Crush Self-Sabotage and Visualize Success

From Pro Mindset® Podcast featuring guest Tara Renze, keynote speaker, author, and emotional intelligence expert.

Almost two decades ago, an 87-year-old woman named Evelyn sat down and wrote a letter to her great-granddaughter the week she was born. She died shortly after. The letter was four sentences long. It became the foundation of an entire body of work that has since reached thousands of people across keynote stages, workshops, and two published books.

The line that changed everything was simple, “Be who you came to be. Love will guide you.”

Tara Renze, keynote speaker, author, podcast host, and fellow University of Kansas alumna, joined Pro Mindset® Podcast host Craig Domann for a conversation that wove together emotional intelligence, athletic performance, parenting, visualization, and the concept of butterfly goals into one of the most practically rich episodes the show has produced. The through line in every part of the conversation was the same idea her grandmother planted in that letter to her son. You were made to be someone specific. The work of a lifetime is becoming more of that person, not less.

"You are entitled to a bad day. You are only human. But you are not entitled to give someone else a bad day. That is emotional intelligence in its simplest form. Choosing how you show up regardless of how you feel."

–Tara Renze, Keynote Speaker, Author, and Emotional Intelligence Expert

The Note That Started Everything

Evelyn's Letter, Written the Week Her Great-Grandson Was Born

"Be who you came to be. Love will guide you."

Six words and four more. Her grandmother was deeply spiritual and deeply intentional. The note to Tara’s son was not meant to be explained and modeled; it was meant to be discovered. Thus for the last two decades, Tara has been helping others do exactly that.

When Tara first read the note, she was a new mother trying to figure out who she was becoming. Her husband and she made it their parenting mantra immediately. The goal was not to raise their two kids into who the world wanted them to be, or who their parents had hoped they would become; it was to raise them into whoever they already were at their core, whoever that turned out to be.

Over the following years, as Tara shared the note personally and professionally, she noticed something. It made people stop. It made them think differently about identity, about self-regard, and about purpose. Eventually she went and got certified in emotional intelligence to give herself the tools and vocabulary to work with that insight more deliberately. In 2018 she took it to the keynote circuit. Her children are now at the University of Tennessee and a junior in high school, a pitcher being recruited by Division I programs and the military academies.

What Emotional Intelligence Actually Means

Emotional intelligence is one of those terms that everyone has heard and fewer people can actually define in a way that is actionable. Tara's definition is precise enough to use immediately and broad enough to apply everywhere.

Emotional intelligence is understanding your emotions and your thoughts and then choosing how you show up, regardless of how you feel. Not suppressing emotion. Not pretending everything is fine when it is not. Choosing. The distinction matters because choosing requires awareness. You cannot choose a response you have not noticed yourself having.

58%

Career Success Linked to EQ

More than half of career success is directly attributable to emotional intelligence – not technical skills, not credentials, not IQ. but EQ.

1st

Most Important Relationship

The relationship you have with yourself is the loudest voice you will ever hear. It carries you everywhere. Everything else is built on top of it.

AI

The Future of Leadership

As technology replaces technical skills at an accelerating rate, emotional intelligence becomes the irreplaceable human differentiator in every organization.

Tara added the dimension that makes this especially relevant for athletes, coaches, and parents. Self-actualization, the highest expression of emotional intelligence, is not a destination. It is a lifelong assignment. You do not arrive at being who you came to be. You are always in the process of becoming more of that person. That framing takes enormous pressure off the moment and puts it back where it belongs: on the journey.

The Clear Mirror: Raising Self-Aware Athletes

One of the most practical tools Tara shared came from her experience raising two competitive sons. After every game, the question was always the same from the kids: how did I do? Most parents respond with either blind encouragement or immediate coaching. Tara chose a third option.

01

Reflect It Back

Instead of answering, "How did I do?" with a verdict, Tara asked, "How do you think you did?" The clear mirror focuses the athlete on themselves, the only thing they can actually control, rather than on an external evaluation they are waiting to receive.

02

Celebrate First

Before any area of improvement gets named, something gets celebrated. No matter how the game went, there is always a shining moment. Finding it first teaches athletes that growth does not require self-flagellation. It requires honest, balanced assessment.

03

Redirect the Blame

When the instinct is to blame the umpire, the pitcher, or a teammate, Tara redirected consistently. You cannot control the pitcher. It is baseball. They call every play. What can you control? That question repeated enough times becomes a habit of thought.

The Hidden Question Craig Identified: When a young athlete asks "How did I do?" they are often asking two different questions at once. One is about skill: how was my performance? The other is about love: do you still believe in me regardless of what happened out there? Most parents respond to the first question with coaching. What the athlete often needs is an answer to the second one first. Separating who they are from what they did on the field is the foundation of a resilient identity and a healthy relationship with performance.

"It is not a lack of talent or opportunity that holds almost everyone back. It is their own self-sabotaging beliefs. The stories we tell ourselves become our truths. And that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy in any direction."

–Tara Renze, Keynote Speaker, Author, and Emotional Intelligence Expert

Visualization: Training the Mind to Win

Tara is a working practitioner of visualization, not just a teacher of it. As a keynote speaker, she stays in bed for twenty minutes every morning and visualizes her entire talk before she gets up. Not occasionally. Every time. The habit is built because she understands what the research confirms: your mind cannot fully distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. Training the neural pathway matters as much as training the physical skill.

How to Build a Visualization Practice That Actually Works

Do It Daily

One visualization session the night before a game is not enough. The mind needs consistent repetition to build the neural pathway. Even five minutes every morning or evening compounds dramatically over a season.

Find Your Format

Some people visualize better lying still. Others need movement. A walk, a slow warm-up, a quiet drive. The format is less important than the consistency. Find what works for your brain and protect that time.

See the Win

Visualize the successful execution specifically. The free throw going in. The pitch hitting its spot. The keynote landing. The more sensory and specific the image, the more powerfully the mind rehearses the outcome.

Combine with Practice

Research comparing athletes who visualized free throws versus athletes who only practiced shows that the winning combination is doing both. Visualization without physical practice has limits. Physical practice without visualization leaves performance on the table.

Train Recovery Too

Visualize things going wrong and then going right. The mind that has rehearsed a recovery stays in the prefrontal cortex under pressure, where resilience and positive problem-solving live. The mind that has not rehearsed it spirals.

Tara pointed to the 2008 Kansas National Championship as one of the clearest examples of visualization and belief doing their work in real time. Down with seconds left, Bill Self kept saying the same thing to his team: we have to believe. We have to see this. The Mario Chalmers miracle shot only happened because a team kept believing it was possible when the scoreboard said it was not. They had rehearsed belief often enough that it was available in the moment it was needed most.

Butterfly Goals: Giving Yourself Your Spark Back

After Tara lost her father unexpectedly in her mid-thirties, she had the kind of reckoning that grief sometimes forces. Her entire adult life had been organized around achievement. The next promotion. The bigger bonus. The better school for her sons. Looking at the math of her father's lifespan, she realized she might be halfway through her own life already. The question arrived with uncomfortable clarity: what am I doing beyond achieving?

She invented butterfly goals.

Achievement Goals

What Most People Set

• The next promotion or title

• A specific income target

• A bigger home or a nicer car

• Performance benchmarks and metrics

• Things that impress others

• Measured against external standards

Butterfly Goals

What the Caterpillar Never Expected

• Learning to surf at 50

• Getting on a game show

• Running a 5K for the first time

• Growing a garden

• Writing a book you have always wanted to write

• Measured only against your own curiosity and joy

The caterpillar never came to be the caterpillar. It came to be the butterfly. Butterfly goals are about realigning with whatever authentically makes you tick, whatever you have been curious about, whatever playful dream got filed away under more important things a decade ago. Tara got cast on ABC's $100,000 Pyramid after a year and a half of putting the goal out loud, filling out applications, and telling everyone she knew about it. Someone eventually handed her a casting director lead. She got flown to New York. She did it.

Learn to Surf

A 50-something man who saw Tara's keynote in Nashville, his sons watched him achieve it. Their relationship was reignited by watching their dad try something new.

Get on a Game Show

Tara's own butterfly goal after losing her dad, she was cast on ABC's $100,000 Pyramid. The proof she needed that you get what you believe.

Run a 5K

One of the most common butterfly goals that lights up a room of middle-aged professionals. Not a marathon. Just a 5K. But it means something real to the person who has put it off for fifteen years.

Learn to Make Sourdough

A small goal that builds problem-solving, patience, and presence. Every butterfly goal trains skills that transfer back into work and relationships in ways you do not even notice until they already have.

Start a Garden

Something that requires showing up consistently, tolerating failure, and celebrating small wins. It is emotional intelligence training disguised as tomatoes.

Write a Book

Something deeply personal that has nothing to do with the title on your business card. Butterfly goals are the goals that make you the most interesting person in the room and give you your spark back.

"When we work on the person and not just the achievements, everything else in our lives gets better. Our relationships. Our confidence. Our ability to stop worrying about what everyone else thinks. How we feel about ourselves fuels every other relationship we have."

–Tara Renze, Keynote Speaker, Author, and Emotional Intelligence Expert

The College Athlete Identity Crisis No One Is Talking About

Near the end of the conversation, Tara raised a concern that both Craig and she felt urgently. The current NIL era in college athletics is creating a mental health problem that is only going to get worse. Athletes who are earning hundreds of thousands of dollars playing college sports are going to graduate, and the money is going to stop. The identity built around being an athlete is going to collide with the reality of a job market that does not particularly care what they did on a Saturday afternoon in a stadium.

The Coming Mental Health Collision: Craig and Tara both pointed to the same inevitability. An athlete who has tied their identity and their worth to their athletic performance and their paycheck is going to experience a version of depression when both disappear. The athletes who will navigate that transition successfully are the ones who developed self-regard independent of the sport.

Not self-worth tied to the scoreboard. Self-worth tied to who they are as people. That is not a soft idea. It is the only thing that will carry them when the sport is over and nobody is watching anymore. Tara connected this directly to her grandmother's note. The athletes who know who they came to be beyond the sport, who have developed interpersonal skills, self-awareness, and the ability to honestly assess themselves without crushing themselves, those are the ones who land well after the final whistle. The sport can be a chapter. For the ones who never built an identity beyond it, the end of the sport feels like the end of the story.

"Most people do not need any more information. They just need permission. Permission to explore who they are. Permission to take that first imperfect step toward becoming more of who they already were put on this earth to be."

–Tara Renze, Keynote Speaker, Author, and Emotional Intelligence Expert

The Bottom Line

Tara Renze built her life's work around four words written by a woman who died before she could explain them. The more she has worked with athletes, executives, parents, and leaders across nearly two decades, the more she has come to believe that the reason those words hit so hard is because they give people something almost nobody else is giving them.

Permission.

Permission to stop measuring themselves against who the world decided they should be. Permission to find out who they actually are. Permission to set a butterfly goal that has nothing to do with career advancement and everything to do with curiosity and joy. Permission to ask their kids, "How do you think you did?" instead of immediately coaching or congratulating. Permission to separate who they are from what they did in the game last Saturday.

Being who you came to be is a lifelong assignment. You never arrive. That, Tara says, is not a burden. It is one of the most beautiful ways to go through life.

Every day is a new adventure in becoming more of who you were already made to be.

The caterpillar never came to be the caterpillar. It came to be the butterfly. So did you.

Listen to the full conversation here or here. Connect with Craig for coaching opportunities on how to build your Pro Mindset® Performance Bubble™ at Craig.ProMindset@gmail.com.

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For more information about Craig, his keynote speaking, coaching, or NFL or NIL athlete representation, go to ProMindsetRep.com or contact him at Craig.ProMindset@gmail.com. 

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