unfulfilled potential, and the slow decay of curiosity, which is the death knell of leaders.

And most people realize their change far too late because if you realize them far too late, that means they've grown over time and they become thicker over time, and then the time to break them may be gone. Because now it's a really thick chain. It's gonna take a lot of effort, and there might not be enough juice for the squeeze. So you gotta you gotta understand. Everybody's got a choice. There's no judgment in your choice. See, here's the thing. I wanna I'm I hope nobody feels bad.

Actually, I hope you do. Maybe maybe you should. I feel bad all the time, so you could join me. So we have to accept responsibility. So we can choose not to do it. I'm completely okay with inaction as long as you own it and choose it. That's how I'm okay with it. Not that you have to give a shit if I'm okay with what you're doing.

I realize that. I'm just saying, like, big picture. You should be okay with it. If you make an intentional choice about not doing something, that is a choice, and that's good. And if you're willing to live with it and take full responsibility for the inaction that you chose, then that's all we can ask for. I just don't feel good about when I'm working with people who won't take responsibility for their inaction and make it other people's problems. That's where I get that's something that is a trigger for me because I know that each of us have within us all that we need. We have the power to do the things we need to do.

We just have to start believing in it. And this is the way to do that, these small experiments. So you get into that experiment experimentation mindset. Instead of waiting for the right moment, which doesn't exist, by the way, the relentless few people will act first and refine later. We'll iterate. Movement isn't about certainty. It's about testing reality. I don't I don't know where the edge is.

I gotta find it. So then you have to ask yourself, well, what would happen if I started that business or quit my job or had the hard conversation or or rejected this assumption that I have? You you you wanna create, you know, small opportunities here, nonfatal failures because you have to develop that muscle. You have to you have to start small. Start with low risk. I don't say anybody should start with a huge risky thing. Start with something small because the only way you're gonna find these limits is to press up against them. And once you find it, then create that small experiment and and figure it out. Now, by the way, the other thing is is you have to develop this muscle, and it's yours to work with.

Don't don't worry about other people. Keep it to yourself. You don't have to share. You don't have to talk about it. You just gotta do it. So now we have this this call to action. You and what I mean by that is you have to stop asking for permission. So Kier Kierkegaard, he brought this up, and he said, the the mistake most people make is waiting for certainty before acting.

We and what that means is we reduce all the risk. Back to the the next podcast, episode 70 is gonna be about failure. That's what we're trying to avoid. We're trying to avoid failure. So but the reality is certainty is an illusion. You once you decide something's worth doing, that's when you do it. Meaning will follow. You'll create the meaning as you do it, but you can't you can't wait for it.

You can't wait for certainty, and you can't wait for it to mean something. You create meaning by doing it. And what you have to do is erase the need for the guarantee. What you need is movement, not a guarantee. Joan Baez said the action for the antidote for action jeez. The antidote for action is this, alright. Time out. We're gonna start that quote over again.

Joan Baez said the antidote for despair is action. Or said another way, action is the antidote for despair, because I believe that's exactly what she said. It only took me about ninety seconds to get it out. But that's what she said. Action is the antidote to despair. And I can tell you over the course of my life, I have seen that be truthful many, many, many, many times because most of us will sit and spin. We get into that despair loop, that that doom cycle when things start going wrong in our lives. You know, we lose a job or we we lose a relationship or we do something, and then we start just reinforcing that, oh my gosh.

What am I gonna do? Oh, this went wrong. Oh, that wrong. Everything I touch goes wrong. What there's no way out. Blah blah blah blah. And then we sit and wait. We sit and wait to be inspired. We sit we we we try to figure out an answer.

We try to figure out a plan. We try to figure out, oh, I gotta study this. Oh, I gotta write that down. Oh, I gotta no. No. What you gotta do is do. What you have to do is do. Because once you start doing, you almost immediately feel better.

And then you get motivation because motivation comes from dopamine. Once you start doing something, that's when your brain dumps the dopamine to give you the energy and the effort to do more of it. You don't get dopamine from thinking. You can't think your way into dopamine, and dopamine is the motivation molecule. It's the it's the pursuit molecule. You only get it from taking action. Now, Heidegger talked about authenticity because we're talking about permission to act. Right? So are are you living as yourself, or are you living as a version of yourself to please others? And so his his, Heidegger actually came up with this phrase.

It was called the they. The they. And that's what he meant by that was the collective voice telling you how to live. Now the they will tell you how to live, but it will be a life of averageness and mediocrity because it's based on the average of the whole. So, again, you can follow the they if you want to. It's your choice. As long as you're choosing it, that's all you can do. That active choice, that conscious choice is the tipping point.

It isn't the result that we're after. Not everybody should should do all the things I'm talking about, and you're not gonna do them at all the points in your life. Again, this is not a dichotomous decision. This is not a one time, hey, and we're done. This is making these decisions over and over and over again throughout your life. But it requires courageous ownership of your existence. Courageous ownership of your existence. That's where we're doing it's you we're talking about.

Nobody else. And fear just isn't an excuse. You will be afraid. If you're not, you have some kind of problem. Right? Because all of us are afraid at some points. We're afraid to be aware. That's the price of awareness is fear because now we now we see it all. And the choice is simple.

We can be afraid and move. We can be afraid and do. We can be afraid and act. We can do we can be afraid and act, or we can be afraid and stay chained. Guess what? Either way, we're afraid. So the difference is you can you can be afraid and act, or you can be afraid and stay chained. Either way, you're still afraid. So you're not getting rid of the fear either way.

And only one of those paths lead to somewhere worth going. So here's here's how we here's how relentless folks explore experiment evolve. That's the path forward. So we're gonna explore. We're gonna identify one pattern expectation routine that might be limiting you. What is a self limiting belief? What is a self limiting expectation or a pattern? And then I want you to ask yourself, who told me this is the way things have to be? Just ask yourself that. Something you something you believe that you've accepted as true, just ask yourself, who told me this? Where did I learn this? When did this start? You don't have to do anything with it right now. Just just do that do that that exploration.

Then take one disruptive action, something that feels off script in regards to the thing you just explored. Start small, You know, that's gonna be necessary. You know, change how you spend your time, how you interact with people, what you eat, what you watch on TV, how much time you spend on social media, any of those things. Now the evolution part of this, the first step will always feel unnatural. That's how you know you're doing it right. I had a I had a and I love him. He's a he's a client of mine. And, he's transitioning, you know, his company, and and he's owned it for, I don't know, thirty five years, I think, and worked in it.

And he's been working on this on this evolution for himself for, I don't know, two years now. And we met one time, and it and I know this wasn't the answer he wanted. But he said, you know, just it just feels so awkward. Everything I'm doing just feels so awkward, and it's and it's and it takes so much energy. And he looked at me, and I said, well, that means you're doing it right, which was not the response that he wanted, but he knew it. He laughed, and he's like, I figured that's what you're gonna tell me. Right? But that's what it is. That it it will feel unnatural, but that's also how you know you're doing something that matters.

Because your new normal isn't found or or or granted to you. It's created by you. You create that that ever evolving new natural new new normal, I mean. So your chains will never break themselves, and no one is coming to free you. If you want something different, you have to be the one to move. So my final question is, what is the one thing you'll do today to prove to yourself that you are not sleepwalking? Just one thing. One small thing. What do one thing.

And I'll leave you with this. If this this what I do, my podcast, the things I talk about are for the relentless few. And if you're still listening, it means you're already moving, so don't stop. We'll talk again soon. Take care of yourself. Take care about the take care of those that you care deeply about and create a better world for all of us. Thanks.