#245 | Winning Is: Being An Authentic Human Ft. Kate Eckman

Executive coach and journalist Kate Eckman reframes success beyond metrics, redefining winning as integrity, self-trust, and the courage to stop abandoning yourself for approval. She breaks down how high performers outgrow scoreboard thinking and why social media can distort value by prioritizing visibility over authenticity. Kate shares a powerful mindset shift: true self-love comes from honoring your values, even when it costs you. If you’re building a winning mindset rooted in authenticity, leadership, and personal growth, this episode is a must-listen.

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Transcript

What Winning Really Means

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Win Today. This show is crafted for those who want to win in every aspect of their lives. Every week you will learn from a renowned thought leader that will share a piece of a winning playbook that you can incorporate into your life. If this show has a positive impact on you and you see value in it, please share it with somebody and leave a rating and review so we can help more people win. What does winning really mean? I've been on this quest now for the past year to dig into what winning means to high performers. One thing I've uncovered is that winning is very rarely defined by a metric or some sort of scorecard. And I believe that social media in the world that we live in today can often portray winning as a number of followers, likes, some sort of metric, an arbitrary metric. And the more conversations I have with folks at the tail end of the interview is around what winning means to them and what winning would have meant to them previously. And there's an interesting shift here. So this is with Kate Ekman. The full episode will come out next week. Kate is a well respected and known executive coach, model, and journalist that has interviewed some of the most prominent leaders in the world, presidents, CEOs, and folks that we often love to study. What I love about Kate is that she really is encouraging people to embrace their full selves to be who they authentically are, not what social media should have them be, not what the world should have them be. Be who you authentically are and understand what it means for you to be authentically human. So we'll dig into more of that next week, but what you'll get with this snippet here with what winning means to her, I really love her definition of it and being true to yourself. Now these are things that easier said than done at times, especially in the world we live in today. But I believe what you'll find with her response here is just her genuine delivery and how her heart really comes out. And it's my wish that by hearing this and by tuning into next week's interview that you'll tap into more of your heart posture and not be afraid to speak on things that matter to you because we really only get one opportunity to do that in this one beautiful thing called life that we get to live. So enjoy Kate, check her out. She has a new book that will be coming out as well, which we'll talk about here at the end and next week. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 3:11

And I I wish that we would spend more time really honoring ourselves. You know, we get so upset, it's like, oh, this person didn't acknowledge this, this person didn't acknowledge that. But I think if we're honest, we don't really ever acknowledge ourselves.

Winning As Self Loyalty

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Right. Yeah, no, and and we need to and normalize that as well. Kate, switching gears a little bit, one conversation that I started having over the past year with all of my guests is understanding what winning means to them. Uh this being the Win Today podcast, I am discovering more and more that winning isn't it's not a scoreboard, it's not a binary thing, especially to high performers and ambitious folks. I might even say that winning is is having a slow morning, and it's not a bank account number, anything like that. But if I pose that to you, what is winning to you? What speaks to you there?

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Winning to me is staying true to myself, not abandoning myself, not betraying myself, not selling out, if you will. It's holding on to my morals and values and standards, high standards, very high standards, even when it's frowned upon, even when it means I'm ostracized, even when it means I lose friends or family members, even if it means I lose everything. If I stay true to myself, I've already won. If I have put one foot in front of the other consistently, even when it's hard, even when I feel broken, even when I feel completely alone and I'm I'm still going, I've already won. And there's really no outward reward, no fame, no fortune, no external validation that could ever mean as much as just knowing that I stayed true to me and my integrity when it was so much easier to not do that. That is that is the fast ticket to loving yourself too. When you when you stop abandoning yourself and erasing yourself for others and betraying yourself for others, you've already won. And I will drop every mic in the world and say that.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

And to everyone who has done that, you've already won.

When Winning Was External

SPEAKER_03 5:33

Amen. If I asked that same question to Kate, who was fresh off of her swimming career and entering the world postmasters, and now you're in your career. Would the response have been the same then?

SPEAKER_02 5:54

No. The response would have been all external.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Being the best, being perceived as the best, being ranked the best, all the money and luxury and everything that comes with that. It would have been about kind of makes me sad. Um, but it's our society. It would have been all about how other people perceived me and thinking that safety and love came from achievement. And that breaks my heart. And it breaks my heart because that's not just my story. I think it's almost everybody's story because that's that's the food that we're fed. That's the poison that we're fed.

Time Affluence Over Hustle

Staying Human In A Hard World

SPEAKER_00 6:40

Mine would have been on a scorecard too. Looking back at the earliest days of my career to now. And I love what you brought up about time affluence. Like there is something to be said about just our time on earth is tomorrow is not guaranteed. The next minute, the next second isn't guaranteed. I I shared with a group of young leaders the other day. Uh they they they brought me in to speak about leadership insights, and one thing that I was that I'm not proud to say is that at the beginning of my career, I it took three years before I took a real vacation. There's nothing cool about that. There's no award or accolade on someone's resume or LinkedIn or whatever that says most time spent in office award goes to dot dot dot. Because imagine if if my life had ended before that. That look at all these experiences that I that I don't have, and oh yeah, Ryan was the guy that lived in the office. And that certainly it had cost some relationships at at the time, but knowing what I know now, it's not anything, it's not a line item on my on a resume. And I love what you said, Kate. Like just being true to your to yourself that has nothing to do with you. You could do that with a million dollars or zero dollars. It requires nothing but that relationship with yourself and loving yourself. You have another book coming out. I wanna make sure we highlight that the the amazing work that you do, because I I believe in you and I believe in that you help make humans better and our world a better place. So with that, I know that if people do get a a piece of your work that they too can be made better. So in addition to the full spirit workout, uh, what's next?

The Question To Reflect On

SPEAKER_01 8:51

I am writing a book about humanity and what it means to stay human right now in our lives, personally, professionally, collectively, culturally. And it is a very profound moment that we're living in, a world I I didn't know what to expect, but a much different world than I grew up in. And I'm seeing people losing their humanity or think that it's just something that they get to have because they are human, but it does require participation. It does require effort. And um for everyone who only cares about the bottom line and getting ahead, it also is the key to, you know, advancing in the external world. So um I'm having a lot of fun with writing about what it means to stay human right now and over on Substack. So I'm putting it all together right now, and that will be coming out to continue to do programming in the media around this topic and um talking about issues that matter, even if they're wildly uncomfortable for people to discuss, I feel like that's my jam too, because if we're uncomfortable, that shows the work that needs to be done. And I think having these conversations with friends and family and colleagues and strangers and making this more normal than all the other stuff, all the doom and gloom and death and destruction and all the hatred that's out there. I think, you know, as someone who has been in the media for my whole career, but we're we're the media every day and what we choose to speak and preach and not say. So, you know, I just I I want to invite everybody to get in touch with their humanity and without me explaining what that means to me or, you know, in general, what that means to you to stay human right now. And you say, well, what do you mean? What does that mean to you? And to reflect on that. What does it mean to stay human right now? Um, I would love to hear everybody's answer. I would love for people to, you know, write me a note or get in touch with me. And, you know, I did this today and it made me think of you because I stayed human. That's that's the movement that I want to create and want people to think about and reflect on and talk about. And when you think of me, I want you to think of that. And when you're having a low moment or a high moment, how can I make this celebratory moment more human? Maybe it's putting the phone down and instead of creating content, it's just being in that moment of like, wow, I made it, I did it. Maybe in that place of despair, it's not spiraling down and, you know, scrolling on TikTok and numbing out. It's it's sitting with it and sitting with the pain. And it's like, you know what, I'm staying human because I'm not avoiding this difficult feeling.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

What does it mean to stay human? That's the question to answer, reflect on, and reach out to Kate about.