Shadow Play

YOU’RE NOT INTIMIDATED BY PRESSURE, YOU THRIVE ON IT

When you feel pressure or stress, it makes you know that you are alive. When you are alive, you feel. And at the end of the day how you feel is everything.

Humans have the tendency to err towards the negative, and I want to train myself to go towards the positive and say to myself, “What can I positively take away from this experience?”

How do you keep moving forward and not beat yourself up when you’ve made so many mistakes?

I could regurgitate some podcast that I’ve heard about what mental framework to use in this kind of situation, but instead, I’m going to be totally transparent about how I actually deal with this.

I’ll start with the premise: I think that anyone who is driven towards success and who is ambitious, a lot of the time, the other side of that ambition or the other side of that success, is that the person tends to be very hard on themselves. And so we think to ourselves, “Well, I don’t know if I could be successful if I didn’t beat myself up or I wasn’t so hard on myself.”

And I’m not going to lie and say I am perfect in this right now, but I am trying to view my relentless drive and ambition as one that is fueled from a place of abundance instead of deep seated insecurity or anger. My journey these past couple of weeks has been to try to do the two following things:

1. Reframing the situation

2. Understanding the energy source that fuels your success

WHERE DO YOU GET MOMENTUM FOR SUCCESS?

Mistakes and failures are honestly just the prerequisites for success. Everyone fails. It doesn’t matter what level of the game you’re playing at.

Steve Jobs was kicked out of his own company because they didn’t think he was the right leader to take Apple to the next level. Howard Schultz from Starbucks was also kicked out of his own company by his board of directors because they didn’t think he was good enough. Elon Musk slept on the factory floor of Tesla for three years, working day in and day out with his engineers to keep his company alive, fearing failure every single day. People at all levels of the game fail on a continual basis, and the only thing that differentiates the true failures from those who succeed is that they didn’t give up, even with how embarrassing and soul-crushing it must have felt.

You will always experience mistakes and terrible failures. The only thing that will change is how you perceive them and the expectations you hold for yourself afterward.

I know that it’s so much easier to stomach the situation when it’s someone else who is going through the mistakes or floundering in debt or having those big failures compared to when it’s happening to you. But the more success you want, the more mistakes are required because you typically learn the MOST from your greatest failures.

Worrying about beating yourself up isn’t going to do anything. It won’t make you fail less. It will, however, make you more fearful to push yourself, and it will also take you much longer to bounce back.

Imagine if every time you did something wrong, you took time to write it down, and then chose to use it as an opportunity for your future self to refer back to so you won’t make the same mistake twice?

What if I saw my failures as an opportunity? To take the negative energy and convert it to positive energy that moves me and the team and the mission forward.

When you make a mistake, don’t allow yourself to indulge in the shame or self-destructive pattern of behavior that causes you to regress.

Expect yourself to make mistakes. You cannot anticipate all the outcomes of life or of your decisions, especially when you never have all the information and you’re still learning. Instead of holding yourself to a perfectionist standard, you could instead hold yourself to a higher standard in how you choose to react to the mistakes that you will inevitably make.

YOU’RE NOT ALWAYS A PROBLEM TO SOLVE

Can you understand and accept that not feeling good is a part of life and completely normal? The answer to what you do when you’re not feeling 100% is often nothing. You aren’t always a problem to solve. You’re beautifully human. If you just keep going through the same patterns you do every day, eventually your dopamine will balance out and you’ll rise above baseline again and feel much better. Just choose to live by your values and not by your emotions.

You have a feeling and it’s in your body. Allow it to move through your body and allow your brain to process it without changing your actions. Eventually, after a few days, you’ll feel much better.

The mental management you can do during these days is to spend extra time either journaling, listening to podcasts, going on a walk… just choosing to be present with yourself during this time without making yourself feel guilty for how you feel. Thoughts and emotions come and go, and so they will come and they will go. Eventually, you’ll feel better.

LIVE IN ACCORDANCE WITH YOUR VALUES RATHER THAN OBEYING YOUR EMOTIONS

DEFINE WHAT’S MEANINGFUL

Passion + Growth + Contribution = Personal Satisfaction

Each of us sees things in our own unique ways, and when we do, we tell our version of the story. As we experience life one moment at a time our brain is processing sensations and quickly providing us with a mental map to help us assess our next move.

What if we could see the world in a new way and generate a new or different map in our mind, a way to flip the script that is already written for us?

STEPPING INTO THE WORLD OF POSSIBILITY

What if we thought about the world differently? What if the world was not about yourself but about becoming part of all being, and the focus was not on competing with others but finding joy in believing we could all succeed? This mindset can help you tremendously when trying to remain positive or trying to get through a bad day. If you ask yourself the simple question each morning, or during a moment of struggle.

Today or in this moment, how can I just merely contribute?

As we live in this world of measurement, we assign titles to each person, and we believe only a CEO, Manager, Teacher, Parent, or Coach can be the only leaders in the room. These titles give people false misrepresentation of what leadership really is. No matter who you are or what your claim is, you are a leader.

The view of our past is hardly clearer than our view of the future. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

We are all creative leaders. You have the ability to be a leader. You just need to be in the right environment with the right mentorship and believe in your abilities. When you’re on a winning team, every persons unique contributions matter. If one team member fails to achieve their goal, then we all fail. Every persons contribution is vital for the success of the mission.

The key to a successful company or even an individual reaching the end goal is by changing and evolving. If we try to tighten our control over what we already know and choose not to change, then we impede our creativeness. In a creative and innovative environment, people are allowed to solve problems with no permissions and we are OK with people making mistakes.

EVERY PERSONS CONTRIBUTION IS VITAL FOR THE SUCCESS OF THE MISSION