Now That You See It

Kim read a book she couldn't stop taking notes on. Pancho pushed back on one of its central ideas. What followed was a conversation in which we're not quite sure if we agree.

The book is Masters of Change by Brad Stulberg, and the thing Kim can't unsee is this: when you're in change you didn't choose, there are ways through it that don't require becoming a different person or pretending you're fine. The concept at the center of it is allostasis, stability through change, the idea that after real disruption, you don't return to who you were. You arrive at a new baseline. And there's a window, documented and finite, right after everything falls apart, where you actually get to influence what your baseline looks like.

Kim connects this to her work in health equity and the concept of weathering, how chronic stress physically ages the body, and what that means for who gets to recover well from life's upheavals and who doesn't. Pancho connects it to his own experience of getting laid off, moving into his truck at 24, and what it means to optimize for freedom in a way that makes certain kinds of loss feel less like loss.

The disagreement is about suffering. The book defines suffering as time multiplied by resistance (suffering = time x resistance). Pancho isn't sure that's fair, because resistance might be inevitable. Calling suffering optional might just be setting people up to judge themselves for being human.

They don't fully resolve it. But they get somewhere more honest than where they started.

Referenced & Recommended Ideas / Resources

• Masters of Change by Brad Stulberg: the book that prompted this episode, on navigating change you didn't choose; bradstulberg.com
• The concept of weathering, via Arlene Geronimus: how chronic stress physically ages the body; search "Arlene Geronimus weathering" for her research
• The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg: the Target pregnancy algorithm story referenced in the episode
• Atomic Habits by James Clear: Kim brought it up, thinking about Charles Duhigg's work. Worth mentioning, since together they are arguably the best two books on habits written in the past 20 years.
• Andrea Gibson, poet: quoted directly by Pancho: "Even when the truth isn't hopeful, the telling of it is"; andreadgibson.com

Just because your coworkers trust you'll do your job doesn't mean they trust you.

This episode goes deep into the practical side of Pancho's relational leadership coaching: six tools he brings into corporate teams, startups, and individual coaching engagements that consistently change how people work together. Most of them require nothing more than a shared document or a different approach to the same conversation.

Each tool connects back to a throughline Pancho: the goal is employee empowerment. Teaching people to think like stakeholders, develop personal agency, and understand how their work connects to something bigger.

Kim brings her own lens throughout, including the concept of mattering and the parallel between what adults need at work and what kids need at home.

Referenced & Recommended Ideas / Resources

Radical Candor by Kim Scott: the framework behind hard conversations at work, care personally, challenge directly - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmxHUiiHgNk⁠

Brené Brown on trust - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Vaq2jMJe4mU⁠

Simon Sinek on trust - ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge3nrxoC_ag⁠

Carol Sanford's regenerative design thinking: the framework behind personal agency, locus of control, and external considering - ⁠https://carolsanford.com/the-regenerative-business/⁠

Dan Walker on Now That You See It, Episode 4 - ⁠https://open.spotify.com/episode/1I0ZfSCVQYqbcHGc8CSMok?si=f8744536d81d4a56⁠

Zach Mercurio, Mattering: concept of mattering vs. belonging - ⁠https://www.zachmercurio.com/the-power-of-matterin⁠g/

Matthew Kimberley wrote a self-help book at 27 called How to Get a Grip. He was certain he had things figured out. And he's spent the last 20 years finding out how little he knew.

In this episode, Matthew joins Kim and Pancho to talk about what he can't unsee: his own fallibility. It's been a gradual process: kids born with health challenges, a marriage dragged through the rocks, career swings that didn't land, and the accumulation of everything life throws at you when you stop being invincible.

What fills the space left by that certainty? For Matthew, it's relationships. A personal CRM to stay in touch with the people he cares about. A Red Velvet Rope policy that protects everyone's experience. The understanding that every good thing in his career traces back to a person, not a strategy.

The conversation also gets into the Dunning-Kruger effect, why Matthew has largely gone quiet on the internet, why silence isn't violence, and what it looks like to operate from hard-won wisdom instead of loud confidence.

Once you see how much you don't know, you can't unknow it. But that's not necessarily a bad place to be.

Concepts Explored

• The Dunning-Kruger effect and what it looks like from the inside looking out
• Fallibility as a slow realization rather than a single moment
• Relationships as infrastructure: why Matthew traces every career win back to a person, not a strategy
• The Red Velvet Rope Policy and why protecting who you work with protects everyone

Referenced & Recommended Resources

• Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port and Matthew Kimberley (20th anniversary edition, October 2025): the system Matthew built his coaching practice around
• The Single Malt Mastermind: Matthew's weekly email accountability program at singlemaltmastermind.com
• Wittgenstein's Ruler via Nassim Nicholas Taleb: if a source isn't reliable, their opinion says more about them than about the subject
• matthewkimberley.com: where to find Matthew and reach out directly

What if some of what you've always called your personality is actually anxiety in disguise?

That's the thread Kim and Pancho pull on in this episode. It's genuinely hard to untangle the overlap between who you are and what your nervous system has just gotten used to doing.

They look at how traits like conscientiousness, planning, and people-pleasing can be anxiety in a disguise that seems reasonable. And how, when it's been baked in long enough, it stops looking like a coping mechanism and starts looking like just... you.

Pancho introduces the Hedonic Treadmill of Anxiety, the loop where unaddressed fear gets intellectualized into worst-case scenarios, generates a small dopamine hit, and keeps you spinning in hypotheticals instead of taking real action. Kim brings in the Big Five personality traits to help draw the line between what you were born with and what got layered on top.

The episode introduces useful ways to distinguish between your anxiety and your personality. It's a tricky distinction to draw, and there aren't necessarily clear answers. But it's an opportunity to understand yourself and your nervous system with more nuance.

Once you see that this constant anxious baseline might not be a part of who you are, you can't unsee it.

Recommended Reading and Concepts to Explore

• ⁠Now That You See It ep 13 - Generations Ago, Your Personality Formed: Judy Hu On Epigenetics and Inherited Pain⁠
• ⁠Joe Hudson on the experiences we avoid feeling⁠
• The Big 5 Personality Traits - take the test ⁠here⁠
• ⁠The Hedonic Treadmill of Anxiety article

What happens when the version of you that has been working for so long no longer fits?

This episode explores the slow process Kim took to understand herself and the resulting coming out to her friends and family.

We explore how coming out is more than a process for people to publicly step into a more self-affirming sexual orientation. Coming out is a process for anyone who has to share something about their identity when there's something at stake.

Whether it's coming out as gay, telling your kids about your separation, or admitting to yourself and your coworkers that you're burned out, publicly stepping into a new identity comes with risk.

In this episode, we get into:

• The loss of being the capable, reliable one
• Why burnout can also bring clarity, not just exhaustion
• The gap between knowing something needs to change and actually changing it
• The tension between truth and safety, and how that shapes how we navigate these dynamics

Finally, we talk about the difficulty and cognitive dissonance of staying in a situation that no longer fits, even after coming out.

Recommended Research and Reading

• ⁠Brené Brown’s Values Exercise⁠
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect and The Valley of Despair
• ⁠Adam Grant on Languishing⁠
• Staying Stuck in Cognitive Dissonance

Chris has spent much of his life looking ahead.

Ahead to the next race. The next film. The next goal.

In this conversation, he reflects on what’s led him to slow his forward momentum.

We talk about entering a three-day darkness retreat and being told, “You’re just an animal in a cage.” About what surfaces when fight-or-flight kicks in without your usual coping mechanisms. About asking yourself, What am I suffering from?

We also talk about friendship and family.

About showing love through acts of service, while wishing you had shown up in person more.

About realizing you’ve been “on your own program” and trying to renegotiate what relationships look like at 40.

And we talk about his mom.

Sixteen surgeries.

Moving home to be closer.

The strange experience of outliving a parent.

And the awareness that, eventually, the people we love become the stories we tell about them.

Chris doesn’t present himself as having figured it out. He’s in it. Grateful. Regretful. Still recalibrating.

After spending years looking ahead and a season looking back, he’s trying to do something simpler: Be right here.

Resources Mentioned & Recommended Reading/Listening

• Learn more about Chris and his work ⁠https://www.chrisburkard.com/⁠
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
• Sky Cave Darkness Retreats - ⁠https://www.skycaveretreats.com/⁠
• ⁠Adulting 101: How To Make Friends as a Grownup ⁠

What happens when a decision stops feeling like a decision?

In this episode, we explore the moment when the status quo becomes intolerable. The moment when overthinking fades, not because life is clearer, but because denial is no longer available. Our one option becomes inescapable.

Kim shares what it’s been like to lose what she calls “the gift of denial.” The survival strategy that once made her adaptable, high-performing, and endlessly tolerant… and that also kept her in situations long after they stopped fitting.

We talk about:

• Why overthinking is often emotional avoidance
• The difference between intuition and anxiety
• Depression as unfelt anger
• Why "getting warmer" to truth is not the same as "getting safer"
• The grief that comes with shedding old identities
• When the only real choice left is whether to stay in the status quo

We also explore Pancho’s decision to stop drinking, not as an act of willpower, but as a shift in perception that made the old way of living incompatible.

This episode is about alignment. About the space that opens when we shed parts of who we were to step into who we're becoming. And about the uncomfortable truth that once you see something clearly… you don’t get to unsee it.

Resources Mentioned and Other Recommended Reading

• Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach
• Thinking In Bets by Annie Duke
• ⁠Generations Ago, Your Personality Formed: Judy Hu On Epigenetics and Inherited Pain ⁠
• ⁠What Alcohol Does to Your Body, Brain & Health - Huberman Lab ⁠
• ⁠Repetition Compulsion⁠
• ⁠Limerence ⁠
• ⁠Just World Hypothesis⁠
• Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

Motherhood does not arrive quietly. It changes your body, your brain, your calendar, and your identity. And then the world starts treating you differently before you’ve even figured out who you are becoming.

In this conversation with Julie Bacon, founder of the Mothership Collective, we discuss the identity shift of motherhood, both from within and from without. Julie shares what it was like to mountain bike while pregnant, struggle through postpartum depression, and build a community that refuses to let motherhood shrink who women are.

We explore the mental load no one prepares you for, the tension of trading off freedom with a partner, and why visibility matters when it comes to pregnant bodies doing powerful things. We also unpack what happens when an eight-month pregnant climber goes viral, and the internet trolls weigh in.

This episode is for all the moms out there navigating this inevitable identity shift and those in support of that journey.

What does it take to stay connected to yourself when everything is changing and the world is telling you to become someone else?

Resources Mentioned and Suggested Reading

• ⁠The Mothership Blog⁠
• ⁠@the.mothership.collective⁠ on Instagram
• Matrescence by Lucy Jones
• ⁠Identity-Based Habits⁠ by James Clear
• ⁠Maternity Shoot Instagram post⁠

"I deserve this."

If you immediately get the ick, you're not alone. But why? Shouldn't it sound empowering?

In this conversation, we unpack one of the most loaded phrases in modern self-help culture. We explore the difference between deserving dignity and demanding outcomes, between healthy self-care and subtle entitlement. Depending on how "I deserve" is used, it can signal a healthy relationship with your needs or it can be a way of emotionally bypassing the shame you feel about having them met.

Though we agree on several points, Kim and I (Pancho) come to realize we hold a different framework of what it means to deserve and when we are actually deserving of things.

We talk about deserving in transactional relationships, the tension between self-determination and belonging, and how burnout and resentment often result from an unhealthy relationship with deserving rest. Along the way, we question whether deserving is something we earn, something inherent, or mostly a story we tell ourselves to avoid harder emotions.

This episode is for anyone who struggles to rest without earning it, to ask for help without guilt, or to process disappointment without turning it into bitterness.

If it feels like something is off when someone says, "I deserve," then this episode is for you. And if you're the one who said it, this episode is for you too :)

Resources Mentioned & Recommended Reading / Listening

• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari - Chapter 6: "Building Pyramids" proposes that human rights are a culturally constructed fiction
• ⁠Self-Determination Theory⁠
• ⁠Desert (philosophy)⁠
• ⁠⁠EMDR Therapy

The way we see ourselves can differ widly from the way others see us. We might see ourselves as competent, self-aware, and reasonable. And maybe we are. But our friends, family, significant others, and strangers all have a different idea of who we are, and that's fascinating.

In this guestisode, Pancho’s wife Steph joins the podcast, with Kim facilitating, to explore the gap between self-perception and how we’re actually perceived by family, colleagues, and strangers. The conversation starts with jokes about Pancho's ADHD and dirty dishes, then moves into a deeper discussion of blind spots, intimidation, personality frameworks, and the strange way we revert to older versions of ourselves around the people who’ve known us longest.

This episode is for those who feel quietly misunderstood or who wonder how to build more honest, open relationships. We talk about the dynamics of moving from one chapter of life into the next, growing together or growing apart as we go.

Resources Mentioned & Recommended Reading / Listening

• How The Enneagram System Works

• The Four Tendencies by Gretchen Rubin

• Driven to Distraction by Edward Hallowell & John Ratey

• The science of healthy relationships with John and Julie Gottman | Re:Thinking with Adam Grant