By the Ocean
Partly Cloudy 77 Degrees
5:44 a.m.
One of the lasting afflictions I have from spending so much of my early life in the world of professional classical music is that I developed a habit of never feeling like I was quite good enough.
When you’re trained to bristle at even the slightest mistake, it’s easy to lose focus and have your life become about not losing instead of winning.
That’s how I can be living in paradise, with a family of 10 kids, with a wife I love and work that makes me feel alive, work that rewards me richly, and still somehow feel like I’m “failing” in so many ways.
This is not the truth, this is just an energetic HABIT.
The truth is different. By pretty much all accounts, I’M AWESOME.
And so are you.
YOU ARE AWESOME. You are meant to be awesome. You can always be more awesome. This is what you’re here to do.
If “I’m awesome” feels weird for you to say out loud, that’s not because it’s a lie, it’s because you’ve been programmed that’s “not OK.”
This is not a pep talk we’re having here, this is simply a recalibration with reality we’re working through.
List everything you’ve done. List all of the qualities others find valuable. List all of the ways you add value to the lives of others. List all of the skills you’ve developed and the insights you carry. For most people, this ends up being quite a long list of awesome.
And yet somehow, the general feeling tends to be something in the neighborhood of STRUGGLE or FAILURE, or “I should be doing better.”
Feeling that doesn’t change the truth. The truth is you are awesome.
Understanding this and feeling this are two different things though. The understanding part doesn’t always lead to the feeling part, they seem to work independently of one another.
It’s the feeling that’s important. Because the FEELING is what controls the vibe you send to the world.
Part of the work is to maintain this feeling. Not because you’re a liar or choose to ignore reality, but because you choose to accurately reflect it, despite what your conditioning might have you feeling at any one moment.
Business is a steady stream of experiencing things that DON’T WORK.
That has nothing to do with you. That is simply part of the journey.
The power is in how you feel about that, the story you tell yourself about what that means and the response you have to that story and the actions you take because of it.
You are the storyteller. That’s where the power is. You can tell yourself a true story or you can allow your conditioning to contaminate it to create the feeling required to keep you small.
No one would logically CHOOSE the “bad” story, and yet it’s our habit to do that pretty darn often.
Why?
What happens if we break that habit? Imagine what could change after that!