Things have always come easily to Dave Trout. As a child, he displayed precocious academic skills, learning to multiply by four years of age. Throughout his school years, he exhibited athletic and leadership abilities as well, serving as captain of the high school football team, basketball team, and baseball team.
Early on, Dave was singled out as Mother’s favorite. She was proud of her son and didn’t mind showing him off, giving him excessive amounts of positive attention over Dave’s three older brothers. But Mother’s fawning led to a deep insecurity: “I have to achieve for people to love me,” Dave believed. This drove him to become achievement-oriented, to a fault.
A Reinforced Pattern: If Achievement, Then Approval
Over time, love and affirmation felt conditional, even his mother’s. Dave went on to enjoy a lifelong career of success in the oil and gas industry. He once had a senior manager who held a particular philosophy on life: Work hard, play hard. “I heard that and felt it fit me perfectly!” Dave recalls. “If I work hard and play hard, people will like and accept me. So, ‘work hard, play hard’ became my god. If I achieved things, people liked me. They rewarded and promoted you.”
By this time, Dave had a relationship with God, but God was compartmentalized. The bulk of the time, achievement was Dave’s real god. “I put God in a box. He didn’t have all of me because my real god was work hard, play hard,” Dave confesses. His marriage also suffered. “I was not giving my wife the attention she deserved. Even when I was there, I wasn’t fully present. My mind was filled with other things. I was giving off the impression that my wife was secondary to work hard, play hard. That was sobering, to think that I put personal achievement above the person I love the most.”
Getting Present and Taking Ownership
Going through Faithwalking revealed Dave’s attachment to achievement. “I was abusing God’s conditional love by trying to achieve everything. To do all that I did, to maintain a certain level of achievement, takes a lot of time and energy. I had to learn that God loves me unconditionally, no matter what I do. I don’t have to earn his love,” Dave says.
Through Faithwalking Dave has learned to take ownership for his past tendencies. For Dave’s wife, it was helpful to hear him admit and apologize for neglecting her through his attempts to achieve. For his kids, it was good for them to see him as a person with flaws as Dave opened up to them in transformational conversations. “When you are a high achiever you come across as someone who has it together,” says Dave. “It was good for me to be transparent about my struggles. I think it deepened my relationship with my kids.”
Moving from Success to Significance
Dave recently retired from 39 years of working for Exxon. He was feeling a little anxious about what to do with his life post-retirement when one of the guys in a 101 group he was leading recommended the book Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance. The book addresses the potential of making the second half of our lives even more significant than the first. With Dave reaching the transition from work to retirement, he wondered: Is what I did for Exxon really significant in the world?
This question led him down an unexpected path—Dave is spending his golden years working on his church’s administrative team as Director of Operations. “Faithwalking helped me tone down my desire to achieve and be loved, and replace that with a desire to do something for God and others. I’m not sure I’d be working at the church if I hadn’t taken Faithwalking.” The temptation to achieve is still present, even in a ministry role, so Dave is cautious to not become achievement-oriented in his new role. “I think I learned my lesson pretty good,” he jokes.
Today Dave embraces a new mantra: Work for a living, play for fun. He is striving to see people more than tasks. No longer living a life based on achievement, he is finding great reward in work that is less about his own significance and more about serving.
