How To Get Curious About Yourself Before You Get Critical (with Antoine Wooten Jr.)
Antoine Wooten Jr. is a coach, educator, and the author of It’s More Than Winning for You. His work focuses on helping people see their identity beyond productivity and performance through coaching, leadership, and mentorship.
In this episode, he and Tom discuss how you can stack up titles and still feel like you’re one bad season away from not mattering.
Antoine knows that feeling from the inside. Athletics, training, real estate, nonprofit leadership. Every new title looked like success from the outside. Underneath, he was running from a fear of becoming irrelevant. He kept leading and kept showing up. He was also burning out, and by his own account, he was acting.
In this episode, Antoine talks about where that pressure comes from. Shame, he says, grows when you measure yourself against an image or against someone else’s win. Success means reaching the goals you set for yourself.
Today he coaches high school athletes, and plenty of adults, to see fear for what it often is: avoidance. We build coverings to hide from it, and those coverings fuel both the performance and the anxiety. His alternative is to swap self-criticism for curiosity and get honest about what’s driving you.
He also walks through the model he teaches. You perceive something. You give it a meaning. You read that meaning as safe or as a threat. Your beliefs and behaviors follow from there.
If you’ve ever wondered who you’d be without the next accomplishment, start here.
DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE
~00:54 Episode Setup
~02:13 More Than Winning
~04:54 Titles And Burnout
~09:34 Value Beyond Doing
~11:31 Shame And Comparison
~15:05 Coaching Young Men
~16:35 Fear And Coverings
~20:00 Curiosity Over Criticism
~24:35 Perception Drives Behavior
~27:22 Get The Book
~28:11 Final Takeaways
~30:44 Outro And Resources
FULL EPISODE VIDEO
CONNECT WITH ANTOINE
Instagram: Antoine Wooten Jr.
Instagram: @theseen.collective
Facebook: Antoine Wooten Jr.
Facebook: Seen Known Loved
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