Mindset
“The dream I nearly talked myself out of, the people who helped me bring it to life, and what Leave Your Mark has given me along the way.”
-Scott Livingston
This week, I am releasing the 500th episode of Leave Your Mark. Even writing that sentence makes me pause. I remember how long I wanted to do this, how many times I found a reason to put it off, and how convinced I was that the technology would be beyond me. Now there are five hundred episodes, more than four hundred one-to-one interviews, and a weekly commitment that has become part of the rhythm of my life. But long before there was a podcast, there was a kid who wanted to ask people questions.
In high school, I loved watching Phil Donahue. There was something about the way he could bring someone into a conversation and explore their life that caught my imagination. I wanted to understand people that way. What had shaped them? Why did they believe what they believed? How had they found their way? I could see myself doing that work, and for a brief time, I had a plan to pursue it.
I applied to a Radio and Television Arts program at a local community college. There was an entrance exam, and it wasn’t easy. They wanted to know that you paid attention to the world and had a real interest in media. I passed, was accepted, and imagined a life playing junior football while studying something I was genuinely excited about. Then my father told me he would only support me financially if I pursued a university degree. I needed his help, and that condition changed the direction of my life.
The only other thing I really knew was football. I loved playing, loved lifting weights, and thought perhaps I could become a coach. My marks didn’t get me into the physical education programs I applied to, but somehow I found my way into a fledgling exercise science program in Montreal. Whether I got there by the skin of my teeth or with some help from the coach who recruited me, I still don’t know. Then I arrived and decided I wasn’t big enough to make the football team. The broadcasting plan was gone, and now football was gone too. I had made it to university with very little idea of what I was going to become.
What followed was the slow discovery of athletic therapy, strength and conditioning, and the possibility of combining the two. Sports medicine was still a relatively young field. There was room to explore, contribute, and build something. I found work I could do well and people I cared deeply about helping. That uncertain beginning became a career of nearly forty years, filled with experiences and relationships I could never have planned.
Still, the desire to broadcast stayed with me. It showed up in my teaching, in my coaching, and in the conversations I wanted to have with friends and colleagues. I loved learning through other people’s experiences. I wanted to get past the résumé and understand the person who had lived it.
When podcasting eventually came into my world, I could feel the possibility. Here was a way to do something I had wanted to do since I was a teenager. But I was busy, and I kept telling myself I didn’t have the time. Underneath that explanation was something harder to admit: I was afraid. Recording, editing, publishing, getting the show onto platforms people could actually find; I had turned every unfamiliar step into evidence that this was beyond me. It’s easier to say you don’t have time than to acknowledge how much you want something and how afraid you are to try.
In the fall of 2017, at a retreat led by a mentor, I finally addressed it. Starting a podcast became one of my big hairy audacious goals. Soon afterward, I came across Brian Rose’s Broadcast Yourself program through London Real. Here was a structure for doing the thing I had spent years imagining. I invested a significant amount of money and committed to eight weeks of being taught, challenged, and pushed to get a show into the world.
Recently, I went back through the notes I wrote during that program. Before there was a microphone in front of a guest, I was asking myself what mattered to me, whom I hoped to serve, and why anyone should care. I wrote about inspiring people, challenging convention, and creating change through example and mentorship. I wanted to explore fulfilment, contribution, leadership, and personal growth. I wanted to understand how someone could build a life that felt meaningful to them, beyond whatever success looked like from the outside.
One assignment asked us to identify our biggest source of resistance. My answer was the need to be perfect. Reading that now, after five hundred episodes, makes me smile. I wanted to become a better listener, but first I had to stop allowing my own expectations to prevent the conversation from ever happening.
The show was initially going to be called A High Performing Life. As I worked through the idea, I kept returning to the people who shape us and the influence we have on others. Parents, teachers, coaches, mentors, friends. People whose words or example stay with us long after a particular moment has passed. Leave Your Mark became the name because it held the question I wanted to explore: what do we leave in the lives of the people we touch?
We were asked to make a list of potential guests and begin inviting them. I reached out to Olympic athletes I had worked with, colleagues I admired, and people who had helped build the profession I loved. To my surprise, everyone I approached said yes. Their willingness gave me the chance to begin. I still had to learn how to record and publish, but now there were people on the other side of those invitations trusting me to do it.
The interviewing advice was to prepare about eighty percent of the questions and leave twenty percent for exploration. I started closer to the opposite. Over time, the conversations became almost entirely exploratory, with a few familiar questions to get us moving. I learned to listen for something worth staying with: a hesitation, an unexpected answer, a passing reference to someone who had changed a guest’s life. Sometimes the most interesting part of a conversation began where I might otherwise have moved on to the next question.
I wanted guests to feel that the experience had contributed something to their lives as well. Perhaps they would see a connection they hadn’t noticed, remember someone they hadn’t thought about in years, or hear themselves explain something they were still trying to understand. Those are the conversations I love most. I finish them feeling rearranged. Someone else’s story has given me a different way to look at my own.
One of the early guests who did that for me was Stu McMillan. Stu had an aversion to appearing on podcasts and told me he had generally declined invitations. But he said yes to mine, and that first conversation became one of those experiences that confirmed why I wanted to do this. He has returned several times since, on his own and as part of panel discussions. Having him back for episode 500 felt right. He has been part of the journey, and he is someone with whom I can have the kind of conversation that made me want to start it.
This time, we spent less time on the technical details of performance and more time on the person doing the work. We talked about persistence, stubbornness, the influence of his father, and the standards he brings to things he cares about. We also talked about coffee. Quite a lot about coffee, as it turns out. His interest began in London in 2010, through an introduction from Steve Lewis and Steve Hooker, and grew into a pursuit that now influences where he goes and how he spends his time. If you know Stu, you can probably imagine the attention he brings to a cup of espresso.
There was a connection running through all of it. His appreciation for quality, his willingness to go deeply into an interest, and his desire to understand what makes something work show up in coaching and in the rest of his life. He also spoke about recognising when to leave something behind. Persistence and stubbornness can be close neighbours. Experience doesn’t necessarily make that distinction easy, but it gives us more reason to examine it.
I appreciated what he said about collaboration, too. He wants to work with good human beings, with people who can help him improve, and with people whose growth he can support. That matters to me. After so many years in human performance, the quality of the people beside you carries enormous weight. Their character, generosity, and willingness to learn influence the work and the experience of doing it.
Our conversation brought me back to those original planning notes. I had wanted to understand how people find fulfilment and continue to evolve. Here we were, years later, talking about changing interests, the parts of business that don’t come naturally, the pleasure of good work, and the relationships that make it worthwhile. We were exploring the questions that had been there from the beginning.
Along the way, the show has developed its own traditions. One is the birthday reading from Linda Joyce’s The Day You Were Born, a book I came across while wandering through Manhattan years before the podcast existed. Those readings have often opened another door into the conversation. Guests recognise something, question something, or begin telling a story that might otherwise have stayed untold. The surprise on their faces has become a familiar pleasure. So has discovering just how much of a person’s life sits beneath the professional biography.
Five hundred episodes have given me more than I could have anticipated. They have helped me listen more carefully and reminded me how little of someone’s journey we can understand from the outside. A career that looks inevitable in retrospect may have felt uncertain for years to the person living it. I know mine did. I thought the broadcasting dream had ended when I went to university. Decades later, I finally gave it room, bringing with me a lifetime of people, experiences, and questions I hadn’t had as a teenager.
I am proud of the consistency. I am proud that I overcame enough of my fear to begin and have continued releasing the show every week. I also feel grateful to every guest who has trusted me with their time and their story, and to every listener who has made room for these conversations. Whether you have been here from the beginning or found the show last week, your willingness to listen gives this work somewhere to land.
I still look forward to the next guest. I still want to know what shaped them, what they are wrestling with, and what they have discovered that might help someone else. That curiosity has carried me much further than the plan I wrote eight years ago could have predicted.
Somewhere in your own life, there may be an interest you keep putting aside, a question you want to explore, or something you have wanted to create for years. I won’t pretend that every desire needs to become a project. But I know what it feels like to keep explaining away one that matters. For a long time, I did that with this podcast. Five hundred episodes later, I am grateful I finally gave myself the chance to find out what it could become.
If these conversations have helped you think differently, recognise something in yourself, or reach for something you had put aside, then they have done what I hoped they would do. They have certainly done that for me.
This week, Stu and I get to add one more. I hope you’ll join us for episode 500 of Leave Your Mark.
Care to listen?
