The Balance of Willpower and Letting Go: The Gryphon Within

Wealth Matters Weekend Issue: Lessons from my own performance coaching session yesterday

Yesterday, I had an appointment on my calendar that was booked a few weeks back off of a cold-call message I received in my Linkedin inbox. Now like many of you, I get 100’s of these well-meaning spam messages per month from people prospecting for business or to cold-pitch their ventures to me for consideration and I ignore or auto-delete 99% of them. However, I have always believed in unexpected serendipity as I have too many gifts from the universe at the right time in my 25-year career that came out of “nowhere” because I have let my intuition do the thing that makes zero sense on paper when it comes to my time, energy, or resources.

I jumped on her zoom at our scheduled time with this individual yesterday without any recollection of why we were meeting, other than I was impressed by her pitch and message enough to say, “Yeah I will give you 30 minutes to tell me what you have to offer.”

I opened up the meeting by acknowledging that I was clueless as to what we were about to discuss, but that I remembered being impressed enough to let serendipity guide the day, and it turned out she was a “high-performance coach” (typically a yawn since I have met 100’s of them along the years) and she said that what she was hoping was that she could just use the time to treat me like I was a client and see where it went. I said, “That sounds good… let’s see where that goes.”

BOTTOM LINE: The hour-long call (scheduled for 30 minutes) was one of the highlights of my day. I have a strong feeling that she will be wearing an ATOMIQ jersey in the months to come and that I/we may have just found our new Wendy Rhoades (fans of Billions will get the reference). More on that in that as it unfolds, if the universe decides that is what’s next, but what does this have to do with my insight for you today as it relates to mental health and wealth building?

How and When to Know if You Are Doing Enough

As a high-performance entrepreneur, pushing through adversity is a familiar road. In the last decade building and running our venture studio ATOMIQ, we’ve had several successful exits while also getting smacked in the face with some devastating blows. We have overcome these with a resilience and willpower that sets us apart but has come at a high financial, emotional, and physical cost from time to time and certainly left both increased grit and scar-tissue.

In the last 24 months, I can say we have hit an inflection point I have dreamt about for decades —where the convergence of macro timing, internal talent, and a handful of active portfolio investments are aligning for true exponential growth and breakout of our business and brand. But despite the unquestionable signs of progress and momentum, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought in the past or said to my wife and 21-year investment partner, "This is the time", only to face unforeseen setbacks that felt like insurmountable headwinds on the path, rather than the tailwinds I’d hoped for. So naturally, I have become more and more cautiously optimistic and used to “the grind”.

The Lion and the Eagle: Willpower and Letting Go

This brings me to a core paradox of entrepreneurship and life itself: the delicate interplay between relentless willpower and the necessity of letting go.

In our ventures, I often think of this paradox as two forces in constant tension—embodied by two powerful spirit animals.

The Lion symbolizes willpower. It’s the embodiment of persistence, dominance, and sheer courage to keep charging forward when you face a wall of compounding challenges. The lion’s strength is the force that drives you when the obstacles mount, and when your entire being tells you to surrender, you roar louder.

On the other hand, the Eagle represents the art of letting go. With its ability to soar high above the earth, it embodies foresight, vision, and the calm understanding that some things are beyond our immediate control. The eagle doesn’t fight the wind; it glides on it, trusting the currents will carry it to heights unattainable through force alone.

The Lion rules the land, and the Eagle rules the sky!

When you are building a venture—or any massive project—you need to harness both of these spirit animals within you. The lion drives the hours, the persistence, the gritty belief that you can and will achieve. But it’s the eagle that reminds you of perspective: that sometimes, letting go of control allows the universe to work its magic in ways your willpower never could.

Fear and the Threshold of Willpower

Fear plays a critical role when you’re at the limits of your willpower. It’s what arises when you reach the point of exhaustion, unsure whether to push harder or to let go. Fear whispers, "What if letting go means losing everything?" It tricks you into thinking that release equals failure, when in reality, it often means trust—trust in your team, trust in your process, and trust in the universe. SO MUCH EASIER SAID THAN DONE-I know!

The nuance here is subtle but critical: fear isn't the enemy. It’s a compass, signaling that you’re at the edge of your current capacity. But you have a choice—either push through with the lion’s brute force or let the eagle take flight and allow external forces to align in your favor. The key is discernment: knowing when the fear is calling for one last roar or when it’s nudging you to loosen your grip and glide.

This is what an attuned outside observer like this coach can do for us that you and I cannot. They can observe when the subtle buildup of tension, lactic acid, and force transitions into our breath and posture causing a constriction to the universal flow. They can pause the conversation, take you back into your body and allow you to go from the ground game to the air game. This happened multiple times in our conversation yesterday and the ability to acknowledge the fear and address it from a place of understanding, versus a fight-or-flight response, reframed it from “giving up control without power” to “taking flight and leveraging the power of the winds”.

Navigating the Lion-Eagle Balance

Here are a few tips I’ve used that you can borrow to navigate this tension in your own wealth building journey:

1. Evaluate your resistance. Ask yourself, "Am I facing this obstacle because I need to push harder or because I need to approach it differently?" Often, this is where fear clouds judgment. If it’s the same wall you’ve been hitting repeatedly, it might be time to adopt the eagle’s approach and shift your strategy.

2. Set a deadline for persistence. I’ve found that committing to a burst of relentless effort for a set period works well. Push with everything you have, but if things don’t shift by that deadline, allow yourself to step back. The eagle needs space to glide after the lion has roared.

3. Involve external feedback. Whether from a coach/mentor, a partner, or your team, seek feedback to understand if your tunnel vision is distorting your decision-making. Sometimes an external perspective can tell you what the eagle might already sense: the winds are in your favor, but only if you stop flapping your wings.

The Gryphon: A Symbol of Balance

Ultimately, success in high-performance ventures comes down to embodying the Gryphon—a mythical creature combining the lion and the eagle. The Gryphon symbolizes the perfect blend of grounded strength and the ability to soar. It teaches us that these dual forces don’t have to be in conflict; they can coexist harmoniously.

Photo Credit: This custom DALL-E generated merger is our ATOMIQ Gryphon mascot and perfectly captures the struggle and beauty of how our ATOMIQ CORE team supports our ATOMIQ Visionaries in our shared ventures.

Just like the Gryphon, you must know when to stand firm with strength and courage and when to rise above with perspective and trust. Each project, each challenge, requires a different balance, but mastering that duality is where true breakthroughs happen.

So, as you face your next challenge, ask yourself: "Is this a moment for the lion or the eagle?" Recognize that both live within you, and when you master the balance, you become the Gryphon—the embodiment of both willpower and wisdom.

Enjoy your weekend!