Self-Worth from Within with Zack Hamilton

Jennifer Norman [00:00:08]:

Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome to today's show. This episode is such an important one. It's for those of us who are fully grown. But we might have a little boy or a little girl inside of us that's harboring shame or secrets of the past. What happens when child trauma takes its toll? Well, in some cases, it can cause us to armor up or rebound in obsessive ways, constantly seeking accolades and approval and air quote success to compensate for our inner feelings of low self worth. My guest today is Zach Hamilton. Zach has a gut wrenching, yet profoundly relatable story that he has only recently mustered up the courage to tell, and it's one that's all too common.

Jennifer Norman [00:00:52]:

So I'm so glad that he's here today to share it with you. Welcome, Zach.

Zach Hamilton [00:00:57]:

Hi, Jennifer. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Looking forward to our conversation today.

Jennifer Norman [00:01:01]:

Yeah, my heart just opened when I heard your story, and I knew that I wanted to have you on the show because talking about childhood trauma, your journey, and then how it made you the man that you are today is truly remarkable. And I think that there's a lot of inspiration that can be shared to a whole lot of people that might be in a different part of a similar journey as what you had gone through. And so you mentioned, off mike, that you've come to terms with your childhood, and so we're not retraumatizing anything here, but feel free to share with everybody what happened and what were the things that you remember most about your childhood. Yeah.

Zach Hamilton [00:01:38]:

Thanks, Jennifer. I think overall, right, I think as human beings and professionals and parents, we all suppress our childhood, especially if there are negative things that's happened to us to a subconscious level, right? So they don't dominate the thinking that we have every day. But what we don't realize is it dominates the way that we behave because we've never really fully come to terms on some of the negative impacts that shaped who we are. And so for me, growing up, our biological father was a drug addict. He was an alcoholic. He was unable to hold down a steady job. He was consistently just moving from job to job because a lot of his own behaviors, right, were prohibiting him to function. And so because of that, he had anger issues.

Zach Hamilton [00:02:26]:

He was extremely verbally abusive, not only to myself, but at the time, I had three sisters, two older, one younger, but he was also physically abusive. So he's physically abusive to my mom. There's been many times where me and my siblings watched him just absolutely beat our mother. And then it started to turn on to me. And so there's a story that I share. It's about when I was four years old and my sisters and I had dinner. My mom was cleaning up in the kitchen and trying to get us ready for bed for the evening. And so we were all kind of laying on the floor watching TV.

Zach Hamilton [00:03:00]:

And I'll never forget I was laying on my stomach. And I'll never forget we heard him come into the house. So we heard the door shut. I mean, a matter of fact, it was a slam, right? Of course, because he was drunk and he was high and he was angry. And so, I'll never forget, he kind of walked in to the living room and I started just to feel being kicked. He flipped me over to my back and he held me down to the floor. My wrists were pinned against the carpet. He was sitting on my waist, and he was spitting in my face, telling me I would never amount to anything in life.

Zach Hamilton [00:03:29]:

I would turn out to be a loser just like him. I continued to get slapped a few more times. And it was in that moment, at four, that I promised myself I would never be him. I would never be physically or emotionally or verbally abusive to anyone in my family. I promised myself that I would hold down a steady job, that I'd be there to support my kids. All of that happened at four years of age. And I could go on and tell many other stories, right, of being physically abused. That wasn't the first and only time that I was physically beaten by him.

Zach Hamilton [00:03:58]:

I have a few scars that I can still see today, one on my eyebrow, one underneath my chin, of just the physical abuse and the toll that it has taken when I was so young. The story evolves. My mom finally had the courage to leave him and to divorce him. But we were consistently what I called in hiding. We lived with relatives, with our aunts and uncles. We lived with my grandparents at a time because my mom was afraid she was threatened by him, that if he left her, he would retaliate by finding us and killing the kids. And so we were constantly in hiding. My mom knew that she had to provide better for us.

Zach Hamilton [00:04:31]:

She knew that if we did stay, it was just a matter of time before that aggression went beyond where it currently was and became more serious. And so we left. We were in hiding. And look, I could count on my hands, think nine or ten different homes that we lived in just to try and escape him.

Jennifer Norman [00:04:48]:

A mom with four children and just trying to keep herself safe, trying to keep you guys safe. And I can only imagine what that does to you growing up, I had read the story about the meth lab in the school bus and your father, you were so ashamed.

Zach Hamilton [00:05:05]:

Yeah. When I was in elementary school, called the early nineties, of course, we didn't have social media, and so we were all looking at the newspaper. And I grew up in a town of, at the time, there's probably 12,000 residents, right? So very, very small town. Everyone knew everyone. There was three different kind of Hamilton families. We weren't related, but there were three different generations of Hamiltons that lived in this small town. And I'll never forget, I got into school. I was in, I think it was fifth grade, but I was in school, and one of my friends had the newspaper, and he was like, did you see what just happened? And I didn't know what happened because my mom couldn't afford the newspaper.

Zach Hamilton [00:05:41]:

So we weren't privy to what was on the news that evening. And so it was the school bus that they had turned into a meth lab. And they were the known kind of meth dealers in our area. And the meth lab had gotten busted. And so on the front page of the paper was my biological father and his brother. And so I'll never forget, they were like, well, you're a Hamilton, aren't you? Is this your family? And I went to Catholic school. I didn't want to lie. I knew it was a sin, but the only thing that I could do in that moment was just absolutely deny it.

Zach Hamilton [00:06:10]:

And I was like, no, that's not my side of the Hamilton's. I'm over on this side of the Hamilton's, which was a prominent attorney. And from the outside, right. They looked like to be extremely successful. But I was that Hamilton. I wasn't that Hamilton. I didn't know who they were. But on the inside, I was so full of shame.

Zach Hamilton [00:06:26]:

I was just full of embarrassment. Right. Oh, my gosh. That is my biological family. Even though we didn't associate with them, even though we never see them, you still know when. Wow, that's my family.

Jennifer Norman [00:06:40]:

Yeah. And so you spent a lot of your childhood growing up with shame and feeling like, I'll never be my dad. I never want to. And so you started to do something completely different, which I think a lot of people do. You start chasing success. You start saying, like, I show them. I'm going to show them that I can be so much better. And tell me about what that did to you.

Jennifer Norman [00:07:03]:

Tell me about that.

Zach Hamilton [00:07:04]:

Yeah. It even started off just in childhood, right? My mom, a single mother for working double shifts in a factory. She put us in the pool during the summers, and that was a way of like, hey, we would burn off our energy, but at the same time, we were being productive. And so I started swimming at five competitively, and my sisters were all competitive swimmers. And I fell in love with the pool. I fell in love with the water. I fell in love with just the cleansing and healing powers that water can bring. I didn't know what that feeling was, but at that age.

Zach Hamilton [00:07:32]:

And so when you really think about the pool, really fueled my feeling of worthiness. And the reason for that is I just won flat out. I could win, but it was really interesting. The way that I looked at winning in the pool was, if you've ever seen a race start, typically, there's six lanes in a pool. There's three from each team, and A lot of kids will just look over right and left, and they will look at, okay, who's my competition? Right? We'll start sizing them up as our competitors, and do I think I can win this race? And for me, it wasn't about who was in the lanes beside me. What I would envision on that starting block is I would imagine him to the right of me. And when I mean him, it's my biological father, and I could block everything out. Like, I didn't realize I had this ability to visualize, but I could visualize no one else in the pool.

Zach Hamilton [00:08:15]:

It's me versus him, and I would win. And if you look at kind of my swimming history, right. My mom still has this plastic tub. Of course, all of our parents had these plastic tubs. Mine's full of just thousands of ribbons. I would say 95% of them are blue ribbons, which is first, very few, second, like one third, nothing else. After that, I have trophies and plaques, and so swimming fueled my worthiness, right? Coaches would high five me, and they would give me a hug and tell me, great job, and give me that positive reinforcement that I never got. And so it kind of translated over.

Zach Hamilton [00:08:48]:

I got burnout in the pool, and I picked up a tennis racket in junior high, and so it was really just, hey, my friends were doing that summer clinic. I want to pick it up because I want to be around friends. And I'll never forget, like, I fell in love with tennis because it was me and my opponent. I didn't have to worry about anything else. And so I'm like, hey, I want to play high school tennis. And so when I got there, my coach was like, look, our team is set. Just be happy if you make the JV squad. But that really fueled me, because what I didn't know, Jennifer, is subconsciously when someone would tell me, you can't do that or just be satisfied, or, I don't think you can launch this initiative subconsciously, it would trigger you're not good enough.

Zach Hamilton [00:09:26]:

And so on the tennis court, what happened was I would practice anytime that I could. My mom would go out and she would feed me tennis balls. And there's so many Friday nights where you could hear my friends and everyone at the high school football game, and I'm out on the tennis courts just hitting balls, because it was. I had to prove him wrong. I had to show him that I wasn't him, I wasn't a loser. I could win. And really, ultimately, what that equaled was I was worthy of love. And so tennis court, again, it paid off.

Zach Hamilton [00:09:53]:

I won. I played college tennis. And then it started to translate over into my professional life. So, very early on, I identified promotions, titles, paychecks, successful initiative launches as what I called winning. This was me proving that I wasn't him. This was me running from him to prove that I wasn't going to be him. And so I got onto this treadmill, I call it the achievement treadmill, where I was numbing my own pain, my own feeling of low self worth. I was numbing being loved and feeling anything with just winning.

Zach Hamilton [00:10:27]:

Right? All I wanted to do was win. And so it worked. Well, I mean, a couple of different companies, I became the youngest director and senior director they've ever had in the company. I achieved everything. But then there became that point of diminishing returns, where I was no longer in that achievement ecstasy. Winning was not enough for me. And then it became, I have to win by more. More basis points, more revenue.

Zach Hamilton [00:10:48]:

So instead of winning becoming worthiness, now it was that wall of diminishing return where wins weren't enough. Now I had to make sure that I won by even more measures to try and get any type of pleasurable feel out of it. And so that's what happened. It brought me to my career errands. I was a senior director in the organization, delivered hundreds of millions of dollars in top line revenue and EBITDA. But I couldn't get to that next level in a promotion. And so I really started to struggle with my self worth. And then it started to have an impact around my relationships with friends, my own family, my spouse, my children, because I no longer felt worthy and I couldn't love myself.

Zach Hamilton [00:11:28]:

And winning no longer brought me pleasure. And Then I got into this just emotional crisis where I just completely just fell. I started falling because I couldn't get those wins. So I had to figure out, how do I trigger worthiness? So I wasn't him. And that led to spending habits. It didn't lead me to drugs, it didn't lead me to alcohol like you might see in others.

Jennifer Norman [00:11:49]:

To me, I was going to ask that.

Zach Hamilton [00:11:51]:

It led me to spending. Right. Spending on brand names. Because if I could just give the perception that I was ultra successful by wearing these luxury logos, then everyone would think I was worthy. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman [00:12:02]:

Wearing all the ribbons as they are out in the world today. It's interesting because as you were talking, I kept thinking about. There was an interview that Barbara Corcoran did, and famously from, and she talks about the people that she's interested in investing in, and she's like, give me the hurt and the hungry, because I know that they're going to work and they've got something inside their bones. And I'm paraphrasing, but there's something in them that is motivating them to do much more than any privileged, soft person who's gone to some Ivy League school could ever do. And then even thinking about stories like Michael Jordan when he was humiliated back in high school, and so was like, I'm never going to be humiliated by missing out on getting on the varsity basketball team again. I'm going to work my butt off until I can make it. And a lot of people who are extremely, extremely successful, by anybody's terms, extremely successful, have this feeling from a memory or an experience in their childhood which triggers them and causes them to be like, I am never going to feel that way again. I am never going to be like that person.

Jennifer Norman [00:13:08]:

I am going to be better than that person who tried to put me down. And so it's interesting that by societal standards, that's considered success and you're making it, but what is it built upon? And you described it perfectly, like, once all of that goes away, once you get older and your body stops working as well, or you find that swimming isn't as fulfilling or tennis isn't as fulfilling, or you're not getting the promotion that somebody else is, it's like a house of cards. Everything can just start crumbling down around you if you don't have that inner fortification of feeling like you're good enough anyway, you're good enough without that. And it becomes even a bigger and bigger divide as you get older. The dissonance between what you think that others are expecting of you and then how you feel about yourself, and that's where the crisis starts to hit.

Zach Hamilton [00:13:58]:

Yeah, I 100% agree with Barbara, too. I even think about the book winning that Tim Grover wrote, who was Michael Jordan's physical and conditioning coach, right. His personal trainer. And he went on to train Kobe Bryant and Dwayne Wade. I think when we are able to harness our pain and stay in control of it and use it to our advantage, it can serve an incredible purpose. Right. Because we will grind for anything. We will grind as athletes.

Zach Hamilton [00:14:24]:

We will grind as people. We will grind as professionals. Trust me, I was an absolute workaholic.

Jennifer Norman [00:14:31]:

Because it's turning pain into purpose.

Zach Hamilton [00:14:34]:

Yes. And pain and pressure is a privilege. But when you no longer own your pain, when you can't harness your pain and your pain continues to own you, that's when you start to see self destruction, and that's when we start to turn into self destructing behaviors, regardless if that's numbing with drugs, alcohol. In my case, it was also spending. Right. I wanted to go out and spend to give that perception to where the ribbons, whatever that self destruction is. We start to self destruct because we can no longer harness that pain. And for me, it was.

Zach Hamilton [00:15:09]:

I honestly didn't know this was the pain that was driving me. It was all subconscious. I knew that there was hurt there. I knew that I had this promise, but I didn't know at to what depth that this went to. And I didn't know that when a COO would tell me, I don't think that this is going to be successful. I'm not for sure this was the right initiatives. What I didn't realize it was triggering was, you are not good enough. You're going to fail.

Zach Hamilton [00:15:34]:

You will be a loser just like me. And so there was a lot of work that I did with an executive leadership coach that really brought this subconscious trigger into how I was showing up every single day. And so I had to start to shift my mental models about winning. Right. And so winning was no longer about Zach achieving everything. One of the most incredible things, Jennifer, that she did for me was a 360 peer review. And so she started to interview peers of mine, different executive leaders within the organization, and even those that reported to me. And when I got the feedback, of course, feedback is always hard to take, especially if you're not in the right mindframe to take it.

Zach Hamilton [00:16:12]:

And the feedback was, Zach is amazing. We love him as a person. He is an incredible individual. He comes from a great place. However, he is burning us out. He is emailing us at all hours in the evening and the morning, expecting returns. He doesn't respect my own personal boundaries with my kids and their sporting events. The pressure that he puts on us to perform every single minute of every single day is so high stakes that mentally, I am burnout, and I'm exhausted.

Zach Hamilton [00:16:39]:

And so what I didn't realize, Jennifer, is also, as I'm chasing this worthiness I was leaving awake behind me, that I started to inflict my own team and my peers to question, well, am I worthy of being in this position? Am I enough? Maybe I'm not enough. And Zach should go find a different teammate. And so, through all of that work, what I had to really understand was, we all have our own definition of what winning means to each and every one of us. My definition of winning is completely different. And our definitions of winning grow with us as we grow as human beings. Right. And so it's winning. You can intermix that with what's our Why? What's our purpose? I call it winning just because that's a mental model framework that I use that resonated with me. It's unfortunate that, as humans, we are programmed to be very robotic at work. Right. It's check your baggage at the door. Don't bring what's happening at home into the work life. We don't want to talk about what's happening at home and how that can emotionally be taxing on us, and it impacts the way that we show up. Right. It's keep everything outside of the organization.

Zach Hamilton [00:17:44]:

But as human beings, that's just not possible. Right? We are emotional beings. We desire connection, and if we can't bring that into the workplace, that says more about the workplace culture and your organization and your leaders than it does you. And so that's where I had spent a lot of time doing work, of, look, if I can't be my authentic self, then is there a place for me here?

Jennifer Norman [00:18:10]:

Right. I want to ask you a question. So, you worked with an executive coach, and how did that come about? Was that something that was offered by a company, or was it something that you thought would be beneficial for you on your own?

Zach Hamilton [00:18:23]:

Yeah, it's really interesting, right? I grew up having coaches, right? And tennis and swimming. And I'm one of those guys where I regard myself as. I'm an incredible executor. You give me the plan, I'll go execute it. I'm not great at coming up with a plan myself, and that's where I rely on my coach. And so where the coach came up is I was still at Aaron's, and Aaron's wanted to start what they called the Aaron's Future Leader program. So it was part of their succession planning that the board created that initiative for them. And they identified about 20 ish different leaders across the entire organization.

Zach Hamilton [00:18:55]:

And we had a couple of different brands under our corporate umbrella. And so we went through an 18 month kind of, I call it the leadership NBA boot camp, where we hired in an outside consultant firm. And part of that was an executive leader coach. And so they matched us up with executive leaders who not only worked with me, but worked with the direct leader that I worked with to really understand, hey, this is where Zach is at in his current journey. Ultimately, here's his goal, but here's also the goal that the organization has for him. So how do we kind of have this triad of working together? And so when I left errands, I continued on with the executive leadership coach because I saw so much benefit while I was still at errands. But I knew that I was still just right in the heart of discovering myself, starting to understand what authenticity was as a person and as a leader. And I knew I was still that leadership journey where and I still am today.

Zach Hamilton [00:19:48]:

But for me, it was, if I don't continue this, what's the cost? What's the cost to me as a human being, as someone who's aspiring to make an impact in other people's lives, what's the cost? And so I just continued that work.

Jennifer Norman [00:20:01]:

For those of you who are listening, who might be CHROs or CEOs or even entrepreneurs that have employees on your team, if we think about how many folks have not had the opportunity to have this kind of coaching before, or who haven't necessarily gotten the tools that perhaps would be beneficial for them to become self aware, self aware as not only managers, but as human beings. And that's the thing that I think is really wonderful about how business is evolving today, is that we're making it okay to bring our humanity into work. And for those who run companies that haven't necessarily gotten to that place of humanity yet, I still hear a lot of people saying, gosh, I wish that they could just do their jobs. Why do they have to keep talking to each other about their personal stuff at work? It's wasting so much time. I wish that they could just sit and do their jobs. That's not really how we operate. We are. We are people that need connection.

Jennifer Norman [00:20:56]:

We need to build rapport. We need to feel safe and comfortable being ourselves. And that leads to more job satisfaction when we can have those kind of connections. But building self awareness and the fact that Zach, in his illustration, so perfectly articulated that he decided to continue on because he saw the benefit of having a coach that could really bring out these things that he would have never have been able to determine on his own, to dig into his subconscious and realize why he was operating the way that he was thinking about the things from his past experiences that were causing him to be a workaholic and to drive others to burnout. Those things are not easy to change. It's not easy to have a mirror put up and reflected back at you. But once you can become okay with the things that really fuel us, that leads us to understanding ourselves more, that leads to us being able to be a bit more vulnerable and say, you know what? I really do think that these are things that I can work on, and then those are the things from building the person within rather than chasing. I always look at the difference between building and fostering and nurturing and facilitating from within versus chasing, because I think a lot of success in former terms, was always about chasing the golden ring, the brass ring, the blue ribbon, whatever you want to call it.

Jennifer Norman [00:22:16]:

It's like, what is the goal, and how can I get to it? And then I'll be happy, and then I'll feel fulfilled, and then I'll feel that my life is worth something. When truly, when we feel okay with ourselves and we're living from a place of really understanding that gives us more compassion for other people and their experiences and helps us to be much better managers.

Zach Hamilton [00:22:38]:

Jennifer, I think that's an incredible take on it, right? And almost kind of that cry for the CHRO to really take recognition of that. Mental health and mental wellness has become a top topic in workplace cultures today. And I've been part of organizations where they want to help others within the organization understand what emotional intelligence is and emotional recognition. And we hear all the time, just be your authentic self. But, oh, don't do that. Right? Don't be that.

Jennifer Norman [00:23:07]:

A lot of us don't even know what that means. I would not have understood what that even meant a couple of years. What do you mean, be authentic?

Zach Hamilton [00:23:15]:

Yeah. And then you think about it, and so the question becomes, okay, if this is something we're going to take on internally, does our employee base trust us? And I can tell you, when I first started working with the coach, I'll never forget, of course, I had no trust. I did not trust people growing up. From what I experienced in my childhood and so I'll never forget, on my second or third call, some of the more challenging questions started to come up. And I remember just pausing for a second and saying, I can't answer this question because I don't trust that this is going to stay between you and myself, and you're not going to go straight back to my supervisor. And so I don't know how vulnerable I can be. And from an executive leader point of view and being outside the organization, we were able to establish that trust. But when you think about companies trying to do this all internally because they don't want to make the investment up front, my question is, do you have trust established within your organization where your employees today feel like they can be their vulnerable and authentic selves and reveal anything that they want without fear of retaliation? And I can say for me, I didn't have this because at the same time as I started this future leader program is when I started my journey with my illness.

Zach Hamilton [00:24:28]:

And so I was diagnosed with a rare form of blood cancer called Walden Stroms. And with Walden Stroms comes, it's a non Hodgkin's form of leukemia, but with it comes extreme fatigue. There are days where I could not get out of the bed. I live with a migraine. I constantly live with a fever. It wasn't abnormal to see me just look, really just tired and exhausted. And I had to get immunotherapy, and there were weekends that I had to or days that I had to take off because I had to go through a medical procedure or whatever it may be. And I actually had that held against me.

Zach Hamilton [00:25:02]:

So I had my leader say, I understand you got to take time off, but you're still taking your laptop with you, right? Because we got to get a hold of you. You got your laptop. I had been told, hey, we're not promoting you because we're not for sure if your health will allow you to lead a larger team. And so I had some of these things where, looking back on it, they were not equipped. Right on. How do you lead with someone that's been diagnosed with a rare illness? We're not equipped as leaders to know how to respond to those things. And so they were ultimately, they went into, I'm going to protect the business mode, but in that given moment, I'm like, you don't care about me as a human being. And never did I get asked, are you feeling okay today? Is there anything I can help support you? Is there any work that I can take off your plate? Never did I hear any of that.

Zach Hamilton [00:25:45]:

It was always, we've got to stay connected with you. And so, look, I still go to Emory. It's heartbreaking, Jennifer, to see the number of executives that are getting treatment after hours because they are afraid their CEO or their board of directors are going to find out that they're ill. It's not like they don't want to know. And I always say, look, it's not like I went to a vending machine, put $0.50 in, and said, give me that illness. Right? I didn't select it. I was chosen to carry this illness, and so I shouldn't be punished for it. But as a CHRO, if you don't have trust established within your organization where I can trust you to be vulnerable and to do the work necessary to become the leader that I know your organization needs, you've got to look outside the organization and it will pay dividends.

Jennifer Norman [00:26:32]:

Absolutely. And I know that your recent experiences and your recent self awareness has informed your most recent work. Can you tell us about what you're doing now?

Zach Hamilton [00:26:43]:

Yeah. So I left the retail industry about five years ago. I'm now in tech, and I finally ventured in out of operations into customer experience. And so I absolutely love understanding customer frictions and trying to help solve them in order to drive better experiences. But ultimately, it accelerates A-P-L. Right. At the end of the day, we have to connect everything back to, are we driving great experiences that ultimately deliver better top line revenue or efficiencies that deliver EBITDA. Right.

Zach Hamilton [00:27:11]:

And so I had an incredible opportunity to work for the company called Medallia, which is the global leader in experience management. And that's where Jennifer I really got the courage to talk about my illness, to talk about the challenges that I was going through. For the very first time, I was able to communicate. I had cancer. It was the first time I was really able to talk about my health in a public setting without fear of retribution. And so I spent a lot of time there. I led retail practice globally.

Zach Hamilton [00:27:41]:

And as much as I love the tool and the medallions there, because I used that tool when I was at errands, I started to really feel this shift of, if I'm going to live my authentic self, my authentic self. If you were to ask me who I am, I am a child of God. I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a cancer survivor, I am a customer, I'm an employee, I'm a patient, I'm a citizen. And I deserve better experiences. I deserve to be my authentic self. And what I started to find, Jennifer, is as brands, we want our customers and our employees to live our authentic selves, but we continue to put them into segments, right, and cohorts. And so if you know anything about me, I love Jordans. I have over a hundred pair of Jordans.

Zach Hamilton [00:28:24]:

It's not uncommon to see me wearing them when I'm doing a keynote. I'll wear them in the boardroom when I present for different brands. But yet, if you really think about the segment group that I get put in as a customer, I get product recommendations. To me that you're like, I have no hair, so why are you recommending that to me? And so when I think about the human experience, I really think about it being the intersection of customer and employee experience. Can we show up as our authentic self? That's why I decided to join Forsta at the beginning of the year, is because from a Forsta perspective, we don't look at it as siloed experiences, right? Customer, product, brand, employee. We look at it as the human experience. And that's the intersection of everything that we do. Not just from a transactional point of view, but the emotional side of it as well.

Zach Hamilton [00:29:11]:

And so I think that's so important when brands want to stay relevant today. It's not just about that transactional relationship, but really understanding who our customers and employees are at the deepest level of their soul in order for us to truly drive that loyal connection. And that's why I teamed up with Forsta, is because we don't just look at it from a transactional point of view, but we also look at it from that human. And you know, as humans, we are emotional beings that desire connection. And so it's all about that.

Jennifer Norman [00:29:39]:

I often will say that there is such power in intent. And when a company starts out with a why of, well, I'm going to sell out and I'm going to make billions of dollars. And it's all about profits, profits, profits. The ones that I feel are really going to stand the test of time are going to have that ability to create richer human experience and a sense of fulfillment to the people of this world. It drives me crazy when I'll go to a BTC site and it is like, but wait, there's more. Throw this in your basket because you just know that they're breeding. It's all about the psychology of getting somebody hooked. And it's almost like that gambling or that gaming, like the dings and all of the things that give us that dopamine hit rather than really speaking to the soul and what that person needs.

Jennifer Norman [00:30:27]:

It's more about what can we do to get that person to give us more dollars at this shopping occasion than they otherwise would if we didn't put all of these things in front of back.

Zach Hamilton [00:30:38]:

Well, it goes back to Simon Sinek's the Infinite Game, right? Where brands play the very finite. We got to win this quarter versus you think about a brand like Apple, right? Apple plays the infinite game. And so many of us feel so connected to Apple, because if you think about Apple's mission, Apple is not the hero in the journey. It is us as consumers, as customers, Those who use Apple products, our Apple phone, AirPods that I have a Mac, we are the hero in our own journey, and Apple is there to give us the tool to do whatever it is we want, right? Whether it's be a creator, a musician, whatever it is, you're the hero. Apple just kind of gives you the tool to do it. And that's why we're so connected to Apple's a brand, because it's about us, not about them. And that's why they can charge the Apple tax, right? That's why they can charge significantly more than a Samsung. And we will pay for a new phone every single time it comes out because Apple's not the hero.

Zach Hamilton [00:31:32]:

We're the hero. And so when you really think about brands and what we have to do is, how do we help every single person become the hero? And it goes back to, well, what are our values? What do we stand as human beings? We all have different values. And that's okay. It's what we stand for. But if you don't connect with me authentically as a human, then you're not going to earn the deepest levels of loyalty that keep me coming back. I'll just go to that next brand who offers it at a cheaper price or an easier experience.

Jennifer Norman [00:32:00]:

Yeah. And I love that nuance that you brought up, because I think in the past, it was about aspiration. You're going to look like the supermodel, you're going to be the star. And so it was almost like, let's show you a symbol of success or what your life could be like, or really a lot of it was unreachable. It was completely fabricated fantasy. But it helped people feel this luster of, oh, my life can be better if I bought into something like that rather than, again, it coming from within.

Zach Hamilton [00:32:29]:

I think that comes down to our worthiness, too. I think brands play on that worthiness aspect of we try to feel worthy from the outside in, right? And so if you think about it, when I was on my achievement treadmill, it was all about winning on the outside. So I felt better on the inside. And the journey that I've gone through with my executive leadership coach and I still continue to go on, is how do I win from the inside out? How do I win myself? Because if I can win myself, I can love myself first. And if I love myself first, then I can love others and I can appreciate others. And if I feel worthy, then I can look at things from a completely different lens, right? It's no longer about myself, but it's about everyone else. And that's what I love about my own journey is recently just heard, I can't remember. But the difference between winning and greatness.

Zach Hamilton [00:33:16]:

Winning is about ourselves. Greatness is about others. How do we help others achieve their own winning? And not winning from a title perspective, but how do we help them achieve from the inside out? Because until we win our own selves from the inside out, then we're just going to continue to shame ourselves into the achievement treadmill, whatever that achievement treadmill is, right? It could be I'm going to shame myself or I need to lose 50 pounds. I don't feel worthy of love from others because I judge I'm overweight and so I'm going to shame myself. But that moment that we miss a workout, everything breaks down, right? Or I didn't get that raise that I expected to. So I'm going to shame myself into that achievement treadmill. Or this initiative didn't go off the way that I planned for it to go off. Now I'm going to start shaming myself.

Zach Hamilton [00:34:01]:

I'm going to get onto the achievement treadmill. I'm going to go back into my workaholic days in order for me to feel worthy again. And so until we win ourselves from the inside out, you won't have the courage to step off that achievement treadmill. That's when greatness is achieved, is when you can help others take a step off that achievement treadmill or cycle of hell. Help them love themselves, feel worthy, win themselves from the inside out to where now they can go and help others into their own greatness.

Jennifer Norman [00:34:29]:

This is the work. This is the work of why we are here. We are here to do that hero's journey, to come back to ourselves. And no one says that it's going to be easy. We're just telling you that it's going to be worth it. And so if you have the right support, if you surround yourself with people who believe in the true you, not in what you bring to the table, not what your bank account says, not because of the labels that you're wearing or what style you've got on for this day, but for those that really care about you and your humanity and your soul and your happiness and fulfillment and joy from inside out, those are the things that I believe are those priceless assets that we are looking to achieve for our legacy and what we want to pass on to our kids. And so, Zach, I want to thank you so much for being on the show today. Your values so much align with what I'm doing here at The Human Beauty Movement.

Jennifer Norman [00:35:25]:

And so I am just so appreciative that the universe brought us together to have this conversation and to share our stories with everybody else.

Zach Hamilton [00:35:34]:

Likewise, Jennifer. I love listening to your podcast. I love hearing what human beauty means to the different professionals and people that you have on your show. And I think it's the work that needs to be done in order for us to really live in harmony. So thank you so much for doing what you're doing.

Jennifer Norman [00:35:50]:

Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty movement is a community based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumandbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.