Discouragement: Separated From Courage

As someone who is deeply invested in my self-improvement, I often felt discouraged along the way. I’d get frustrated that the hours of work, dedication, and doing my very best didn’t yield the results I expected. I was doing all of the right things, everything the world’s smartest and most successful people were saying I was supposed to do, and felt entitled to achieving the outcomes promised to come with them.

Looking back at it I have the awareness to know that wasn’t the case… I was only implementing the level of awareness I had at the time, which was limited, but nonetheless the felt experience was real. And I want to diagnose exactly what that was like and the extra implications of it I didn’t even realize.

Let’s look at the etymology of ‘discourage’:

‘Dis’ is a prefix that means apart from, or opposite of. It presents a major contrast against the root word.

‘Courage’, derived from the Latin word ‘cor’ meaning ‘heart’.

So when we’re ‘discouraged’ it means we’re ‘separated from doing things with heart.’

And that’s how I felt. I didn’t have the courage to play big because I was in an energetic space that was forcing me to think small. I wasn’t shooting my shot because I was remembering all of the times I missed instead of the times I hit. 

Your heart is the essence of you and your future. As long as it’s beating, you’ve got another shot. So removing yourself from your heart means that you don’t have hope for the future, and your feelings around it attract more of the same.

What worked for me is the old cliche - treating failure as feedback. Instead of judging myself for the times I fell short, I started to curiously explore what happened. I started treating things like an experiment and became less attached to the result and more interested in the process around it.

Everything operates on the law of cause and effect. This is useful because the more insight we have into how cause connects to effect, the more we can control our inputs to shape better outputs.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is all easier said than done, and it’s a slow transition out. But what helped me make that shift was: 

1) Having a coach who could remind me of the intention to be curious about my performance

2) Setting time aside to reflect less emotionally on the factors influencing my results

This helped me cultivate a Growth Mindset, and made me believe that things can get better when you work on them, which gave me hope for my future.

Now, I’m extremely enthusiastic and optimistic about what the future holds!

By the way, if you’ve been feeling discouraged, frustrated, stuck or like you’re not operating at your fullest potential lately, click here and I’ll show you my process for overcoming exactly that!

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