Episode 66: Avatars - Designed and Betrayed

An active practice in my community is avatar design and upgrades. Think of an avatar the way you would in a game; the version of yourself you load into a given context, complete with skins (how you present), loadouts (the tools, language, and moves you bring), and upgrades (the trainings and reps that level you up). 

Sometimes we betray ourselves and show up in the wrong skin, with the wrong kit, for the room we're actually in. Sometimes we get it right and catch ourselves mid-swap, conscious of the version we're deploying and why.

This is just a small window into an extremely diverse and powerful concept applicable in all domains of our life. More on this in future episodes. 

This is an excerpt from a call with my group from late 2024.

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to The Sovereign Guide. I'm your host, Alistair MacDonald. Let's get started

Speaker 0:08

I've had the privilege of having incredible mentors my whole life, and I've visited... I've, I've sought them out. Early on, I was too dumb to solicit them, uh, but I stumbled across one which led me to discover the ability of others to fold time for me. And so what followed was a deliberate curating and cultivating of mentorship relationships since I was 18 or 19 years of age. One of the most powerful mentors in my life was a man named Martin who's still alive and I have not seen for too many years. It makes me sad. Martin was my dad's age and, an expert in the safari field that was of the most sophisticated, gentlemanly type. Everything he did was done with precision. When we would share a tent in a safari camp at night, if I got up at night, he slept with one eye open. Part of it was his ex-special forces. Uh, his clothes were folded perfectly. His shoes sat at the foot of his bed. His weapons were always impeccably clean. His vehicle, no matter what it had been through, was polished at 4:30 every morning ready for his day. This man was somebody of the highest standards I had ever seen, and they were the highest standards in all of his domains. I saw him in very complicated circumstances of physical, reputational, intellectual, financial danger over the years of us working together, and he was always as poised as he was powerful and clear. And though I haven't seen Martin for many years, I have no doubt that he's aging, uh, just as gracefully. An incredible man I'm extremely grateful for in my life We were out, uh, on a safari with a small group of German gentlemen, and we were in an area called the Matetsi Safari Area. We were driving back to camp in the middle of the day, and one of the trackers on the back of the vehicle where I was sitting tapped on the roof, the signal to stop the driver, to halt. Looking back, he told us there were lion back there. There's lion tracks. We were going 30 kilometers an hour, but this gentleman missed nothing. Lion tracks crossing the sand behind us. So we stopped the truck. Martin got out. I was in the back, young guppy like I was. Super exuberant. Wanted to be great. Wanted to impress my mentor. He got out and started walking back, speaking Ndebele to his trackers, two legends, legends that I just held in such high regard as well. They said to him, "Look, it looks like there's some lions back there that have crossed. The tracks are fresh." So Martin started walking back on foot. I jumped out and went with him. Let's just go have a look. Fatal error number one As we walked back slowly, we came to the So it's probably 40 or 50 meters away, 'cause we were moving at a fair clip by the time the truck had stopped. We got back to the center of the road. Sure enough, we're there looking at the tracks. Yep, look at that. It looks like there's three, maybe four lionesses, big sized, big old dinner plate sized paws in the sand with scattered cub paws between them Red flag number two. As we're standing there, he and I, the vehicle 40, 40 or 50 meters away with our weapons in it, we look around. "Oh, look at that. Ah, that's, it's great." Like a couple of novice, uh, British tourists. "Oh, great. Lions right here. Oh, there they are." In the grass were four large lionesses. And no sooner did we make eye contact with the alpha female, the matriarch, but she was coming at us. And she was, sudden, not fast. She covered ground so quickly I was frozen in my steps. The two of us standing there completely unarmed as she came at us from probably 40 yards away In a flash, Martin crouched down, grabbed two handfuls of sand, roared, and threw these hands full of sand up in the air. This lioness halted. I'd never seen that trick before. I'd been working under Martin for two, maybe three years at this time. I'd never seen that before. And she turned to walk, but keeping that killer eye contact that they do the whole time. Walked away, walked away. We joined her. We started walking our way, but when she turned to walk, we saw what emerged were all of these cubs popping out of the grass, bounding back. She was giving... She was scaring us away to protect her youngsters. No sooner had we turned to start heading back to the vehicle to where our weapons were, to the horrified, equally dinner plate sized eyeballs of the client standing in the back of the truck watching us about to get turned into two skewered kebabs, cooked extremely rare, but she came again This time there was a slight disconnect. We, we looked at each other for a moment and he started running. So being his apprentice, my instincts of course kicked in, which is me thinking, "I'm 20 years old. He's 55. I'm gonna take him on the outside. There's no way that Martin's gonna leave me behind." But I set off to sprint and I realized what I was doing, and I stopped, turned around, and I did exactly the trick that I'd just seen him do, that I learnt maybe four seconds before. Reached down, roared, threw sand up in the air. This lioness jammed on anchors. She was so close and moving so fast that the dust that she carried washed over my face like jet wash. But Martin had kept running and stopped when she did and looked back at me. This lioness was probably eight paces, seven paces away from me. And of course, I'd never seen a bigger lioness before and I've never seen a bigger one since than that one. Was she the biggest? Didn't matter. She was the biggest in that moment, which makes her the biggest forever. The head on this beast was the size of a, of a gearbox of an F-150. Just massive, massive beast. As she stopped, the dust flew past her right into my face and she let out this gut-wrenching roar, just wa. And stood slowly from this crouched position and turned, kept eye contact with me, and slowly walked away. Again, the cubs bounding back, bounding back every time she made distance, covering for her youngsters. I turned to look at Martin and he was looking at me with a combined, the combined energy and view of somebody who was really impressed but secretly a little embarrassed that he had run and not stood I mentioned that, to hit pause for a moment, I mentioned that I've just come back from my quarterly retreat, three days, three nights, four days in the mountains. And I spent a good amount of time reflecting on our earlier conversations about avatars. I make the case that there are aspects of ourselves. There's a version of you that shows up for the board meeting at the local PTA. There's a version of you that shows up to mentor your doc. There's a version of you that shows up with, uh, a patient that is upset. Equally, there's a version of you that shows up to celebrate your team, to acknowledge your loved ones, uh, to apologize for something you've gotten wrong. All of these are avatars of ourselves, just as we see in all of the stories of the hero's journey. There's the warrior, the princess. There's the warrior princess. There's the poet, the author, the lover, the fighter. These avatars have a favorite piece of music. Haven't you noticed when you work out? You don't always listen to the same thing. They have a certain outfit they wear, maybe the red lipstick tonight and not the pink. They like to drive a certain way that at other times they don't. They like eating at certain places that at other times they don't, et cetera, et cetera. They respond differently under conflict with some individuals than they do others, typically according to degree of proximity, intimacy, and commensurate risk for our dignity and humility and heart And as I reflected on my own avatars, revisiting them as I did after this incredible, beautiful, powerful early morning meditation looking up at the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains, I started asking myself about principles and integrities within each avatar and how many of them are portable to other domains. Stick with me here. I appreciate your tolerance. How many of the principles that a certain avatar we carry, you as the mom with your daughter versus you as the mom who's currently dealing with a naive, very low confidence assistant, do these principles of operating carry into other domains? An example from my own reflections is the principle of creating assets versus shepherding them, something we've spoken about in the past Merrill Lynch advisors would have zero entrepreneurial clients if it wasn't for the fact that somewhere we were convinced, largely by Wall Street's marketing machine, that as an entrepreneur you are uniquely qualified to create capital, but you are inherently unqualified to shepherd it The entire reason that the financial advisory industry exists is implicitly stating it's built on the premise that you might be able to create it, but tut, tut, tut, I don't think you really know how to handle it. Now, I'm not saying that trusts and, uh, wills and legalese and so forth are not critical. For sure they are. But this is something that your financial advisor refers you to, an estate attorney or etc., etc. So let's not wrap it all together and give credit where it's not due. Somewhere in this exchange, we go from believing in ourselves to create money to not quite believing in ourselves to be stewards of that capital. coming back to this notion of avatars and principles, and are they portable to different domains? I think about my own perspective about wealth creation, which is of course at its core value creation. I, like all of us in this beautiful community, am hell-bent on staying relevant to your challenges and to creating value in any way that I can. These can occur in two different ways: opportunities we want to capitalize on, or micro tears, mistakes, problems, shortcomings, obstructions in our path or on our path to getting there. Problems and opportunities. I'm committed to staying as relevant to your problems as you are to creating them I love that about our relationship. I trust you to keep doing really ridiculous stuff, uh, and I trust myself to try to keep up and see if I can help along the path. I shared just recently that the government decided to siphon off unsolicited, unknown to me, a multiple hundred thousand dollar divot in my account a few months ago. Woke up on a Friday morning, "Congratulations, Alistair. We want you to know that the funds have been transferred." I'm like, "Oh, it's weird. 6:00 AM on a Friday. I don't remember asking anyone to siphon some cash out of my account." Oh, no. Government has put their straw into this brokerage account and taken what they thought was relevant. They took multiple hundred thousand dollars for a, what turned out to be a $4,000 question about, uh, something that we're wrong about in the first place. The rest, uh, fees, penalties, and legal fees. Legal fees. Some attorney, some attorney got $85,000 from out of nowhere. Anyway, in that moment... I shared this in real time. I'll, I won't recap with great depth, but in that moment, I saw that those two wolves, as the old saying goes. There was the wolf that could say, "Oh my God," self, uh, righteous indignation, "How can they do that? And this is wrong," panic and justification and so- The other side is to say, "No problem. I'm sure it's an error, and if it's not, I'll make it back. Trust myself." One is the language of scarcity, the other is the language of abundance. One is the philosophy that preserves, the other is the one that creates. I have to live in the realm of creativity, creation, value contribution, and you do too. And I wanna suggest if you're looking for brain damage, pretend that you're not a value creator. Start worrying about what you can keep instead of what you can create. Guaranteed brain damage. For individuals that do not have a floor underneath them, their own creativity, yet do have ceilings above them, employees, they don't enjoy the same privilege, which is to say you have this privilege. I encourage you to own it as part of a lived philosophy, or it's like having a superpower and not using it. Don't do it. Coming back to the comparison of these avatars. In my value creation self version, where I believe in myself, I, I believe in myself enough to the point of stupidity. I actually think that I can own practices in a country I don't live, uh, that are doing dentistry that I'm incapable of doing. Uh, that's how naive I can be sometimes. But so far, so great. That, I just say that, as naive or ill-conceived as it might be, it speaks to the language of creativity, self-belief, and abundance. Certainly, I trip from time to time. Yet when I look at my investments, I'm so much more conservative. I'm more constrained and deliberate. I'm very specific about qualifications Is there an alignment there? Now, there's two different versions of this. One is, hey, we could say it complements. Conservative, aggressive. Great. Rather that than conservative here, aggressive there. You know, to switch them. And it may be a perfect fit. It may complement ideally, but it may also be speak to some other internal substructures that I've not yet visited, and I spent some time doing that this week and then realized that a good part of that is watching my family build incredible businesses only to have them erased twice by forces completely beyond their control. Sovereign nation imploding on itself. Inflation of the greatest in history destroyed everything they had built, despite building significant businesses. So there's-- that seemed to be written into my genetic code. Is that bad? Is it good? I don't think judgment helps, but it is worth owning and looking at and at least revisiting. The jury's out on what I'm gonna do, but I can convince myself that any one of these, uh, reasons, justifications, things are, are worth doing, but they haven't been visited as well as they could be. Does that avatar, the creator, that, that also sit at the table of the shepherd? Should he, she? Shouldn't they? Is it a different realm? I don't know. Don't know. I have observed in clients whose assets I've helped shepherd over the years that more often than not, individuals will bring that fast and loose psychology to their investing and betray all of the hard work that they've done, essentially turning what started out as an attempt at climbing El Cap into a free solo. You can climb El Cap and still say bolted in, and it'll still be an impressive feat. You don't need to do it as a free solo, particularly if you have children. I'm already worried about Alex Honnold's legacy. I worry. Other versions of this. Is the version of me that publicly deals with insult The same one that privately deals with it If I'm privately insulted, how am I going to respond? Versus when I'm on stage and somebody says, "Oh, weird speaking bald African." Of course, that stuff's all true. That's not particularly insulting. But if there's something that's not true, uh, you know, are there other elements yet? I just, th- these are things that I've spent some time reflecting on Of course, there are many avatars, and they have different versions of principles and philosophies, and integrities that either overlap or don't. Of course, I'm using, as a definition, integrity is when what we say, uh, overlaps with what we do with complete, uh, with complete accuracy. Anything outside of that is me being out of integrity, and I can always tell 'cause I'm really difficult to be around. Very much like, I think it was, uh, it was Dan Sullivan who used to say, "Do you ever notice that the more hungry and tired you are, the worse everyone else is as a driver or as an intellect?" I'm like, "Well, that's true, Dan." I said, I said, "I'm tired and hungry and everyone's driving like an idiot. What are the chances? 100%." Uh, so yeah, when I'm out of integrity, I'm a little bit irascible. I'm a little bit difficult to be with. Getting old enough where I actually catch it almost in real time, like within a year, I guess. Within a year, I close the loop Martin was and remains an iconic individual in my life, and I'll forever be grateful for him. The look on Martin's face in that moment, which I'm not even in a position to judge, but I can assess 'cause I was there was one of somebody realizing that they didn't follow their own principles established just seconds before. You've done this. You've done this when you said to the kids, "Okay, time to go to bed. Time to go to..." And then you just turned into a bear Had your principles, set out with all good intention, betrayed it. Nowhere does this show up more with more predictability than when the schedule falls apart. You come in with great stoke, you bring the light, schedule falls apart. Fire-breathing dragon undermining the belief system that you've supposedly instilled in the team over all these years. I really believe in you guys to solve this. Who? We ask who, we're looking for someone to blame, not a solution. Not a solution I have no judgment for Martin. I have nothing but gratitude and love, and I'm grateful for that moment because I saw the discomfort in him, a person of the highest integrity, who to this day I admire beyond my own, my own self, the things that he does, even just how he moves through the world. As I haven't seen him for too many years, but I, it's the safest bet of all time that he's still 100% himself, moves to his own true north, his own drummer. I saw in him a look in my own eyes that I would see 1,000 times over the next 30 years. We know what to do, but the moment that there's a slight dislocation in context, the principles that support this avatar are forgotten I also would love to tell you that I saved both of our lives that day, but I didn't. He might have saved mine. I simply was lucky that that lioness had no intention of chewing any of us up. She was doing the same thing I would do, just trying to protect my babies. And it worked. How many others can sprint 30 yards and create a bowel movement in two otherwise self-respecting men? It's a compelling protection of the bear cubs. Uh, it's, uh, it's compelling These are the reflections that are coming up for me. This is what I'm investigating, and obviously, as you can see, it's quite a rabbit hole. But I'm asking this of us and inviting you to consider it as leaders because that's where it shows. As a leader, especially those of you that are going to be mentors or are already, and I believe that there's power to speaking to this weakness em- embedded in all of us because it shows the fact that as all of our, our friends here that have mentees know that it's important that your mentees, your associate, your, uh, O- OM, et cetera, knows that you are a work in progress, too. Nothing communicates the fact that I'm into closing loops and, and creating new problems, which is to say solving old ones, actually solving them, but creating and instilling the confidence in others to create solutions, yet completely obviating the probability of that happening by my example of unraveling when things fall apart Nobody cares what we say. They care what we do. That beautiful old saying, "Who you are speaks so loudly, I can't hear a thing you're saying." Of course, this sounds fairly scathing, and this is just language of my own self-inquiry. I don't mean this for or to anyone here. But I just invite you to consider it. I think the easiest, just based on my own journaling, the easiest, uh, tells, the easiest markers or indicators are when I develop an edge, when I'm being a little bit edgy with someone, where I'm not bringing my kindest, most benevolent self. Uh, that's typically a tell that I'm about to betray my best thinking, my actual core principles. As more and more of us put ourselves out into the world, you are going to be wrong in front of larger and larger audiences. You are going to do things that you used to that would have embarrassed younger versions of you. Uh, and that will happen as it'll... I'm sure... I mean, tonight's kick-off the call, I started talking about the things I've gotten wrong in the last year. Uh, I think it's ex- extremely important. We are a work in, we're a work in progress. Nothing more daunting or unrealistic than inauthentic perfection. It, it just... There's nothing great about that. There is for people that need certainty, which are the very same people that are at the bottom of the value creation chain. You shouldn't work with them. Shouldn't work with people that need certainty We should all ascend to the privilege of dealing with individuals that can tolerate the answer, "I don't really know, but I've got some ideas." Those are the right people, and that's the right person to be in my estimation

Speaker 7 24:40

oh, one more thing. To close the loop on that big debit, the thousands and thousands of dollars that were siphoned out of my account by the government. About three and a half weeks later, I received another early morning email. Just want you to know your funds have cleared and been deposited into your account." Same instinct, same email, same scenario. That's funny, I don't remember expecting to receive a large bolus of money. I pulled it up, looked at it, and sure enough, the government had apparently seen the error of its ways. They decided to send back the entire amount that they had siphoned out with their digital magical straw just a month or so earlier. As for the fictitious, I think, invisible attorney and their magical eighty-five thousand dollar fee, I can't really account for that. Apparently, they weren't paid, which makes sense given that I don't know what they were contesting or who they were contesting it with, or how somebody gets to bill someone else for sitting in a room alone, wrestling with your own mind. Bizarre, but wherever that magical, invisible attorney is that did work that we can't account for, for a cause we don't understand, with a client and a counterparty that has not been identified, it's good to know that maybe justice prevailed. Funds returned, loop closed, round complete. But the real victory w- was the amount of brain damage I saved myself. Holding true to those principles, by believing this was simply just an error of understanding that would eventually be resolved, I spared myself a lot of agony. I didn't want any part of the resolution. There are others better qualified and better paid to solve those problems, and they did their job, and I'm super grateful for that. I don't want any part of that process. It's ugly work, in my opinion. But more than anything, I'm grateful for the experience of protecting myself from this frustration. I mean, I skipped weeks of that, you know, that self-righteous anger, the pacing around, and any time you find some unwitting audience beginning conversations with, "Can you believe?" and, "The people these days," and, and on and on. On this rare occasion, I was completely unburdened by those old instincts, which have shown up so many times in my life. You've gotta celebrate the wins when they happen, and this one felt good and real. It was a pain I didn't feel because I didn't betray my principles of how I wanna show up in the world. That avatar, that version of me. Sometimes we actually get it right, and it pays us back in unusual ways, normally with peace, a little bit of pride, the opportunity to be nicer to be around, make an impact for others, but also self-respect, and that feels good, and I wish the same for you

Speaker 6 27:57

That's it for this episode. Thanks for being here. Hey, there's only two things that you have in your life, your time and your attention. That you've given both to me for these few minutes of today means everything. Cheers.