What to do when life breaks you

I remember I was like this feels so awful it feels so hard I feel like I'm carrying the weight of everybody on my back and it's going to be okay here's what I would tell my younger self when it feels like everything is falling apart there are going to be more times than not when you are new to business or even just new to where you're at in business you're at a new level where it feels impossible to achieve what's next that is completely normal and the reason that things feel impossible is because we've never

done them before so we have no evidence to support that they are possible the thing that I remind myself of in those moments is I'm like right now in this moment when I want to quit when I feel awful when I feel like everything is not going my way when I feel like fires are popping up left and right and when I feel like my goal is this like farfetched reality that I feel like is a joke to even believe today I remind myself today is the day that I can create the evidence for my

future self so that my future self believes it's possible so if you look at every day as like today is a chance for me to create evidence for myself to make it more possible tomorrow we're able to conjure up the courage to keep going because we just know if I can get through today it gives me more evidence so that tomorrow it doesn't feel quite as impossible the first time in my life when something felt truly impossible was when I weighed about 220 lb and I was like I need to lose weight and the thought

of losing 100 lb felt so frightening and so difficult it just felt like such a tall task to take on I anchored myself in even if my brain is telling me that it's impossible to do this I just need to take action like somebody who believes it is if I eat food like somebody who's losing weight if I exercise like somebody who's losing weight if I have a lifestyle like somebody who's losing weight I will lose weight it's the laws of physics I cannot argue with that I remember starting and being so terrified to step

on the scale because I felt like I've been in this cycle for so long where I wanted to change but I felt like I didn't had a change I never put my best foot forward because I was scared I was scared like what if it doesn't work for me what if I didn't lose weight what if it's been a week and nothing has changed what if my Situation's so bad that I'm the one that it doesn't work for through my whole journey of losing weight it was almost like my eyes could not catch up to

reality I remember IID lost 35 lbs and I would look in the mirror and it was hard for my brain to realize that that was even me because when I walked around I still felt like I was a 220 lbs and some people may not believe today that I walk around and still feel like I'm over way it's almost like because I lived my life that way for so long my brain has more memory of me being that way than not that was the first time that I can recall being in a moment where it

felt truly impossible it felt like it was such a tall task and I didn't have any evidence to support that I was going to be able to do it but it worked despite all that it wasn't even you know a lot of people talk about confidence but I think it is it's evidence evidence for me that I can think really doubtful thoughts I can feel really negative feelings and I can still accomplish my goals that translated over to me in the first time I started a business cuz the first time I started business it was

the second most terrifying think I think i' ever done because I'd never run a business before I'd never managed people before I'd never managed money before I'm taking steps forward but I don't know if they're in the right direction I remember people would say like wow amazing you started a business this is so great and I just felt like I was just feeling around in the dark consistently and I don't know who to trust because I don't have the proper skill to judge who I should trust as to what I should do now when I

look back on those times I feel nothing but wishing I could go back to them because those were the times that gave me so much strength because when we're going through the times where we feel like there's no end in sight and it feels impossible what we don't realize is like that is what's going to set us up for future success being able to develop the character trait of Persistence of patience of I would say tolerance of negative feelings those are are all incredibly useful skills when it comes to achieving any goal we always set

these goals that we want for ourselves but then we forget that there's this moment after we've set the goal and right right after we're feeling good we're feeling like everything's amazing and then we step into reality and then we realize like I don't have half the skills required to meet this goal and you know what it feels like to acquire skills shitty because what you realize is that you have deficits and you feel those deficits because you're doing things that you suck at and then when you're constantly doing things on a daily daily basis that

you suck at you're in an environment where the decisions that you've made because you have the skill to make them are constantly reminding you of your deficits it feels very punishing and that's why most people stop because they can't handle how it feels you can let those same things drive you into the ground or drive you to success and the only difference is your actions it's not that we're going to feel any different it's not that the people that keep going feel better than the people who quit in fact they feel worse because they keep

going despite it feeling shitty I've just now seen and had my life play out enough times that I've realized that feeling shitty is the price you pay for Success the only way to get to the highlights of your life are to go through the low lights I still vividly remember 8 years ago when Alex and I were sleeping out of motels where we had less than $1,000 in our bank account where Alex's partner stole all the money from the bank account that we did have everything was falling apart we had family members in the hospital

we had people with alcohol problems we had our business burning to pieces and we had no money and honestly no help or friends I remember at that point in time a Perpetual feeling of stress waking up every 45 minutes with nightmares about your business and about having no money about the situation you're in about the risks you're taking you know it's it's this constant feeling of unease and there is literally no relief and I think for the first 2 years that we were starting the business I felt like that that consistently I felt ashamed you

know I wasn't taking care of myself like I stopped working out as much I was drinking more looking at our situation looking at even just like what I had stepped away from I had personal training I had clients I had like a nice apartment I lived in and now we're living out of Extended Stays and motels and I'm thinking like I don't even know if we can keep doing this at times you know it just felt very dark and very lonely I'm embarrassed I remember so many nights I would just go and take a shower

just to cry I think a lot of people go through that when they're starting a business when they're making a change when they have some really hard they're going on in their lives but we don't want to talk about it you know nobody wants to talk about pretending to take a shower so you can cry but that's the real that we go through it's not like I don't experience those emotions still what it taught me to get through those 2 years and not give up is that if you don't give up you can find success

if you keep going through all of those emotions you can have the same success as anybody else it also taught me that people who find success are more willing to feel those emotions than those who aren't because I really think that the only reason people tap out is because they say it's not the situation it's their emotions that are Arisen from that situation here's the thing in the times in my life when I have exited a situation because of emotions the emotions find their way back and they will pop up in a different situation unless

you want to spend your whole life running and downsizing your goals so that you can avoid those emotions you have to just go through it and just accept that it's going to feel awful and hard but you're not going to die and that's what I would tell myself I remember I was like this feels so awful it feels so hard I'm so exhausted I'm so tired I feel like I'm carrying the weight of everybody on my back and it's going to be okay you know sorry I'm tired today okay you think a lot of people

struggle with like just juggling like more things than you have hands for you know is that is that part of it is like just the breath of all the things you to worry about it is and it's funny cuz like I think I'm crying because I I feel it right now I'm talking about the past but it doesn't go away it never goes away you gained the tools to deal with it in a better way you figure out how to manage this figure out how to prioritize learn what's important what's not important what to say

no to what to what to say you know what we can do it later because when you're first starting everything's feels urgent because it's new you don't you don't understand what a priority is because you just don't know and then eventually you learn how to prioritize you learn how to say no until you just go through it one time you can't can't gain the skill you just don't learn until you fail it sucks because the failure is what feels so awful and it feels embarrassing cuz you feel like there's people around me that love me

that are watching or people that work for me or my friends who I I quit my job and I told them about it but at the end of the day better to fail and try again than to just have never gotten in the arena you know what I mean cuz most people just never step in everything in life is now romanticized everything's got filters most people compare their business their life their significant other to whatever is on Instagram what I see now is that so many people are going through hard times because they're comparing themselves

to this romanticized version of business or relationship or life that somebody else just puts up on social media so they think there's something wrong with their situation they're like I can't keep going cuz it's clearly so up no it's just that everyone else hides and lies there's nothing wrong with what you're doing it's just that everyone else is lying which is just the truth we look at hundreds of businesses every week and people are like oh there's so many business in America and it's not okay well let me show you how many actually make money

not a lot you know let me show you how many actually feel like they're not on fire all the time not a lot I just think more people now and it makes it harder for people who are just getting started cuz it makes it feel like you're doing something wrong and you're not doing anything wrong you're doing it right if it feels hard and it feels like you want to quit you're probably on the right path when times feel really hard and things feel impossible what makes it even harder is when you feel ashamed of

that I tend to be the type of person who doesn't want to talk about it and wants to hide it even with Alex you know we're business partners and we're married and we're going through stuff I wouldn't tell him how much I was struggling with something I stole the opportunity for him to support me in a way that he really could and I remember it was a few years ago when I was just going through a really hard time it got to the point where it was like I couldn't hide it from him it was

just like I was so not myself and he clearly saw that and finally when I opened up to him I just remember he had skills to help me in an area where I was deficient and what it did too is it opened up a dialogue about things that he'd had to deal with that I had no idea about and I was like holy like all this stuff that I've been struggling with and because I don't share it I never find out that somebody else has gone through it and already learned their way out of it

and I can just Leap Frog my way by hearing what they did and sometimes that person is your spouse you know sometimes it's somebody on your team somebody sometimes it's a friend it's a family member there's a difference between you know venting and emotionally dumping on people and then sharing hey I just want to let you know this is what's going on with me if it seems like I'm a little off this is why and then I always like to say like no action needed it's just an FYI and I know for myself when I

try to hide it from people around me it just makes it much worse how can anybody help you if they don't know what's going on how can anybody support you if they don't know that you would like support and how can you give anybody else opportunity around you you know if you have a business for example like step up if they don't know that there's a gap if you just share what you're experiencing there's often so many more people that can help you than you thought in my past I would feel resentful that I would

have to solve a problem that I didn't cause I think what a lot of people do and what I probably did when I was younger is try and make the other person solve it try and make somebody feel bad and hopefully make them feel bad enough that they would solve the problem that they caused but when you do that you miss the opportunity to gain the skills to solve the problem yourself and the confidence that comes to solving the problem when I was dealing with a lot of the stuff from my mother and having uh

a lot of Anger from my childhood and what I had dealt with there and I realized all of these things that I felt resentful of her for and that I was hoping that one day she would come fixed like she would clean her up and then she would just be a functioning mother again and then I wouldn't have to deal with these problems that were left when I finally realized that that was just never going to happen I was like so what are you going to do I think until was in a situation where I

realized the person who has caused this problem is no longer here so what does that leave me do I just live with this problem forever do I just deal with it do I just allow it to exist or do I take ownership over this situation and say this is my life I'm an adult and I can figure out how to solve this problem on my own whether I like that or not it's either that or you live at somebody else's will and I wasn't willing to do that and so though maybe I'm not the one

who caused the problem it's now my problem and I have an opportunity to solve it there's so many times in life where it's like we can blame our boss our friends our ex-boyfriend our family our aunt or sister's boyfriend it just doesn't matter it doesn't matter who caused the problem it's now yours so if you are able to be a problem solver I think there's so much opportunity for growth when I realized that I was like all the hairy shitty leftover problems that nobody wants to solve I'll take them I will take them because because

that gives me more opportunity to grow than anybody else I realized at an early age that a lot of I guess you could call it acting out on our emotions is to get something from somebody else that we don't have the skill to articulate or ask for when I was going through a really hard time and I told people about it it wasn't even necessarily because I wanted help but I wanted them to console me I wanted them to give me some sort of attention because maybe I felt lonely in going through whatever I was

going through and when I realized that about myself I was like I don't want to do any behaviors that are attention-seeking okay then I need to develop the skill of asking for what I need of articulating my preferences of asking for help when I want it and for letting people around me that are close to me know the things that I'm I'm wanting and once I realize that I think now it's brought a level of awareness to seeing it at others and I see people in situations where they're having a really hard time and they

are keeping themselves stuck because they're seeking attention through acting out on their emotions and then they are surrounded by people who indulge them in those emotions and they feed into it and they almost make it worse by saying you're right them they're all awful this is so terrible I'm so sorry and I think people confuse empathy with enabling you can be empathetic for somebody and also remind them that they can get back up on their two feet and I would say that that is much more helpful than somebody emotionally vomiting on you day after day

after day because they're upset about something it's not a fact that because you feel a certain way you can't do something you just really don't want to and you allow those emotions to be the reason I would say that in those situations what you want to do is ahead of time walk through what you were going to do when the situation occurs okay when I'm in a situation where I feel like I can't keep going and my boyfriend says something to me and all I want to do is flip out like a crazy on him

what am I going to do in that moment and you have to remind yourself am I going to leave the house for 10 minutes am I going to go on a walk am I going to put myself literally in a timeout in my room what am I going to do to remove myself from the situation long enough for my emotions to dissipate so that I can act rationally if I know that I'm not going to be good for Alex I just tell him I'm leaving and I have in the past I've gotten 10 times better

but I never want to put my emotions on him and so I will just exit myself maybe it seems rude to leave for a moment but I think what's worse is to just take somebody out all your anger out on somebody like they're your punching bag and that's what a lot of people do and I think that's why a lot of people people get divorced break up friendships end because you end up treating the people that are closest to you like your personal punching bag we've reinforced in society this behavior of when someone feels something

bad we should feel bad for them and treat them differently and I actually think that that keeps more people stuck because it treats them like a victim of their thoughts and feelings and you're not a victim of your thoughts and feelings but unfortunately a lot of people are surrounded by family and friends and co-workers who care about them but they enable this cycle by continuing to reinforce it every time they cry they console them they give them attention now you teach the person that in order to get attention they have to cry I think that

a lot of people stay in that space because they're getting something from it that they don't even realize this behavior of you know feelings and thoughts are valid all these things right okay valid versus useful to indulge in are different things something can be valid meaning we can say oh that exists but we can also say just because it exists doesn't mean it's a fact even in the sentence like what we're talking about this video I feel like I can't keep going well you are so the feeling's wrong you are continuing to keep going you

don't feel like you can keep going which really just means the language isn't correct you really would prefer not to keep going but you are feelings exist but how useful are they there's many times my feelings have led me in the wrong wrong direction I don't find them to be reliable sources of information most people work themselves up with the language they use about the difficulty they're going through so when you look at even just how people Express it's a lot of misuse of language I would say which is like I'm really anxious about the

speech I have are you anxious or is it I really care about the speech I have and I really want to do a good job because I really care if I deliver value to this audience and I think a lot of people trade the word care for anxiety because it's probably more popular right now but in reality I think there's a lot of situations where you just care a lot it can get to the point sometimes where I would say that mismanaged care can become anxiety if you don't manage your thoughts around the things you

care about then it might turn into maladaptive behaviors and then that creates an anxious Loop but I think it comes from a great place I think that in order to do great things you want to care deeply if I wanted to not be successful what would I do I'd be like cool be lazy and don't give a about anything so if you want to be successful part of that is I would say it's like the curse of care I care deeply about my team the partners we have the people that watch me on social media

like to a degree where like those things all can very much agitate me if not going well right and I could say that it gives me anxiety it gives me this but I I remind myself I care and I would rather care any day over not giving a about something I've had people be like you know tell me how you really feel like don't downplay it and I'm like if you knew how powerful language was you would know why I'm not up playing it because it makes it feel worse there are so many ties into

different parts of the brains with the words that we use that you might feel completely calm but then if somebody asks you to say the word with an elevated tone five times in a row you might notice your heart rate elevates not because there was anything happening but because eventually language can cause the reaction in your body and so a lot of people say I'm so anxious I'm heartbroken I'm disgusted I feel like I'm going to going to die I could be like I'm so anxious there's so much going on I'm so overwhelmed or I

could say you know what we have a lot of new things that we're trying right now and it's really important to me that they go well and I know that I have the capability for them to go well I'm probably overthinking some of that and so that's resulting in feeling a little bit more stressed than normal and you know and this isn't a forever thing it's going to end eventually it's a season and I'll get through it and I don't think there's anything I need to do but I care a lot about making sure these

things go well and so sometimes I get elevated stress it's like even just comparing those two things one the second one is reality you know we feel things within the context of a situation it's not like we are always feeling this way about these things most people being precise with our language will help us sooth ourselves much more than working ourselves up with our language if you want to achieve anything you have to accept that you're going to care about those things most people who don't succeed it's because to some level they don't care probably

because there's not high enough Stakes I would just remind people that if you feel like you can't keep going I want you to look at what you're actually doing and if you are going and you haven't stopped it's just not true you can keep going