Do you ever let the fear of failure hold you back? It could take the form of worrying what other people might think if you don’t succeed, not wanting to look stupid by going for something out of your league, or wasting precious time by putting so much effort into something that didn’t come to fruition. If so, here’s a new way to think about it.

What if every time you were rejected it was actually protecting you from something? 

Just consider the possibility - I know it’s not easy to do in the moment but imagine how empowered and resilient you’d feel if you could, as Winston Churchill puts it, “move from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”

That would mean that every time you got rejected you would be grateful for the way that your path is being reserved for the people and things that are in complete alignment with your mission.

The reason this all came to mind is it was the central theme of a podcast conversation between Ed Mylett and Jamie Kern Lima. In particular, Jamie had a brilliant elaboration on what this protection actually means. She said that sometimes the value you have to offer is hidden to others because it doesn’t serve you for them to see it. 

The people who reject you because they don’t believe in you, they don’t see the vision, they don’t want to work with you - It’s just a matter of them not having the awareness to know what you have to offer. And while it might feel insulting or like a missed opportunity in the moment, ultimately it’s protecting you from something you can’t see yet.

In order to get consistent with this new way of thinking, so that it becomes a genuine belief and thought you have in the face of rejection, you’ll need to do some work. 

The best way I’ve learned how to cultivate a new mindset like this is to intentionally and consistently induce the thought process. Tactically, this means that if you reflect every night on the moments in the day when you were rejected, and specifically assign the meaning you want to take from the experience, you can teach your mind how you relate with those kinds of experiences moving forward.

At the end of the day, if you manage to change the way you think about rejection so that you cultivate more resilience through it, you will be empowered to take action in remarkable ways with full faith that the right things are happening for the right reasons.

To circle back on this podcast episode I listened to - Ed Mylett’s show is one of my go-tos and this conversation in particular with Jamie Kern Lima was really good. They’ve got a cool special announcement in it too, give the episode a listen by clicking here!

We talk a lot about being less judgmental of others - putting our biases and assumptions aside to appreciate the uniqueness of other people who are different from you. Ultimately, that judgment suggests beliefs that you have about the world and how you view your role in it.

But something that is lesser talked about, but equally important, is the judgment we place on ourselves. We are our own toughest critic and oftentimes most difficult person to satisfy. I believe the reason for this is because we have full access to our own thoughts, seeing the shortcomings and missed opportunities that no one else does, knowing that we could have done so much better. This is in comparison to other people where we don’t have the same access to those thoughts and therefore must draw conclusions from everything that happens externally.

To paint the difference here, let’s use an example.

Let’s say you and a friend got the exact same score on a test, a solid 85%. You might relate with your own score unfavorably knowing that you spent some time procrastinating here and losing focus there, and deprioritizing your studying more than you intended to over the weekend. You see those as all of the reasons why you didn’t score better so you might be disappointed with the end result.

However when you evaluate your friend’s performance, you see it more objectively because you don’t have the same context. 85% is a solid B, which represents that they’re upholding their responsibilities in the class as a solid student. It’s very possible that they procrastinated, they were distracted, they didn’t study over the weekend even more than you did. But you don’t know or see any of that, so you’re not biased by their potential upside and give them fair credit for their result.

This is human nature and unfortunate at times because it can make us question ourselves and negatively impact our self-confidence. So how can we stop being our toughest critic and be more fair to ourselves rather than judgmental?

The first thing to do is to interrupt the unconscious script. When you notice yourself having harsh language in your thoughts, that’s your own limitations projecting itself on you. When you do hear that voice come out, try giving it a name - It helps to separate you from it and observe it better. That’s just “Critical Kerry” or “Judgmental James”.

Once you’ve done that, you can try planting a more empowering thought that’s representative of who you want to be. Acknowledge and celebrate your own self-awareness of your thoughts. Give yourself a reflective prompt that shapes a more positive response to the challenge or judgment you’re facing.

When you allow into your consciousness the way you ideally want to relate with the situation, you immediately create your better, more aligned reality.

Alright I know this is super cliche but please don’t let that keep you from embracing the concept within it.

I hope you can take a moment to appreciate the miracle that is happening. It all started by you winning the lottery when two cells, one from a woman and one from a man to create you. That cell then went on to exponentially multiply in the most intricate of ways to create a functioning body.

This body has more cells than galaxies in the universe and veins that have grown so long that they can wrap around the planet. This is all inside you. Then beyond that, this same process happened to every human you’ve ever encountered, who for whatever reason in space and time crossed your path in big and small ways.

We don’t recognize this miracle that is life because there’s so much hardship and suffering in it. Sometimes we don’t get what we want, things happen that are unfair, or we sad that our spark is slowly fading away. But what if we recognized this incredible opportunity that we have and made the most of it?

“Life is precious, don’t waste it.”

What does wasting life even mean? I can only speak for myself, but I see it as failing to apply yourself to the things that you care about, not allowing yourself to chase what you want and who you want to be, regretting that you didn’t make the impact that you know you’re capable of.

It’s having wings but never having the courage to fly.

But the wonderful thing about life is it takes a life-time to live it. And understand that just because you feel like you haven’t made the most of it yet does not mean that you aren’t on the path to.

Take Damon West for example.

Damon was a college athlete turned meth addict and criminal. He received a life-sentence for it and went to maximum security prison. His life was over and by all accounts it appeared as though he wasted his potential. But in prison he chose to transform his life, learn from his mistakes, commit himself to being of service to others, and by some miracle he was let our on probation after just over 7 years in prison. Now he’s speaking on stages across the world, supporting other addicts with their recovery, and making a real profound difference.

He’s taken this quote to heart and is living out his life’s purpose, which he arrived at in the most unpredictable of ways - “Life is precious, don’t waste it.”

Now what does this all mean for you? Well of course it’s what you make of it.

You can choose to see life through the lens of all the things you have to complain about, or you can choose to see that everything is available to you and you’re the creator of what happens next. Of course we all want to choose the latter, and it’s easier said than done, but knowing the miracles that have already happened around you to get where you are should give you reason to believe that many more are on the way!

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Last week I went through a guided meditation session that inspired a really interesting awareness of myself that I thought might apply to you.

In the mediation I was instructed to visualize myself crossing a golden bridge, where on the other side of the bridge were two paths. In my mind’s eye I visualized them - The first one was straight in front of me, flat, wide, well kept, and you could see a good distance in front of you. The second one took a sharp turn to the right and appeared to be more rugged, less maintained, and you had little vision beyond the turn.

In my visualization I without a second thought took the safe, popular path right in front of me and started walking down it. I don’t know if there was a prompt in the meditation or if it came from my own internal dialogue, but I gave myself a pause to consider what happened. I didn’t make a conscious decision about which path I wanted to take, I just moved forward with the path outlined in front of me.

In my meditation I chose to reroute myself, walk back to the fork in the road, and instead go down the sharp turning path. Immediately it descended intensely down the canyon that the bridge just crossed. I reached the bottom in an instant and saw a steep, treacherous incline in front of me. I started to regret my decision then almost magically I bounded up the face of this cliff in a supernatural way I’d never experienced before.

Of course this is all imaginary so I can only interpret the significance of all of it, but I think there are some interesting insights.

First is we all that path that is laid out in front of us. It’s easy, safe, and expected. It’s taking the job that seemed to fall into your lap, staying in your hometown, and otherwise conforming to the expectations of others. Now there’s nothing wrong with this kind of life, there’s a lot of richness in simplicity, but is this something you chose?

In this visualization I realized that I’m more susceptible to taking the easy path than I’d like to be, and would prefer to be more curious and exploratory of my options to make a decision. I want to choose my path forward rather than just inherit what seems to be in front of me. Also I came to understand that the riskier path very well may lead to the bottom, and make things harder than they need to be. But you never know what the environment might inspire within you, like a superpower you didn’t know you had, to help you elevate to heights you didn’t believe you were capable of.

Again, there’s no judgment about what path you take. If you know that you enjoy the ease and simplicity of a traditional life, you’ll achieve that by pursuing the traditional path. But if you want to do something novel, ambitious, pioneering, and boundary stretching, you’ll need to take a different path.

It’s experiences like this that make me really excited about my personal development journey. In becoming more aware of my beliefs and unconscious patterns, I can find new ways to create the new and improved life of my choosing. Hopefully this inspires you to chase the same too.

I don’t mean to assume but I’m guessing that the reason you’re reading this is because you want to positively change your life. You know that you need to become something different in order to have something different, with that something different being more joy, purpose, impact, fulfillment, peace, bliss, or whatever it is for you.

But doing the right things to evolve into the next best version of ourselves is a daunting task.

Where do you start, what do you focus on, and how do you know it’s going to work?

There’s no one right answer to that, but I do want to offer a perspective that might be different than anything you’ve ever heard before that could give you a new thing to try.

Fundamentally we want to change ourselves. With improved mindsets, emotional intelligence, physical fitness, habits, and routines we become capable of more than we were before. We want to make improvements to how we operate at our core. People call this your identity.

So how do you change your identity? Aristotle says that “We are what we repeatedly do.” This suggests that what we do, our behavior, is the vehicle for transforming who we are in our identity.

The truth of this philosophy is confirmed through the validity of expressions like “consistency is key” and “the compound effect” and “take imperfect action”. They all make the same argument to emphasize how critical our behavior is in our personal development.

Now let’s take it one step further, and this is the step most people miss. What is required to take consistent action? You might think it’s will-power or motivation. Those are both unsustainable sources that might work in the short-term but won’t last in the long run. The most enduring, effective, unrelenting influence to your behavior is your environment.

Surround yourself with people who are fit and you’ll find yourself working out more and getting in better shape. Immerse yourself in the wisdom of successful business people and you’ll learn the right actions to take to make your business succeed yourself. Use accountability and commitments to encourage you to make better choices that lead to healthy and productive actions.

If you want to change your life, change your environment and everything else will flow from there.

This is the change yourself chain: New environments lead to new actions lead to new identities.

So change up the layout of your office, work at a new coffee shop, boldly share an ambitious goal that you have to make you feel more accountable to pursuing it,  or make a pact with a friend. Try doing things that change the physical, emotional, and social environment around you, and see how it goes.

You could probably attest to the fact that people are busier than ever. In fact you may even feel that way about yourself.

As you know, being so time-restricted can have some unfortunate consequences - Important things are neglected or deprioritized and daily expectations aren’t sustainable, basically acting as a ticking time-bomb that will inevitably go off and create fallouts within your physical health, relationships, and sanity.

If any of this sounds like you, the good news is you can still do something about it. Except for in extremely dire circumstances, nothing in life is permanent. There are always new balances to strike and new ways to design your life inputs so that it creates new outputs.

The first, most fundamental shift you can make to achieve more work-life balance is to establish your order of priorities. So many of us allow everyone else to determine the way we spend our time, causing us to be more reactive to the things around us rather than proactive about how we want them to be.

More specifically, the shift is to schedule your personal life before your work. The way you spend your time is a reflection of your priorities, so if you feel like you’re neglecting important things, it means that you need to reevaluate the way you structure your time.

If you feel resistant to this idea, isn’t it worth a try? Just try blocking off portions of your calendar and enforce it. You’ll find that this causes everything to shift to accommodate the new intention, and by necessity you’ll start to create efficiencies and stronger criteria around what actually deserves your time so that you can make it all work.

To put it another way - You are a person with a career, not a career with a personal life. Start getting the order right and you’ll find that not only that this is best for you, but it’s also best for your career. Subconscious transformation expert Jim Fortin has a quote that goes “the doing is only as good as the being doing the doing”. 

If you feel like you only have 50% of yourself to give because you’re burning the candle at both ends, then maybe it’s time to start adding more quality to your life. This will change everything from the inside out!