Many of you have an endgame. An extraordinary goal, challenge or dream you want to slay to make your life more fulfilling, meaningful, complete.
You begin the journey bubbling with excitement as if you’re about to plan the vacation of your life.
But then your itty bitty shitty committee starts to whisper sweet negatives in your ear.
Your self doubt kicks in wondering whether or not you’ll be able to stay the course and cross the finish line.
- Do I have what it takes to do this?
- How will I pull this off?
- What happens if I fail?
- What do I need to know?
Instead of keeping your eye on the prize, you zero in on everything that could go wrong. All the obstacles that will fall on your path. All the mistakes you’ll make.
One day an entrepreneur client landed on my coaching door step whose endgame was to build a new business after a previous one had flopped.
After they verbalized all the mistakes they thought they had made in regards to the first venture, I said in a neutrally charged tone: “You did an excellent job at figuring out how not to build this business. You’ve learned so much.”
This is a snippet from the transcript of the Oprah Winfrey interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business:
“There are no mistakes. There really aren’t any, because you have a supreme destiny.
When you’re in your little mind, in your little personality mind or you’re not centered, you really don’t know who you are that you come from something greater and bigger. We really all are the same.
You don’t know that, you get all flustered, you get stressed all the time, wanting something to be what it isn’t.
There’s a supreme moment of destiny calling on your life. Your job is to feel that, to hear that, to know that and sometimes, when you’re not listening, you get taken off track.
You get in the wrong marriage, the wrong relationship, you take the wrong job. Yeah, but it’s all leading to the same path. There are no wrong paths. There are none.
There’s no such thing as failure really, because failure is just that thing, trying to move you in another direction.
So you get as much from your losses, as you do from your victories because the losses are there to wake you up. The losses are to say, fool, that is why you go to school, so that CBS can call you!
So when you understand that you don’t allow yourself to be completely thrown by a grade or by a circumstance because your life is bigger than any one experience and if I had,
I always ask people on Super Soul Sunday to tell me, what would you say to your younger self?
Every person says in one form or another, I would have said, relax.
Relax. It’s going to be okay.
It really is going to be okay because even if you’re on a detour right now and that’s how you know, when you’re not at ease with yourself, when you’re feeling like oh, oh, — that is the cue that you need to be moving in another direction.
Don’t let yourself get all thrown off, continue to be thrown off course. When you’re feeling off course, that’s the key.
How do I turn around?
So when everybody was talking about, when I started this network, if I had only known, good lord, how difficult it would be. The way through the challenge is to get still and ask yourself what is the next right move?
Not think about oh, I got all of this to, what is the next right move and then from that space make the next right move and the next right move and not to be overwhelmed by it because you know your life is bigger than that one moment.
You know you’re not defined by what somebody says is a failure for you because failure is just there to point you in a different direction.”
This is why I go with “experiment” rather than “failure”, which many motivational speakers try to get us to embrace. That’s an Edison-ism by the way, which I fully agree with, because words are powerful things and words like “fail” and “mistake” usually have people running away from them.
Great point Mitch. We need to pay attention to our words. They’re the script with which we program ourselves to create a story. The story of our lives.