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The Second Take: Motivation Is Failing Leaders
16 Plays4 months ago
You can tell yourself the right things and still make the wrong decisions. In leadership, positive self-talk rarely fails loudly—it fails quietly by keeping you comfortable when you should be honest. This episode is about where mindset stops helping and starts costing you.
At The Second Voice, we explore the inner conversations leaders rarely say out loud.
If this episode resonated, it is likely because the second voice is active in your leadership too.
Hosted by Luisa Hogan, leadership resilience strategist and founder of Vermelho Consulting.
Luisa works with founders, executives, and senior leaders who carry real responsibility and want to lead with steadiness, clarity, and self-trust under pressure.
Her work focuses on nervous system regulation, leadership identity, and the inner dialogue that shapes how leaders show up when things are hard.
Work With Luisa
If this episode sparked reflection, here are ways to go deeper:
• Leadership resilience workshops and advisory
• Keynotes and curated live experiences
• The Steady Leadership framework and private sessions
Learn more at: vermelho.com.au
A Note From Whisper & Thread
The Second Voice is proudly supported by Whisper & Thread.
Whisper & Thread creates intimate apparel embroidered with quiet, internal messages designed to interrupt negative self-talk.
Each piece carries a reminder on the inside. Not performative. Not loud. Just for you.
Because leadership self-talk does not start in the boardroom.
And confidence is built in the moments no one sees.
Explore Whisper & Thread at: whisperandthread.com
Stay Connected
Follow along and join the conversation:
• Instagram: @thesecondvoicepodcast
• Instagram: @vermelho_consulting
• Instagram: @whisperandthread
Subscribe, rate, and review The Second Voice to help more leaders find these conversations.
What did this episode reveal about your own second voice right now?
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Transcript
The Downside of Positive Self-Talk
00:00:00
Luisa Hogan
You can tell yourself all of the right things in your leadership and you can still make all of the wrong decisions. In leadership, positive self-talk has a shadow side and it really fails loudly. It fails quietly in that it keeps you comfortable when you should be being honest with yourself and honesty can be really hard.
00:00:25
Luisa Hogan
especially when it comes to the decisions that you are making, because there is such an emotional attachment to them in your leadership and in business. This episode is about where mind so mindset stops helping you and starts costing you.
00:00:41
Luisa Hogan
And I'm so excited to explore that with you today.
The Second Take Format Introduction
00:00:45
Luisa Hogan
Welcome back to the Second Voice Podcast, where we explore the conversations that leaders don't say out loud. And today's a solo episode called The Second Take. I will be doing these occasionally, where I reflect back on the conversations from the last two episodes, and also reflect on a few lessons that came up
Confronting Negative vs Motivational Self-Talk
00:01:04
Luisa Hogan
for me.
00:01:04
Luisa Hogan
after recording those two sessions. And today's session is all about positive self-talk and how in the last two episodes, my guests did not hide from their negative self-talk. And they did not hide from their negative self-talk by saying, It will all be fine. Everything's going to be okay. They looked at the negative self-talk and they faced it head on and they still made decisions that propelled them forward. And today it's really about the hidden cost of being far too motivational with yourself in and in your thinking, in leadership and in business.
The Dangers of Avoiding Problems with Positivity
00:01:46
Luisa Hogan
Now I'm going to say that I'm not talking about positive self-talk that is about finding the reality and ignoring the criticism and the self-criticism and the lack of self-confidence inside of you that rears itself as negative self-talk. I'm talking about the positive self-talk that hides behind the phrase like, I just need to stay positive in this situation.
00:02:11
Luisa Hogan
And That really tells me when I do something like that, that I am avoiding a situation very deeply because it makes me buy time. If I ever tell myself, oh, well, just stay positive. It stops me from really looking at the issue in front of me and tells me that I just need to change my thinking and everything is going to magically get sorted for me. And that really doesn't work. It's Something that you say when you sense something is off, but you don't want to name it yet. Like the person you hired isn't the right person for the job.
00:02:50
Luisa Hogan
How many times have you had somebody in the wrong role and you've just thought to yourself, well, you know, we'll just keep going and I'm sure things will work out. Maybe, maybe things will get better. Maybe they just need time.
00:03:02
Luisa Hogan
Or when a strategy in your business isn't working and it's really, really wobbly and And you just tell yourself all of the soothing strategies to make you feel like, oh, well, I'm just going to keep churning along with this and buy myself some time until that strategy resolves itself.
00:03:18
Luisa Hogan
Or when your energy is dropping and you are feeling tired and you just tell yourself, oh, well, I just need to stay, you know, positive about what's going on and tomorrow i'll feel better after a little sleep.
00:03:30
Luisa Hogan
And you don't acknowledge the truth that you need some rest or that you're burning out or that you need to ground yourself or you need to anchor yourself or you need to have a pause in your day to recover and to rest and to
Positivity's Impact on Standards and Resilience
00:03:42
Luisa Hogan
recuperate.
00:03:42
Luisa Hogan
Or you delay a conversation because you tell yourself something like, oh, I'm just being negative. I'm just going to wait until I feel a little bit better about it.
00:03:54
Luisa Hogan
And those sorts of things don't always turn out like that. In fact, most of the time the situation gets worse. The situation compounds, the situation ah doesn't get more positive. And in fact, you might even start getting resentment or other people around you might start start getting some resentment. And in the end, you're facing a much bigger problem than the one that you just told yourself to stay positive for a little while back.
00:04:27
Luisa Hogan
Now, I've heard lots of people call this toxic positivity, where people just want to see only the positive side and never really acknowledge the truth in the room. I like to call it ah motivational self-talk, where people tolerance, where your tolerance is reframed as resilience. And you've got to see tolerance not as acceptance, but tolerance is just allowing something to go on, even though it's something that doesn't feel good inside. And people reframe that tolerance as resilience.
00:05:01
Luisa Hogan
And motivational self-talk often sounds like, oh, well, it's just a tough season or everyone's just really stretched right now, everyone will get better soon, or I shouldn't expect perfection from myself, I should you know just keep trying.
00:05:19
Luisa Hogan
And yes, of course, you don't you shouldn't expect perfection from yourself. But all of that motivational self-talk never extracts the problem.
00:05:30
Luisa Hogan
And they sound really reasonable. Inside, they sound very soothing and they sound very reasonable. but collectively they move the bar, the standards lower for yourself without really announcing that it's going to do that.
Realistic Optimism in Leadership
00:05:48
Luisa Hogan
Now, when that happens, the standards don't drop dramatically. It doesn't just happen because you have had one, you know, toxically positive thought about something, but collectively it just erodes things over time. It just collectively does that. And that's what struck me a lot about and my last two my last two guests, where Michelle was talking about all the times that she had negative self-talk when she was facing with dealing with change. And in all of those times, she felt faced backlash and criticism and was not always the popular one in the room. And never once did she tell herself in any of those situations, oh well, things are going to get better for me soon.
Openness in Business Struggles
00:06:35
Luisa Hogan
She faced them all head on and she tackled her self-talk in a very realistic way.
00:06:41
Luisa Hogan
And the same for Crystal. I just remember talking to Crystal in the last episode where we talked about how she came and started authentically sharing with her community the struggles that she was having in her business. She never once told her community, don't worry, things will get better, everything will be fine. She told them authentically and clearly what was struggling, what she was struggling with in her business. And they all rallied around her. And that created the positive self-talk that wasn't toxic, that was needed in her life to keep her going and to keep her motivated, but not in a way that hid her from the real issues inside her business.
00:07:22
Luisa Hogan
A lot of people would just talk about this as optimism and I deal with clients all the time and I talked about optimism and and I talk about optimism and pessimism. And what people don't realize is it's not just a straight binary of optimistic or pessimistic. There's actually unrealistically pessimistic and unrealistically optimistic.
00:07:43
Luisa Hogan
And those people see things in an unrealistic way. if they ah if they If they are pessimistic in an unrealistic way, that means everything is going to go badly and I cannot see any positive here. And the unrealistically optimistic person is the opposite. They see everything is positive, nothing bad, and they cannot see the reality in there. And what we need to strive for is to be realistically optimistic.
00:08:07
Luisa Hogan
And there are realistically pessimistic people where it's errs on the side of realistic, but a little bit more negative. What you want is to be realistic, but have,
00:08:19
Luisa Hogan
feel positive about that realistic so slant and and still push yourself in that realistic optimism.
Discomfort and Decision-Making in Leadership
00:08:26
Luisa Hogan
And people don't realize that they actually aren't doing that. They they think it's one or the other and they I'm just being optimistic. But unrealistically optimistic is not going to move you forward in your business and your leadership.
00:08:41
Luisa Hogan
because what it does is it just reduces your discomfort, right? And let's face it, leadership and entrepreneurship and business ownership has got a lot of uncomfortable moments in it. You feel so uncomfortable all the time about decisions that are hard, about am I going to annoy this person or I'm going to let this person down or this is a difficult decision decision that's going to impact so many people or I have to face that my business is failing in this area and I have to front the world and tell them that these are the things that are not going well.
00:09:15
Luisa Hogan
And when we are unrealistically optimistic, It reduces our discomfort instead of increasing the responsibility that we have to deal with a problem.
00:09:29
Luisa Hogan
And resilience says, this is really hard, but I still need to act. I still need to move myself forward. And I don't need to pretend that I'm strong. I don't need to pretend that this is not bothering me. I just need to acknowledge that this is hard and feel that feeling of this is hard. And then I need to act and make a decision of what I'm going to do about this next.
00:09:54
Luisa Hogan
Whereas that self-protective optimism, that unrealistic optimism says, this is hard, so I don't need to act yet. I'm just going to wait it out. Can you hear the difference?
Rational vs Comfort-Focused Self-Talk
00:10:05
Luisa Hogan
It's two completely different things in terms of being positive, unrealistically positive or that, you know, positive motivation rather than having that resilience that says, if this is hard, I am okay. I will ground myself here. i will get clarity and I will make a decision and I will move forward and I will act.
00:10:27
Luisa Hogan
Your self-talk is what's going to make you feel calmer without making you more decisive. And what you need to strive for is for your self-talk to make you feel calmer and still decisive and still take action.
00:10:43
Luisa Hogan
Because without it, it's not resilience. Without it, you're not using the second voice that's propelling you forward. You're using a second and first voice that's just soothing you and putting a band-aid over the situation.
00:11:00
Luisa Hogan
And that's the other thing that stood out for me in those last two conversations in the last two episodes with Michelle and with Crystal. What stood out was how often their self-talk sounded like leadership language. It sounded like compassion. It sounded like patience. It sounded like long-term thinking.
00:11:19
Luisa Hogan
Their self-talk wasn't about you know about doubt, it wasn't a pattern of doubt, it was about rationalizing and narrating to themselves and explaining to themselves and justifying to themselves and articulating to themselves and persuading to themselves that there were other ways forward and that they needed to act. It was never about silencing the critic and going, well, you know, it's just my negative self-talk. I'm just going to like keep myself positive now. There was never that inaction in either of those two leaders. And I absolutely, in thinking about that over the last couple of weeks after talking to them and and listening to what they had to say, that's the lesson that came out for me is is neither of them were in that toxic toxically positive state at all.
00:12:13
Luisa Hogan
So essentially the the lesson I got was the danger isn't always in the harsh negative self-talk. Sometimes the danger is in the reasonable stories that we tell ourselves to preserve our comfort and to preserve preserve the status quo and to keep us in a state of inaction because we are afraid to make the wrong decision or to be imperfect.
00:12:38
Luisa Hogan
And That's really the lesson out of those. It's it's not the harsh self-criticism or the harsh self-talk, which we need to tackle by the way. it's It's the too positive comfort creating positive self-talk that is also a real danger.
Reflective Self-Questioning
00:12:57
Luisa Hogan
So if you find yourself being the kind of person that is about soothing yourself through negative self-talk or through negative situations and you want to know how to tackle it this is what I learned from Michelle and Crystal and this is what I've learned from my own journey about how to have more of a reality-based self-talk that is positive but allows you to still make hard decisions and have the have the conversation and I would ask yourself like ask yourself
00:13:33
Luisa Hogan
What am I postponing? Am I postponing anything by say with soothing myself with this? Or is there a decision that I need to make? Even though the decision feels negative and I have some negative self-talk about it, blame, shame, all of the things that come with that, what decision do I need to make still?
00:13:53
Luisa Hogan
And that's still positive self-talk because it propels you forward. And you could also ask yourself questions like, what am I protecting myself from? What am I trying to prevent in the future that I really need to tackle right now?
00:14:11
Luisa Hogan
And then you could also ask yourself, if nothing changes here, what am I silently agreeing to? Because when you don't make changes, you're actually just agreeing to staying in that negative state.
00:14:26
Luisa Hogan
You're agreeing to stay in the state that needs correction, even though it feels really hard and negative to do that. So that's not going to make you feel better. I'm sorry. in In business and leadership, there are decisions that are difficult and it's not going to make you feel better emotionally. But what it will do is it will move you from a state of here, now, stuck in this negative state to some difficulty to a more positive state, hopefully in the future, because you have faced the situation that you're in. and you've been resilient through it in terms of not being strong and pretending like you're tough and that you're positive through it, but in remaining calm and grounded and making decisions that move you forward out of that situation. Because that kind of self-talk doesn't just motivate you, it corners you into a little corner
00:15:19
Luisa Hogan
And it works for you because it gets you out of that corner and making decisions that are more sound and that move you in your leadership and your business forward.
Episode Conclusion and Engagement Encouragement
00:15:31
Luisa Hogan
So thank you so much for joining me on the second take. I hope you enjoy these little short sessions that I'll be doing every couple of weeks as we reflect on some of the conversations we've had and some of my learnings out of them and also reflections on my own business. I have two businesses today. that I find myself doing some of these things and I will share my lessons with you as I go through that. And let us know in the comments, comments what you think. Make sure you subscribe on any channel that you're listening to. We're on YouTube, we're on Spotify, we are on iTunes. Make sure you subscribe on any of your preferred channels and keep listening to the conversation that we're having with leaders about the second voice and the conversations that we don't have out loud.
00:16:13
Luisa Hogan
Thank you for joining me.