Jerry Colonna was a high-flying New York venture capitalist in the early 1990s, but his life wasn’t as glamorous as most made it out to be. He was anxious, overweight, unhealthy, and unfulfilled. After suffering a panic attack on the streets of Manhattan, he started coaching other executives, giving him a new lease on life and a career as one of the premier executive coaches in the United States. In this episode, Colonna calls on years of experience to discuss his thoughts on resilience, discernment, self-esteem, anxiety, motivation, and the rituals that keep him fulfilled. Colonna also gives Shane a public one-on-one coaching session.
Available now: YouTube | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Transcript
Colonna is the Co-Founder of Reboot.io, an executive coaching and leadership development firm dedicated to the idea that better humans make better leaders. He is also the author of Reunion: Leadership and the Longing to Belong, now available for pre-order.
Here are a few highlights from the episode:
One of the most important ways to unpack the unconscious structures is to ask yourself, What is the benefit?
How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?
As a bunch of protoplasm in embryo, in uterus, you didn’t have shame. So somewhere between conception and today, you learned to feel shame if you wasted someone’s time.
Not every book we write, not every song we write, not every painting we do is going to move people in exactly the same way, but that doesn’t mean you failed.
There is something powerful and purpose-driven in acknowledging and living in that gap between who we are and who we’d like to be—without getting sucked into guilt, without getting sucked into shame because we’re not living amongst the stars, but I’ll be damned if I leave this earth not having tried.
We tend not to teach our children how to speak in a way that is life-giving and life-affirming, right?
OFNR is an acronym, and the letters stand for four words: observation, feeling, need, and request. And if we want to think about it, we can think about it this way: this is discernment in action and this is self-responsibility in action.
Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:08 – Why did Colonna feel hollow during the peak of his success?
09:43 – Why do we let what we do define who we are?
17:30 – How are you complicit in creating the conditions you don’t want?
32:42 – How do you forgive yourself?
41:00 – How to get out of the negative self-talk loop
46:00 – How do we learn to come to grips with enough?
54:47 – On the “better angels of our nature”
01:01:47 – Colonna’s journaling routine
01:05:34 – What does it mean to “process your emotions”
01:08:31 – Colonna’s morning rituals
01:11:18 – How to build resilience in yourself
01:17:00 – How stubbornness and psychological safety impacts relationships
01:31:30 – Why we keep toxic relationships (and how to end them)
01:45:19 – What is O.F.N.R?
01:52:50 – What is success for Jerry Colonna?
