Relational nutrients: why encouragement has to come from outside you
Try this for a moment: encourage yourself. Really do it. Sit alone in a room and tell yourself you’re capable, that the hard season is going to turn around, that you’re not as far behind as it feels.
Notice something? It doesn’t land the same way. We all need a perspective from someone that has been further along in the journey.
This is one of the first truths we teach inside Remaking Champions, because it explains so much of why people stay stuck even when they’re doing “all the right things.” That’s not a mindset failure. It’s not because you don’t believe in yourself enough or haven’t read enough books on self-talk. It’s because encouragement, by design, was never meant to be self-administered. It’s relational. It has to come from outside you to do what it’s built to do.
Relational Nutrients Are Real, and Most People Are Starving
Think of it like food. Your body cannot manufacture certain vitamins on its own you have to take them in from an outside source, or you get sick, slowly, in ways that are hard to trace back to the actual cause. The same is true relationally.
There are things every human being needs that simply cannot be produced internally:
Encouragement: the cure for discouragement. You can hype yourself up for a morning. It fades by lunch. Real encouragement, spoken by someone who actually sees your effort and names it, does something self-talk can’t.
Confrontation: the uncomfortable nutrient nobody asks for and everybody eventually needs. “Bro, you’re about to lose your marriage if this continues.” “This pattern is going to cost you the thing you say you want most.” You will never confront yourself with that kind of honesty. Your own blind spots are blind precisely because you can’t see them that’s what makes them blind spots.
Love that isn’t earned: being cared for in the moment you’re least lovable, not the moment you’ve cleaned yourself up enough to deserve it. It’s hard to love yourself unconditionally while you’re in the middle of the mess. Someone else has to hold that for you until you can hold it yourself.
Belief in a future you can’t yet see , sometimes the only reason someone keeps going is that another person looked at them and said, with complete conviction, I see who you’re becoming, even if you can’t see it yet. You cannot borrow that kind of certainty from your own uncertain heart. It has to be lent to you.
Miss these nutrients long enough, and you don’t collapse dramatically. You just slowly go numb, isolated, convinced that whatever “this” is is simply what life feels like. Most people never trace their stuckness back to a nutrient deficiency. They just assume they’re the problem.
Why This Requires Someone Outside You
Here’s the part that’s hard to hear if you’ve spent years being self-sufficient: you were never designed to do this alone. Not emotionally, not spiritually, not practically.
A real mentor, not a hype account exists specifically to deliver what you cannot deliver to yourself. It’s the entire reason Remaking Champions exists as a mentorship and leadership model and not just a content brand. Mentors can see your blind spots because they’re standing outside of them. They can tell you the truth you need instead of the comfort you want, because their job isn’t to make you feel good in the moment it’s to help you win in the long run.
This is exactly why isolation is one of the most dangerous places a person can live. Not because being alone is inherently bad, but because it cuts off the supply line to the nutrients you cannot produce yourself. No encouragement reaching you. No one is positioned close enough to confront the pattern before it costs you something real. No outside voice believing in your future when your own belief runs out.
If you’ve been white-knuckling life solo figuring it out yourself, refusing to let anyone close enough to actually see you that’s not strength. That’s malnutrition disguised as independence.
The Ego That Blocks the Nutrient
There’s a specific kind of person we see often: strong on the outside, loud, confident, seemingly untouchable and completely unreachable. Not because they don’t need what everyone else needs, but because they’ve built a wall of ego specifically to keep anyone from getting close enough to deliver it.
Usually that wall was built for a reason. Somebody got hurt once by someone who was supposed to protect them, and the conclusion drawn quietly, maybe without ever saying it out loud was never let anyone close enough to do that again.
But the wall that protects you from being hurt is the same wall that blocks the encouragement, the honest confrontation, the unconditional love you actually need to heal. You can’t selectively let nutrients through a wall built to keep everything out.
Breaking that down isn’t about weakness. It’s about recognizing that everyone, no exceptions, is running on the same basic human hardware. Insecurity, fear, the need to be seen. Nobody is above needing this. The people who look like they need it least are often the ones who’ve been going without it the longest.
Who Is Delivering This to You?
Ask yourself honestly: who in your life is close enough, trusted enough, and unafraid enough to tell you the truth when you need it, not just what you want to hear?
If the answer is nobody, that’s the actual problem to solve. Not the business plan. Not the five-year goal. The supply line.
Find people who will encourage you when you’re discouraged, confront you when you’re drifting, love you when you’re not at your best, and believe in a future for you that you can’t yet picture for yourself. Then do the harder thing: let them close enough to actually do it.
You weren’t built to run on empty. You were built to be filled by people who see you clearly and love you enough to tell you the truth!
That’s not a weakness to overcome. That’s by design.