Sick of Failing in Life
Sick of Failing in Life: 3 Tips to Start Fresh Today
Introduction.
When I first started thinking about this topic, I remembered the old thing about how ‘live’ spelled backwards is ‘evil’. Well, my opinion is that what’s evil is to waste a life by not living it. I’ve been saying for years that when I die my tombstone will say that I lived loving and I died living.
It seems like not a day goes by that I don’t come across people – clients, bank tellers, even just people in line at the grocery store – who feel like failures, like they just don’t have what it takes to be successful in life. That they’re stuck or trapped. That somehow they had been just dealt a bad hand. That success or happiness or joy was for the other guy. I keep hearing these people feel like just ‘getting by’ is as good as it gets, and that they can’t get any further in life than they’ve already gotten.
So today I’m going to give you three tips to start fresh today, and to be done with a life that you are just simply sick of failing at.
The first problem is how people see life itself. So let’s start with that. Let’s start with the word life.
LIFE
L – Living somebody else’s life
I – Inferiority
F – Fearful
E – Empty
Living somebody else’s life:
This starts at a very young age, because that’s when people start to shape and mold us. We are shaped by religion, by gender, by stature, even by birth order. The first child is treated very differently than the last child, whether there is two children or twelve children. You have to look at all of these things and realize that you came in like a piece of clay, and that the way you were shaped may not necessarily be the correct shape for you. You will never really live a fully happy, empowered, engaged life if you’re trying to live the life of who you are supposed to be instead of who you are.
Now sometimes those can be the same thing, but more often than not they are different. Sometimes big differences, sometimes little differences, but at the end of the day they are still differences. And as you discard more and more of what you were shaped or molded to be and take on more and more who you actually are and who you are here to be, you are stepping forward to living a life that is yours. A life you can be happy and successful in because it is yours. You can’t help but fail, automatically, guaranteed, at a life that was never really your own.
Inferiority:
There will always be people, someone, who does something better than you. There will also always be people that don’t do it as well as you, and people that do it pretty much on par with you. But there will never be anyone who does it exactly like you do – if you are being you.
Because of the competitive nature of our world, we have a habit of comparing ourselves with others, which makes many people feel like they are not good enough. Like they are somehow inferior. That inferiority leads to another ‘I’ – it makes them insecure. They doubt themselves. They are less willing to take risks, to stand out in a crowd. They would rather blend in, because then they’re not taking the risk to be judged, to be found lacking, to fail.
So on one hand, we are encouraged to go out and do our best and try, but on the other hand we receive a lot of subtle messaging as well that holds us back. Our society is too attached to uniformity, we are expected to conform to be accepted, to be part of the pack, unless we are so so good and brilliant at something that we can break out and be a leader, become a hero, be put on a pedestal. And that leads to its own problems, because that thing we are lauded for – whatever it is – is only one aspect of us, one part of us. But too often, people become defined by that thing they became great at, and they lose their sense of self. Somewhere along the way, they become a caricature of who they are, struggling and hiding that fear of failure. Scared that they’re going to let people down or make a fool of themselves if they try to go out there and truly live, become more, become all that they’re here to be.
Fearful:
Now fear has a purpose. There are some things we should be afraid of. There are some things that we’re automatically afraid of for our own very survival. On the most simplest physical level, we’re afraid if somebody points a gun at us or if we’re suddenly face-to-face with a bear. We go into a fight-or-flight mentality. Sometimes we’re afraid we’re going to lose somebody we love, or that our security, our comfort, is going to be taken away from us. We feel powerless, out of control.
Fear in-and-of itself is a survival mechanism. However, having fear at appropriate times and living a fearful life are two different things. And in this day and age, we often spend so much time in a fight-or-fight mentality that we finally end up shut down, depressed, and apathetic.
Why has this happened? Well, because fear can be instilled through thought processes. We are taught to be afraid of things we don’t understand. We often will take that fear out into hate or anger, prejudice, bigotry, being abusive, even being self abusive. We’re not truly living if we are in a fearful life. We are just surviving.
So one of the things that gets in our way, that sets us up to fail, is living a fearful life. Because the true meaning of life is to have experiences. To go out, to grow, to expand, to become more of who we are. So you don’t want to live a fearful life. You want to start to determine what fear is appropriate and what fear is just pre-programmed. What fear is just ignorance. If your fear is coming from a place of ignorance, then become educated. If your fear is something that was handed down to you, hand it back. If you want to live a full life, a true life that is well lived and fully lived, it takes courage and it takes risks and it takes an evolving set of new experiences.
Empty:
The thing is, our life is meant to be full. Full of love, full of adventure, full of experiences, full of growth. And many people walk around and their life is pretty empty in a lot of ways. Even if they are working a good job, have a good relationship, have a nice family, those things have become somewhat stagnant. They are in survival mode, just trying to get by.
As you go through life, you want to always be constantly exposed to new things, trying and doing new things, helping those people around you that you care about, helping them live fuller lives, making sure that they’re being who they are here to be. And when you are out there actually living life, doing new things, giving back, finding ways into which to expand yourself as a person, you may say, “Oh, my plate is so full.” But look closely. Full of what? Is it full of minutiae? Is it full of meaning or full of things that you do just to occupy your time?
There are many ways to support an empty life. To make your life full of white noise, but no music. To become hypnotized into thinking you’re doing your best, instead of realizing that you really are not doing much at all, beyond exactly what you have to do to just survive.
At the beginning, I promised you three tips to start fresh today. We’re going to get to those and I’ve already alluded to some of the solutions. But before we do, we’re going to reframe the word ‘life’.
L – Live as you are
I – Integrity
F – Fearless
E – Exuberant
Let’s take a quick look at those solutions.
Live as you are:
It may sound simple, but it’s far from easy. How many of your belief systems can you actually explain? Can you even even justify to yourself? Are they things that you have thought through that make sense to you, or were they just given to you by others and you’ve never taken them off? There were many things we were given in our childhood that we may have outgrown and we don’t really realize it.
So, live as you. Don’t live as those around you want you to, live as you. Yes, we all have to make accommodations to a certain extent, but they should never stop you from living as you, from being in integrity.
Integrity:
If you are being in integrity, it means that you are not only talking your talk, but walking your walk. If you say that you pray at the altar of a loving God, are you loving? If your God told you not to judge, are you without judgment of other people? If you were brought up with the basic tenet that you should be kind, are you kind? If the beliefs and structures you were brought up with don’t fit you anymore, decide what does. What are your life values? What are your value statements that you live your life by? And are your actions in integrity with those values?
Fearless:
Next we move to fearless – which is less fear, not no fear. If there’s a rattlesnake in front of you, shaking its rattle, looking like it’s going to strike, you should have a little fear, enough to go into fight or flight, to think quickly, to move quickly, to have that adrenaline rush. But a fearless life is a life that is less full of fear – where you have fear in appropriate places, where it’s necessary, and the rest of the time you are living your life in E – exuberance.
Exuberant:
Now, there’s many words I could have chosen for E. Excitement, ecstasy, exuberance. But it’s about living life full out. Living excitedly, joyfully. Having a life that makes you excited to get out of bed in the morning. Yes, we all have our bad days. We all have those mornings that we want to turn off the alarm clock and put the pillows over our head. But it shouldn’t be the majority of the days. The majority of the days, you should be getting out and loving the life you’re living and being able to do it fully, exuberantly, ecstatically, with excitement and energy.
If you’re dragging through life like it’s torture, then it is torture. And who wants a tortured life? And you have to figure out why. What is it that you’re not, that’s not working for you, that you cannot be living a primarily excited life and make the change?
So there you go. You want to go from living the life somebody else wants you to live, being who somebody else wants you to be, to living as you. To going from feeling inferior, like you don’t measure up and you’ll never be good enough, to living in integrity to who you are and know that no one can be a better you than you. That you go from a fearful life to a fearless life, where fear is used as it was intended, to keep you alive – not to bully you, manipulate you, or control you. And to go from an empty, unenthused, unexcited life to a life that is exuberant, that is full of energy and full of excitement.
When I said I had 3 tips to start life fresh today, I didn’t say easy, and I didn’t say that they were going to happen overnight, but that you can start today and that make your life better for every day that you are choosing to implement them and do the work.
1: Discover who you are. If you strip it all away and you go back to that original clay came in as, and you shake off all of the misshapings, it gives you the ability to think and feel and make decisions and create the life that you want. Go through the process of discovering who you are. And if you can’t do it alone, find someone to help you, to mentor you. Someone who’s actually walked the path for themselves. I’ve had the great honor of being that someone for a number of people. Oftentimes, it is really painful at first, because we’re taking away things that may limit you, but are comforting, and replacing them with things that even though you know they are right, the change is scary. And it just takes consistency and courage and practice to make them happen.
2: Claim who you are. Be proud of it. That the day you were born, the world was given a gift which, when opened and delivered, would make the world a better place by your very existence. Stand in that knowing – that you are unique, special, and one-of-a-kind. And not only do you deserve to know who you are, and be who you are, but to really claim it, to own it, to be one with it.
3: Live life big. No matter how long a life you live, if you live it small it will seem endless, and if you live it big it will never seem like it was long enough. You want to go out there and live your life big. I remember, in my late-20’s, early-30’s, having a group of friends that would always tease me that I was a little bit larger than life, that I lived life as if I was on a stage. But for all of their commentary, they followed me around like puppy dogs. Because I was out there living, and I was living life big. And I didn’t let people get in my way. Then one day I realized, and I turned to my friends and I said “The problem isn’t that I’m a little larger than life, it’s that your life is small so I look big.”
Don’t have a small life. Live life big. Live life like it’s yours. It is your life. So know who you are, be that person, and live it for all it’s worth.
To help you go through these steps, I’ve developed some simple exercises that you can start implementing today, to put yourself on the right path. You can download and print the companion worksheet below to get you started.
Discover who you are, claim who you are, live your life big, and stop failing at a life that was never yours to begin with.
Namaste.
