You know your strengths. You've done the self-reflection. So why does success still feel so hard? In this episode, Steve Goodner reveals why knowing yourself isn't the same as knowing your pathway—and what to do about it.

www.eqfit.org

Welcome to the EQFIT Podcast.

Our mission is to equip people to prosper in every aspect of their life, whether

you're at home or in the workplace.

We explore practical ways of improving success, satisfaction, finding

balance, and building enjoyable and beneficial relationships.

Thank you for joining us.

So I don't know if you've ever looked at my website, we run a blog on there that's

actually older than the podcast, but when I create content for a week, it's

the blog first, and then I take the blog and use that for the podcast episodes.

So I want you to picture this table with puzzle pieces laying out,

scattered around with the box, with the rest of the puzzle pieces,

sitting to the right and sitting in the box on top of the puzzle pieces is a cat.

So the title of this week's episode is Hiding the Pieces.

Could be a catastrophe.

You'd have to go to the blog to see it and really appreciate the

picture, and I hope that you will.

What's the subtitle?

Why Knowing yourself isn't the same as knowing your pathway, and I think

that's a very important differentiation.

You may know a lot about yourself.

Again, I'll use the analogy, think of being inside the puzzle box.

You can see a lot of your pieces, but there'll be some pieces that

are buried underneath others.

But if you're inside the puzzle box, you cannot see the picture on the

outside of the box that guides all of those pieces into the right place.

This becomes critical.

For anyone who's a professional, you might be an entrepreneur, you

might be a small business owner, you might be leading a large corporation.

If you can't understand and see all of your pieces and how they fit together

in your unique success pathway, then you're never gonna reach your optimal

performance.

You're never going to reach the most success that you can have and still

have quality of life at the same time.

I'm not saying that you won't be successful, but can you have real success

and quality of life at the same time?

The only way I know how to do that, is if you know what your unique success

pathway looks like so that you are swimming with the current more than

you're swimming against the current.

And again, this is a bit of an introduction to my book that will be

released soon called Thrive Finding Your Entrepreneur's Edge in the Age of AI.

Rachel knew exactly who she was.

After 15 years as an entrepreneur, she could rattle off her strengths without

hesitation, creative problem solver, natural connector, relentless work ethic.

She'd taken personality assessments, worked with coaches,

read the books, self-awareness.

She had it in spades, and yet she kept hitting walls.

Every new initiative started strong, then fizzled.

Every partnership that seemed perfect, turned complicated,

every strategic direction, felt right at first until it didn't.

She'd pivot, recalibrate, try again, and again and again.

I understand my strength.

She told me frustration bleeding through her voice.

So why do I keep ending up in the same place?

Why does everything feel so difficult?

I asked her a question that stopped her cold.

Rachel, you know your pieces, but do you know the picture

they're supposed to create?

She stared at me for a long moment and then she said

quietly, no, I don't think I do.

Let's focus on the gap that nobody really talks about.

And here's something that I've learned after four decades of working with

entrepreneurs, knowing yourself is not the same as knowing your pathway to success.

Most entrepreneurs I meet are self-aware enough to know their strengths,

they understand their experience, their capabilities, their passions.

They can tell you what they're good at and where they struggle, but they

often can't see how these elements combine into their optimal path forward.

It's like having all the pieces of a puzzle spread out on a table.

You can examine each piece individually.

This one's blue.

That one has a straight edge.

This one looks like a part of a tree.

But without the picture on the box, you're left guessing how they might fit together.

I often say you can't see the label from inside the jar.

That's another way of looking at this.

You're too close to yourself to see the full picture.

And no amount of self-reflection alone will give you that outside perspective.

And here's why.

Self-awareness alone falls short simply because we have blind spots.

We cannot see everything.

Now, don't get me wrong, self-awareness matters.

It's important.

It's the foundation.

Without understanding your emotional patterns, your triggers, your habits,

your tendencies, you're flying blind.

But self-awareness has a ceiling, and here's why.

First.

Again, we all have blind spots.

There are patterns in how you operate that you simply cannot

see because you're inside of them.

The way a fish doesn't notice water.

You don't notice the assumptions and habits that

shape your decisions every day.

Second strengths exist in context.

A strength in one situation, could become a liability in another.

You relentlessly drive forward.

You've got this fuel that pushes you to break through.

You try to get through these crisis times and guess what happens?

You burn out yourself, you burn out your team, knowing you have

that drive doesn't tell you when to deploy it and when to dial it back.

Third traits don't reveal trajectory.

Knowing that you're creative or analytical or empathetic tells you what you

are, it doesn't tell you where to go.

Your pathway isn't just about your traits, it's about how those traits interact with

your motivations, with your environment, your season of life, and the specific

challenges that are in front of you.

Rachel had high self-awareness.

What she lacked was pathway clarity, the understanding of how her specific

combination of strengths, patterns, and drivers could be channeled into a

sustainable and fulfilling direction.

That's what was missing.

So the cost of figuring all of this out the hard way, how many times have

I been, what I talk about being in a class, and until I learn the lesson, I

don't get to graduate out of that class?

Well, unfortunately, earlier in my life I found that I just needed to

try it out, and if it didn't work one way, I'd try it different.

The whole trial and error thing, right?

Scientifically sounds great.

A pretty hard road though, to be honest about it.

In a slower era, that trial and error was a reasonable strategy.

You could afford to try different approaches, make mistakes, learn from

them, gradually find your footing.

That era is over.

In the age of rapid AI evolution, entrepreneurs simply don't have time

for extended experimentation, the landscape is shifting too rapidly.

Competitors who find their pathway faster will capture the opportunities

while you're still trying to figure out which direction to run.

But speed isn't the biggest issue.

The real cost of trial and error is what it does to your internal resources.

Every pivot.

Every false start, every initiative that fizzles and burns through

your four most precious assets, time, energy, focus, and effort.

These are not unlimited and unlike money, you can't raise

more of them from investors.

Think about what Rachel experienced.

Each time she hit a wall and pivoted.

She didn't just lose months of work.

She lost momentum.

She lost confidence.

She lost some of the fire that had driven her in the first place.

Her team felt the whiplash.

Her family absorbed the stress.

Trial and error isn't free, and the compounding cost of repeated

pivots and changes without a clear pathway can hollow out

even the most resilient entrepreneur.

So let's talk about what a success pathway really looks like.

Your unique success pathway isn't a generic formula or a

one size fits all framework.

It's not a personality type or a set of best practices that you borrow

from somebody else's playbook.

It's the specific combination of your emotional intelligence patterns, how

you process stress, connect with others, regulate your responses, and maintain

motivation across five key dimensions.

Your motivational drivers are another part of that, not just

what you want, but why you want it.

The deep sources of meaning that sustain you, even when

surface level rewards fade away.

And another factor here is your behavioral tendencies, your natural

patterns of action and reaction, including the ones that serve you

and the ones that work against you.

When these elements are understood and aligned, something powerful happens.

You stop swimming against the current decisions become clearer because you have

criteria that match who you really are.

Opportunities that fit your pathway practically announce themselves

while distractions lose their appeal.

For Rachel, discovering her success pathway meant realizing that her

creative problem solver strength, was most powerful in the early stages

of a project, and that she needed different structures for execution

and then for maintenance, she wasn't failing because she lacked capability.

She was failing because she kept putting herself in situations that

required her to operate outside her optimal zone for much too long.

Now let's talk about why it's incredibly difficult to do this on your own.

If you cannot see the label from inside the jar, what's the solution?

You need someone outside the jar to read it for you.

Kind of makes sense, right?

This is why I'm a firm believer in the power of assessments combined

with guided interpretation.

And I don't mean one assessment, and I don't mean just a personality assessment.

I'm sure if you've listened to my episodes before, you know that I talk

about multidimensional assessments.

I mean, if you go to your doctor and something's wrong, do you want

'em just to listen to your heart and the sinus infection that you have

doesn't get any treatment because

all he did was look at one thing.

Of course not.

That's silly, right?

Well, why do we do that to ourselves in our personal and professional growth?

It doesn't make any sense.

So this multidimensional assessment process can give you the data that you

need, but that data without someone to interpret it and put it in the

right context is simply more noise.

It's more information.

And self-reflection alone keeps you trapped in your

existing frame of reference.

That's why you need outside help.

The magic happens when objective measurement meets

experienced interpretation.

When someone who understands the patterns can help you see what you've been missing.

When the picture on the puzzle box finally comes into focus,

that's when it all makes sense.

This isn't about someone else telling you who you are far

from that you know who you are.

It's about gaining the outside perspective, that reveals how your unique

combination of qualities actually creates a pathway that's been there all along.

It's hidden in plain sight.

Rachel's transformation didn't come from learning something new about herself.

It came from finally seeing how the things she already knew fit together.

The pieces hadn't changed, but now she had the picture and everything

else started falling into place.

Let's look at what changes

when you find your unique success pathway.

When entrepreneurs discover that, I see the same shifts again and again.

Confidence replaces confusion instead of second guessing every decision you

have internal criteria that tell you whether an opportunity fits or not.

You can say no without guilt.

And you can say yes without anxiety.

Energy returns.

When you stop fighting your nature and start working with it,

everything requires less effort.

Not because the work is easier, but 'cause you're no longer

wasting energy swimming upstream.

Relationships improve.

Understanding your own patterns makes you better at understanding

other people's patterns.

You build teams that compliment your strengths instead of duplicating them,

you connect with customers in ways that feel natural rather than forced.

Results accelerate.

This is the paradox.

When you stop trying to succeed in ways that work for other people

and start succeeding in ways that work for you, progress comes

faster, less effort, more results.

That's what alignment makes possible.

Six months after our conversation, Rachel had restructured her

business around her pathway.

She brought in a partner whose strengths complimented hers.

She stopped chasing opportunities that looked good on paper, but

didn't really fit who she actually was or what her business had become.

And for the first time in years, she told me the work felt sustainable.

Maybe you should recognize yourself in Rachel's story.

I know I do at times.

You know your strengths, but you're still searching for the big picture

that makes sense of all of those pieces.

Or maybe you're just beginning to realize that self-awareness, as

valuable as it is, hasn't been enough to create the clarity and the momentum

that you need and that you want.

Either way, the path forward starts with simple shifts.

Stop trying to figure it out all alone from inside the jar.

Seek the outside perspective that can help you see what you've been missing.

Your success pathway is already there.

It's encoded into who you are.

It's not something you need to invent.

It's something you need to discover.

The journey to clarity starts with understanding your

emotional intelligence patterns.

Why do I say that?

Simply because I know that the most valuable skillset in today's world, for

anybody in business or in professional life is emotional intelligence.

It's the foundation.

Of more skills than you can name, but most people don't understand

how critical that is now,

it's not everything, but it is the foundation and getting that

foundation in the right place where you have good self-awareness,

self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and excellent social skills.

That really covers the gamut in our world today.

One of the things I wanna offer to people, if you go to my website, eq fit.org, at

the very top of the landing page is a big blue button and it says, take the free

success pathway snapshot five questions.

Take you two minutes to do, and that's a great place to start figuring out what

your unique success pathway looks like.

Let me leave you with this.

In today's world where there is so much noise coming at you every day.

Dozens, if not hundreds of emails, social media just everywhere you look,

you're getting input, input, input.

And it's hard to process all of that.

It's so fast.

AI is changing literally every single day.

How in the world do we keep up?

Here's a little peek ahead into the book.

You keep up with agility and resilience, but I'm gonna tell you

right now that my definition of agility and resilience is very different

than what you may think it is.

And it goes pretty deep into how our brains work and how we

can prepare ourselves to grow in the way that we want to.

I hope you'll do that.

I hope you'll go to my website.

EQ fit.org.

Take that free snapshot assessment and start discovering

your unique success pathway.

Thank you for joining us for this episode.

If you have any questions about this week's episode or maybe a

suggestion for future episodes you'd like us to explore, please contact

us through our website@eqfit.org.

For more information and inspiration, connect with us on LinkedIn,

Facebook and YouTube at EQFIT.