Grand Slam Journey explores how lessons from competitive sports shape life, career, and business transitions. I host conversations with athletes, business leaders, and tech innovators, uncovering purposeful mindsets and tangible strategies — from leadership and trust to decision-making frameworks and emerging technologies, such as AI. Each episode offers actionable insights for thriving physically, mentally, and professionally, helping you navigate transitions and unlock your full human potential. Available in audio and video on YouTube.
16. Announcements, Consistency & Power, Power for All
•Klara Jagosova•Season 2
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Some announcements, consistency, and my contemplation about Power as I reflect on my reading "Power for All" by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro. Link to an article I wrote about consistency. I would appreciate your feedback on how you enjoyed or didn't enjoy this episode. #powerforall #consistency #power
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Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to my Grand Sun Journey podcast, where I together with my guests discuss various topics related to finding purpose, maximizing our potential sports, life after sports, and transitioning from one chapter of our lives to the next. I have to apologize for being disconnected for quite some time. Life happens, and it has been a busy summer, full of work, which unfortunately pushed my passion projects to the background. However, I'm back and happy to be bringing you some exciting new content and also think about how I want to iterate on my podcasting journey. And so today I wanna give you a few updates, and I also have something new I'm trying out. So I hope you have some patience with me, and I'm actually curious how you enjoyed this episode. Regarding announcements. As I mentioned, I'm going to be restarting my Grand Slim journey as I took a few months' break. And that is mainly due to realizing that I am typically very passionate about the work and what I do. And as I get more passionate, I get more engraved in my job and start putting my passion projects to the background. I very easily prioritize my work goals over my personal goals. And this has been a narrative probably the majority of my life. And so I hope you're gonna hold me accountable. And me announcing this out loud will allow me to hold myself accountable to really stick with my podcasting journey and adventure. And my goal is to continue to bring you content on a weekly basis. And really with that is practicing consistency. And so that's kind of the main update I want to share with you is those who know me or have been following my Grand Slim Journey blog know that I write quite a bit about consistency and believing in the athletic mindset. And as I reflect on my athletic journey, being a tennis player for about 15 years of my life, really I believe that consistency is key to success. My sport has taught me a lot, and I have built this muscle of understanding how habits form us into who we are, and consistency a large part of it. You need consistency in training and consistently hitting hundreds and thousands of balls and consistently practicing special drills and doing all the other things that tennis players need to do in order to be great. And I have realized that that hasn't completely carried over to my podcasting. And so I have been chasing, I would say, quality after consistency. And as I've been thinking about it, you can be consistent in one aspect of life while lacking consistency in other. And so my podcasting journey has definitely lacked consistency, and I'm fully focusing on creating that in 2023 and bringing you some hopefully exciting and interesting topics throughout the year on a weekly basis. So the next thing I want to talk to you today about is power. I guess it may be an interesting topic for the holiday, as holiday are typically times where we want to disconnect, maybe spend time with family, relax, turn off from our daily life and really create some break and reflecting on the year and perhaps thinking about restarting a new year. Some of you may be thinking about goals or what you have achieved and what energy you want to put into for next year. And so while power may not seem to be a natural fit for that, I actually want to invite you to think through it with me on a little bit deeper level. I have to admit that I didn't know how large my misconceptions about power have been until I attended the Texas Women Conference in Austin this November. And I have listened to a talk from Julie, Julie Batilana. Sorry, Julie, if I'm pronouncing your name wrong. And it was very thought-provoking because what I have realized is that I have very skewed perception about power. Ever since I was young, I feel I have had very strong observation about the power dynamic. I come from a small countryside in Czech Republic. I would say it was a very macho culture back then. My upbringing and growing up was right after a communist era, which created a lot of opportunities, but also a lot of changes in the way the politics, I guess economics, and just cultural things have changed from before and after a communist era. And I would say I've been fortunate to live in a family full of powerful women, and at the same time they have always been one man that had ruled the family hierarchy for one reason or another. And so I've always thought that I've been interested about the dynamic of men versus women, and it has been a topic I've been diving into for quite a while. I always thought that I've been interested in understanding how hierarchies work and why those few men were able to overpower some of the most powerful women and inspiring women that I thought were really the cornerstone of the family. But it wasn't until the Texas conference and when I listened Julie talk about power and the importance of power. And I've realized that I myself had a large misconception because I just thought by nature power is dirty. And so reflecting on my life and even my career journey, I would say that I have given power away because I just felt having an owning power wasn't something for me, or it wasn't something I wanted to have. But listening to Julie's talk, it made me really think on a deeper level that with that power there's really no influence. And understanding where our power is can really help us with achieving our goals because we all have goals we want to achieve. And perhaps approaching conversations or it may be family conversations, it may be company conversations or even friends conversations in a more strategic way or a more thoughtful way about understanding where our power lies. And so this brings me to the book Power for All that I have been reading, written by Julie and Tesiana. That was my Czech Italian pronunciation. I'm sorry, ladies, if I mispronounce your name again. I'm really enjoying the book and I'm taking it slowly, creating pauses to think and reflect and consider how I should approach power going forward. I love the two questions that Julie and Tiziana lay out as kind of the basis of power. The two key questions that we should ask ourselves is one, what do the people involved value? And the second question is who controls access to what they value? Again, what do the people involved value? Who controls access to what they value? Today I want to briefly dive into the first one, written in chapter three, and I want to read a brief passage from the book. So prepare the book Power for All. Humanity's two basic needs are safety and self esteem. Observed from afar, humanity is but a speck of dust in an endless universe, our position as inconsequential as it is fleeting, at the deepest level. What we humans long for are two defenses against the existential dilemma. First, protection from the winds of dangerous forces much greater than our own that could annihilate us in a moment. Second, reassurance of our value as individuals in a universe that is indifferent to us. Ultimately then, we aim to satisfy two basic human motives safety from harm and confirmation that we are worthy of esteem. I loved how simple this is laid out and looking at the history of humanity and even my own decisions, I can definitely see how these two are the drivers of power. I also love this broader framework that Julian Tiziana laid out on page 58, Power for All. And so the framework then describes sort of the next level of needs that are surrounded around the basic two needs. And the next ones are morality, which means virtue or moral character, achievement, which means competence, learning, progress and mastery, affiliation, which means friendship, love and affection, belonging to a group, autonomy, control over one's choices and the course of one's life, status, social rank, prestige, esteem in the eyes of others, and of course, last but not least, material resources, money and property. We know the humanity has been able to kill for gold ever since the history of our times. And so many people would argue that money drives power, and money and power are really the main two things that have been rotating around since the history of our times. So I really enjoyed this framework. I recommend the book. I found it very thought-provoking, and it's a great way to wind down from my day before I close my eyes for the night and a way to think about something else than my daily schedule. That's been sort of my routine for the past few weeks. And so I hope you enjoyed this contemplation about consistency and power. And feel free to reach out if any of this resonated or actually even didn't resonate. You can find feedback page on my grandslamjourney.com under feedback. So if you enjoyed this or didn't enjoy it, I would appreciate you giving me feedback so I can think about how to iterate on my next steps. Thank you so much. Enjoy the holiday, and I'll be back with you soon with an interesting conversation about tennis and pedal, which is coming next. Bye bye.
