Work in Progress: Vulnerability, Self-Worth, + Surprises

What does a year of digging through your own history actually do to you?

In this check-in episode, George and Liz put themselves back on the couch for an honest look at how far they've come and what's still under construction. Self-worth. Self-forgiveness. Self-belief. Vulnerability. Consistency. If you've been following the Beyond Your Default journey, this is a window into what it actually looks like to practice what you preach. Messy parts included.

The Questions That Make You Squirm

These check-in episodes happen every 15 to 20 episodes. The format is simple: George and Liz take turns asking each other questions designed to go straight for the jugular.

George admits he crafted his questions to force vulnerability. Liz's response to seeing them? "You're an asshole for this question." Said with love.

That's the tone. Honest. Uncomfortable. Necessary.

Self-Worth: From Shell to Substance

George asks Liz how her relationship with self-worth has evolved over the past year.

She doesn't sugarcoat where she started.

"I started this journey with you kinda at the bottom of the barrel. I had hit rock bottom in my life, and then for some reason, because I'm a tenacious little butthead, had kept digging."

A few months before the podcast began, she'd celebrated her 40th birthday with an expensive Italian dinner. Married. Friends in from out of town. Everything perfect on paper. Six months later, her entire life was on fire. Divorced. Belongings in a storage unit. Business struggling.

At that point, she knew she had value, but only in propping others up. She'd lost belief in her own voice.

"I knew I had talent to extract out from other people, the greatness that I saw within you. But it was not because of any belief in my own voice. It wasn't in belief of my own worth."

What's changed? She stopped trying to fit in and started seeing worth in being different.

"I was never born to be someone who could ever fit in. God made me physically and temperamentally. I've always been a little bit too tall. I've always been a little bit too loud. I've always been a little bit too strange. I had been built to be different my whole life, and now I see worth in that."

The shift wasn't about suddenly telling herself a different story. She just stopped focusing on telling a story at all. She focused on living.

Positive Selfishness: Filling Your Own Cup

Liz asks George about incorporating selfishness in a positive way to prioritize his own needs. How's that been going?

He points to a recent Sunday morning. He could have done plenty of other things. Instead, he took time for himself. Walked on the treadmill. Watched professional growth content. Did church online. Five miles total before he came out to engage with the world.

"I needed that time. The thing that I'm working through and realizing is if I cannot be of service to myself, I will not be able to be of service to others, at least to the level in which I'm trying to do this."

He has good days and bad days. But he's trying to have more good days than bad.

The shift happened through reprogramming. When you do the same thing for 7, 14, 21, 30 days, it becomes the norm. "If you're setting up all your norms to be in a positive direction around the things that are important to your life, you might feel like, well, that's just the norm, but you have to look back and go, it didn't used to be."

Liz offers a frame: "When you pour love into yourself, it becomes easier to pour love into your world."

George laughs. He can now hear the words "self care" without twitching. Progress.

Digging Up Skeletons and Self-Forgiveness

George asks how digging through her history on the podcast has affected Liz's ability to practice self-forgiveness.

She admits that unearthing old skeletons didn't start with forgiveness. It started with self-acceptance and owning her story.

"As I've started to tell my own stories, it has forced me to not tell stories in a way that makes me feel the worst way possible. Which is usually how I tell those stories to myself."

When you tell stories on a podcast, you have to present them factually, not emotionally. You can't speak to trauma while still feeling traumatized. That requirement forced a different perspective.

"Because you have to tell these stories from a factual perspective, not an emotional perspective, it enabled me to start seeing things with more factual clarity."

Retelling stories multiple times also helped her contextualize them differently. Two things can be true: what happened wasn't right, and everybody deserves a chance to walk away and try again.

It also made her more protective of others in those stories. Her stories, her perspective, but other people were involved. That awareness shaped how she shared.

George adds his own observation. "They're not as scary when you've talked about them 5 to 7 times versus running from them for 25 years."

Wrestling Time

Liz asks about time management and strategies George has implemented.

His answer? He hired an assistant.

One of his daughters had been helping with video scripts and wanted to do more. He laid out the role, the responsibilities, what she'd be protecting him from. Created systems in ClickUp. Built a multi-inbox email workflow. The goal: buy back time.

"All of this investment in her, investment in the position, investment in systems and processes is to buy back time in my life. So in some areas, I can be a little bit more selfish with the things that I need to learn, do, and be, but also be a little bit more of a blessing because now I'm not as stressed."

He's also exploring adding a sales arm to the organization. Taking quotes, invoices, and initial conversations off his plate.

The mental shift was harder than the logistics. "Things that I am talking about do not happen by default. I'm more of the give me the crayons, let me go into a corner, let me draw something, let me be creative."

But he's learning to act according to where he actually is in life. The business has grown bigger than he ever dreamed. It requires different infrastructure now.

"Sometimes we actually arrive somewhere before we mentally and physically catch up to the fact that we've actually arrived there."

Self-Belief and the Story That Shaped Everything

George asks how the Beyond Your Default journey has shaped Liz's self-belief in what's possible for her future.

She pauses. This is the question that kept her up.

"I didn't believe I could have anything. I didn't believe I was allowed to have anything."

Then she goes deeper than she's gone before.

She's an only child of two only children. No aunts, uncles, siblings. Her parents divorced before she was two. She watched her mother unravel with mental health issues and addiction.

"For a long time, I just felt like an artifact of a broken marriage, constantly reminded that I made life a lot harder for other people than it needed to be. And so the belief I've always had is that I am an artifact of a broken marriage and a disappointment."

She grew up solitary. Couldn't have friends over because of her mother's alcoholism. Had to parent her own parent. Moved out young while friends went to college. Felt shame about that too. Most of her family died when she was young because her parents were older.

But something in her programming keeps getting up.

"There's something weird in how I'm programmed where I never quite give up. There's always been something within me that's like you are destined to do something bigger. I didn't know what bigger was. I still to this day do not quite know what that means, but I've always still pushed myself to continue to show up."

This process forced her to stop thinking of herself as uniquely broken and realize she's allowed to believe in herself like anyone else.

"We are all uniquely built in our unique ways, but sometimes that unique snowflake internal narrative works against us. Because we start to think those positive ideas around self belief and what we're capable of, those don't apply to me. And that's just simply not true."

George's response cuts through: "Against all odds, God brought a human to the earth to create an incredible story and impact people. But God knew that for you to be who he needed you to be, that you had to, you know, diamonds. How diamonds are made."

Under pressure.

Walls vs. Boundaries

Liz asks George about his relationship with vulnerability and how it's shifted in recent months.

He doesn't have a three-step plan for becoming more vulnerable. But he's been refocusing on it since they did the vulnerability episode, which retriggered something from years ago when Brene Brown spoke at Inbound.

His frame is about walls versus boundaries.

"Boundaries are, you can be on a football field and you know the boundaries. In and out of bounds. The playing field. Off limits. Walls. If I lock the doors, you can't even get into the stadium. You can't get into the stadium to even play the game."

He wasn't letting people into the stadium to play the game that is life with him. He'd let people through the first five layers but always kept enough distance to run before he could get hurt.

Now he's actively removing bricks from the remaining walls. Not a three-step process. A mental visual project.

"If I know that discomfort equals growth, then instead of running from discomfort, how can I actually run towards it and embrace it? Well, if that's the case, then how do I look at vulnerability and actually breaking down the last wall or two?"

He's asking himself: How can I be a better husband? Better father? Better friend? The answer keeps coming back to living a life with no walls.

"If I can't do this for my circle, family, friends, how am I gonna even think that I'm gonna be able to do this for the masses, listeners, from the stage?"

The snowball effect applies. Super difficult at first. The further he goes, the easier it becomes. What was once effortful becomes the norm.

Consistency and Choosiness

George asks Liz how staying consistent with Beyond Your Default has impacted her resilience.

She goes back to those first episodes. She was showing up as a shell of a human being. But she'd suggested they do this, so she didn't have a choice. Every week, during the darkest part of her life, she got up at 7:45 AM to have a conversation about personal growth.

"I didn't look at it each time of, and this is going to be your lesson in consistency. It's just no. It's the thing I have to do. It's the thing I have to do because I said I was gonna do it."

As other parts of her life came back online, she noticed a problem. Too many yeses.

"I was looking around going, there is no way for me to be consistent. It's actually not physically possible."

At first, she blamed herself. More evidence she was a screw-up. Then she realized that wasn't how any of this works.

She started making a list of non-negotiables. This podcast was at the top. By the end of the list, she hadn't even written down personal things yet. Problem identified.

"One of the keys to being consistent is being very choosy. Because you can't be consistent if you're trying to give yourself over to everything and everyone."

The less she focuses on, the more consistent she can be.

She shared this insight with a friend who couldn't understand why she sometimes walks away from relationships quickly. Her answer: "It allows me to devote my energy like this to the relationships that matter. If I'm giving myself away to everyone all the time, I cannot devote the time and energy to fixing things or showing up in the way I want to for the people who matter."

The Surprising Lessons From a Year

Liz asks what George's greatest and most surprising lessons have been.

First: they actually did it. A year of challenging topics. Every episode felt like going into mental and emotional war. And they came out better, not curled up in the fetal position.

Second: the Superhuman Framework. The beginning of it existed since 2014 when he started ending videos with "don't forget to be a happy, helpful, humble human." A longer version sat in a document for over four years before he shared it. Now it's growing into personal growth, professional development, and organizational culture. He didn't see that coming.

What would he tell himself at the start? Temper expectations.

"So many times when we create content, we think, well, of course my family's gonna listen. Maybe not. Of course my friends will listen. Maybe not."

He'd remind himself of his own methodology: the mathematics of one.

"We've actually been playing a game that is more along the lines of like, ping pong or tennis. It's about the right person being across the table or across the net from us."

It doesn't matter if one person listens to one episode or if ten people listen to a thousand episodes. What matters is what that one person does with what they heard. Who they impact. The ripples.

"I have to believe that even though some of my immediate expectations may have not been met from a business owner mathematical measurement side of things, we've definitely over the last year created some ripples. I'm fine with that, but I would probably go back and remind myself to be fine with that along the way."

Quotable Moments

"I wasn't letting people into the stadium to play the game that is life next or with me as a human being."

"When you pour love into yourself, it becomes easier to pour love into your world."

"The less I focus on, the more consistent I am able to be."

"Sometimes we actually arrive somewhere before we mentally and physically catch up to the fact that we've actually arrived there."

"We've actually been playing a game that is more along the lines of like, ping pong or tennis. It's about the right person being across the table or across the net from us."

Your One Thing

George's takeaway: Go back through the questions from this episode and use them as a check-in for yourself. How are you doing with self-worth? Self-belief? Consistency? Focus? There are episodes that tie back to everything discussed. Identify where you're killing it and where you need help. Then dig in.

Liz's takeaway: This has been an honor. The podcast has forced both of them to show up, week after week, and do the work in public. The people who listen may not always be loud about it, but they're tuned in. And that matters.

Reflection Questions

1. If someone asked you about your relationship with self-worth, what would you say? How has it evolved over the past year?
2. Are there walls in your life that you've mistaken for boundaries? What would it look like to take down one brick?
3. How many yeses do you have right now? Are they enabling your consistency or undermining it?
4. If you were going to practice positive selfishness tomorrow morning, what would that look like?

Ready to go deeper? Press play above and let George and Liz walk you through the full conversation. This one's raw. This one's real. And if you've been on your own journey of becoming 1% better each day, this is essential listening.