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If you want to be the best at whatever you do.
It's about learning about human behavior and what drives human behavior.
And it's the heart.
And the heart has some deep needs.
And the deepest need is for love and connection.
Hi, everyone.
It's Rosie here.
Welcome back to Radio Headspace.
So what does it actually mean to be excellent?
And more importantly, is it something we're born with or something we can train?
My guest today is Jim Murphy, bestselling author and performance coach to some of the most incredible people in the world.
Today, he's going to break down how you can be the absolute best version of yourself.
I really hope you enjoy it.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, like how you got to this place of coaching and talking about excellence.
So the first question I want to ask you is, what does it mean to be excellent?
Yeah, great question.
Thanks, Rosie.
And thanks for having me.
I'm grateful to be here.
When I think about excellence, I think about nine characteristics of inner excellence and of the best possible life.
And those characteristics are love and peace joy patience kindness goodness faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
So it's about becoming a certain type of person, a person filled with these characteristics.
Inner excellence, and excellence itself, to me, is about pursuing absolute fullness of life, which is embodied by these nine characteristics.
Can you tell us what the characteristics are?
Well, so love is the start.
And so when I think of love, there's many different aspects of love.
And in English, we only have one word for it.
And so you might say, like, I love orange juice or I love going to the fair.
And so this is kind of the pleasure aspect of love.
I get these good feelings for certain things and even romantic love.
And then there's the love that I'm talking about, which is sacrificial love.
Sacrificial love is like when you think about it, for others and as we're created for, relationship is uh, the willingness and desire to sacrifice yourself for someone else, and so from that comes joy, and so joy i think of as a byproduct of love, and so the way i define joy is a deep sense of well-being, freedom and gratitude, independent of circumstance.
It's an inner buoyancy and delight that comes from love.
I think it's such an interesting way of perceiving the world because it's such a positive outlook.
So could you give us a little bit of background as to how you created your own framework and perhaps how we can utilize the tools that you talk about to navigate the current state of the world?
Yeah, sure.
And thanks, Rosie.
One of the disciplines of inner excellence is to fuel your heart, the deepest part of yourself, your soul, where your greatest fears are and your greatest dreams are.
And so inner excellence is about training that.
And part of the training.
One of the disciplines is to fuel your heart and be very specific about what you're fueling it with.
Everything that you read watch, listen to people, you spend time with everything that comes into your field of vision, your environment.
That's all fueling your heart every day, and you're moving closer and closer towards all those things.
And so I was a pro athlete and my whole identity was wrapped around my role as a pro baseball player.
When I lost it, I felt like I lost everything.
So I'm driving the truck for FedEx.
I'm working downtown, inner city Seattle at LKE Station, inner city Seattle.
I get a call from my former teammate in pro baseball, Ricky Scruggs, and he was opening up a baseball academy.
He said, can you help me launch it for the weekend?
And it was just at a perfect time for me and that I was really getting restless and wanting to figure out something greater to do with my life.
And I didn't really have a clear purpose for my life.
And so I just said, what if I moved down there and help you out part time and stayed there?
And he said, yes.
And so I did.
And so, when I was there, I decided to become a personal coach to pro baseball players and teach them how to have peace and confidence under pressure.
And my first two athletes said amazing.
So then, I decided to put together a little manual on how to have peace and confidence under pressure for future clients.
And I decided I'm going to interview a sports psychologist and ask him How can a pro baseball player in game seven of the World Series, with a game on the line bottom of the ninth, two outs bases loaded down by one full count?
How can that guy have peace and confidence with so much out of his control?
Or like an Olympic athlete training for four years for an event that may last less than a minute.
And I didn't get sufficient answers.
So I called another and another and another.
And then I spent five years full time writing and researching that question.
How can someone with with so much pressure and so much out of their control, how can they have peace and confidence?
And what I realized in the desert was that your heart is the key.
Training your heart is the most important thing that you'll ever do.
And training it to love most what's most empowering.
And so that's kind of what InterExcellence kind of started in the desert there.
And so that was ended up being five years of full-time writing and researching that question.
And that became the book InterExcellence.
Again, it's so inspiring and it's, really motivating to think about our lives in this way, right?
It's like, what does the everyday person have in common with these pro athletes?
And I think that what you're saying is this idea of the heart, right?
Being able to achieve or, or You know, be in a state of joy or in a state of gratitude.
All of these things, I think, help us connect to our inner excellence.
Right.
Like what what that means for us, because not everybody wants to be a champion.
Right.
And that's actually a quote that one of my student friends who's a Super Bowl champion.
He said that to me one day.
We were having a conversation and I was telling him, you know like I just wish that people would see their potential.
Like I wish that people would see how amazing life could be if they just followed those threads and if they just did the hard work.
But then he said to me, not everybody wants to be a champion and people just want to be happy.
People just want to live in a state of joy and in a state of connection.
So I'm giving you all that context because I think it relates to what you're saying, right?
This idea that we have to go into that wisdom, that love, that place of connection with our own heart to be able to begin a process of healing, of finding what that inner excellence is for us.
Yeah, for sure.
And I think inner excellence is about human optimization.
It's how do I live the best possible life?
It's not about how do I be a great pro athlete or win a gold medal?
It's how do I live the best possible life and maximize my life?
And so that it's not for a specific person or athlete.
And what I found in the desert is that, exactly that, like if you want to be the best at whatever you do.
It's about learning about human behavior and what drives human behavior.
And it's the heart.
And the heart has some deep needs.
And the deepest need is for love and connection.
And the greatest fears is rejection.
And so most people spend their entire lives trying to get some better achievements or improve their looks or get more money or status so they can get that love and connection that they so desperately need.
And so InterExcellence says, hey, let's pursue that directly.
Let's go for that directly and you'll be better at everything that you do.
What happens when you encounter or you're working with somebody who gets totally psyched up to achieve or have this dream, and then they fail?
Because look, I mean as a entrepreneur, or as an artist, or as a creative, you're encountering failure at every turn.
It's like what you have for breakfast, right?
I mean, it's part of the process to constantly be in that state, but you get used to it, right?
But some people just don't.
They have to build.
In the beginning, it was very difficult.
So I want to make sure that I
I'm speaking for myself.
It breaks you down.
It makes you feel like a failure.
Rejection makes you feel like you're not good enough.
So how do you move past those initial rejections or that initial feeling of failure?
I'm going to give you two things, Rosie.
One is principle number one.
Everything is here to teach me and help me.
It's all working for my good.
And the other one is a discipline.
And that discipline is to embrace the tension in the moment.
So, if we look at principle number one, Everything is here to teach me and help me, including everyone I encounter.
It's all working for my good.
Say you get a busy day and you get a flat tire or someone doesn't show up or something happens and your whole day is messed up because of what happened in the morning.
So your thought is my whole day is messed up.
What you think of messed up may be the most important thing for you.
And so it's like in performance with sports whenever the weather is quote bad, like for golf, for example, rainy and windy is like two things that golfers don't like.
And probably cold.
It's really important to know that that thing that you're resisting may be the most important thing.
It may be sent by God for you, the thing that you're resisting.
And so practicing non-resistance and developing more awareness is so crucial.
And so let's talk about the discipline of embracing the tension in the moment.
So say you've got a big speech coming up, some presentation or some big performance or maybe a violin concerto.
And you're really nervous for it.
So now we've got tension, nerves, this tension.
So what we do with embrace the tension is we're going to start off by asking yourself before the day starts, or before you go into your presentation, or when you think about this nervous thing that you have coming up.
Am I willing to face my fears?
Am I willing to face any feeling?
Am I willing to fail?
Am I willing to be embarrassed?
Am I willing to have this feeling that I hate, even if it never goes away?
Am I willing to sit with it and stay with it?
Because what happens to most people?
They come to the edge of their feelings like okay, I'm too uncomfortable right now.
I'm really, really uncomfortable.
Then they flee.
That moment is your teacher and helper.
It's saying, hey, you want to live your dreams?
Okay, here's the path.
We need to find those edges where we come to the edge of our beliefs, and those beliefs have feelings.
If we can just say, look, I may not do very good outcome-wise, that's up to God.
What's crucial here is that I face these fears and am willing to have these feelings.
Because if I am, I'm going to start to get better at these moments and better and better.
And then eventually the outcomes will take care of themselves.
Let's say that you're just starting with somebody blank slate.
They're wanting to work with you and they're wanting to achieve excellence.
They're willing.
They're open.
Do you have a protocol of what you do when you first start working with somebody?
How do you know that your student is ready?
So we start off with how they want to feel and how they don't want to feel.
Because we're going to clarify.
We want to help you get the best possible life and understand what that feels like and have a life with great experiences and deep enriching relationships, where you're learning and growing and making a difference in the world, where you feel fully alive.
And so in order to create that life, we want to start by, okay, what makes you come alive?
And when have you been your best, felt your best, performed your best?
And describe what that's like.
And then what's the opposite?
So we want to get clear on those two opposites and then start to design the habits of thought and action to get them there.
And we also think about How do you want to live?
And when I think about that question, I think about how do I want to handle adversity?
All the things that are out of my control in my life, what type of person do I want to do?
Like Viktor Frankl in the Man's Search for Meaning talked about being worthy of his sufferings.
How do I want to handle the things that when it comes time for me to suffer, how do I want to handle that?
So I think about that.
How do I want to live?
And then who do I want to become?
Who am I meant to become?
Like Viktor Frankl again said, don't ask what you want from the world, but what does the world want from you?
It's not what you're asking the world to give you, but what is God or the universe?
What are you meant to do and be?
Yeah, I mean, those are really great questions.
And, as you're saying it, I'm thinking about the questions that we need to ask as well once we get there, because we only ever see the end result.
Like I want to achieve this goal, or I want to be you know, have a promotion and be you know X person, you know placement in the company, or I want to be a number one podcaster, or I want to have a million views or whatever it is.
But I love what you're saying because it's creating a framework for a pathway to success, essentially.
So Scotty Scheffler, he just won the British Open recently and number one golfer in the world.
And he had kind of this very viral story that he gave where he said, what's the point of winning?
Like, what's the point of golf?
My family's more important to me than golf is.
And I think that's a big reason why he's won so much is because he's able to to uh stay fully present when he's golfing, because it's not his identity.
And I think the point is to pursue how I define excellence or absolute fullness of life.
And golf is meaningless if you just look at it by trying to get a ball into a hole with as few strokes as possible, just like baseball or basketball.
But it's filled with meaning if you use it to learn and grow and become a certain type of person filled with love, wisdom and courage, a person that learns to sacrifice for others.
But you can do that in anything.
It doesn't have to be sports.
And the problem with pro sports is that it starts to think that you are somebody because you're able to shoot a basketball or something like that.
One of the things that I always like to ask people that coach especially if you've been doing it for this long obviously, and you have a lot of experience Do you personally still work with a coach?
You've mentioned working with a coach in the past, but I'm curious if that's still something that you actively do and if it is why.
And if not, why?
Yeah, so I just got off the at an hour call with a spiritual mentor coach and it was very powerful.
So interaction is about learning and growing.
The number one goal is to learn and grow.
And one thing I know about me is that I have a lot to learn and a lot of growth to do.
And so This is the essence of inner excellence.
When I'm coaching, I don't say, hey, I'm going to tell you what to do.
In fact, I try not to ever tell anyone what to do.
What I do is I share things that I've learned and I ask them a lot of questions so I can really understand them.
And hopefully we can both understand them really, really well.
And then I say we're going to go on this journey together and I'm going to work on the exact same things you're going to work on.
I'm going to work on um Being a type of person that, when they're squeezed, love and inner peace and inner strength comes out, not anger and frustration.
I'm going to work on a person that becomes more fully engaged heart, mind and body, unattached to the results of what I'm trying to do.
And a person that's overflowing with love.
That's the person that I want to become.
And so I'm going to work on that with you.
I think that's extremely humble for a coach to say.
I mean normally when you think about a coach I mean in a more sort of grand perspective.
Generally, I feel like the visual is a coach telling you what to do, right?
Score this, do this.
This is your ritual.
This is your routine.
So I really love the idea of empowerment is what you're doing.
You're empowering your coach, student or your person to become more familiar with their inner landscape.
And it sounds like you take it as an opportunity to do that for yourself as well.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
I mean, I want to learn and grow.
I'm super excited to...
I mean, I have so much to learn.
And so it's very exciting.
Like my favorite store in the world is Barnes & Noble.
I mean, you walk in there and I mean, it's filled with...
And every day they're getting new books.
So it's amazing.
For yourself.
Has there been a persistent lesson that's creating that tension you're talking about?
That you've had to really work with.
Typically people have that one thing that they have to work on consistently throughout their lives.
I'm curious if there's one for you and if you wouldn't mind sharing that.
Well, I think fear is the biggest challenge that we all face in performance and in life.
And generally it comes from self-centeredness, this constant thinking about self and getting in our own way.
And so it's something that I face a lot.
One of the ways you can think about inner excellence is self-mastery.
And so when I think about self-mastery, I think about mastering the ego.
And when I think about mastering the ego, I think about three things which is becoming unembarrassable, unoffendable and unirritable.
And so I've got a little bit of ways to go.
I was like, have you done it?
Do you do it?
Tell us all the secrets.
Yeah, I've never said I'm an expert in inner excellence on doing it.
I want to be.
That's my pursuit is to be to have this inner excellence.
But I've never even said I'm good at it.
I just I want to be.
Yeah, no, I think that's a it's a great.
It's a great intention to set.
I love my biggest thing is talking about self-care and self-love.
And they always say you teach what you need to learn.
So I think it's absolutely brilliant that you can see that.
So for the people that are listening to this or watching this right now.
Where can they go to get more information about you and what you do or connect with you?
Yeah, sure.
Thanks, Rosie.
So I'm on social media.
You can go to...
Instagram and InterExcellence, Jim Murphy.
You can follow me there or the other social media outlets.
Facebook, we have a Facebook group.
And then I have a newsletter, InterExcellence VIP newsletter.
You can go interexcellence.com and get it there.
And we'll be on Substack as well.
Okay, great.
We'll put the links to that in the show notes wherever you're listening to this podcast.
One final thing that I would like to ask you to just share with the people listening or watching this on YouTube is If somebody is listening to this and they're really in a place of questioning their purpose or their path, or they're really feeling stuck in some way, shape or form, what is one thing you can tell that person right now?
I think it's so important to understand that there's hope and that, when I look back at my life, there's been some really, really down times and times where I felt hopeless and depressed.
And one time I almost had a mental breakdown and And now, looking back, I can see that God was training me the whole time.
And so at the time, I could not see it whatsoever.
And so understanding that you're constantly getting trained and there's no one that can bring to the world what you can bring.
And so it's so important to remember that that no one has your experiences and your relationships and your understandings, and no one has been through what you've been through.
And that can really make the world a better place.
And that's what you're here for.
And so be encouraged.
Jim, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Radio Headspace.
This has been a truly inspirational conversation.
And I'm so grateful for you for the work that you do.
And thank you for sharing your wisdom with all of us here.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Rosie.
It's been an honor to be on your show.
Thank you.
