Hello, my friends. Welcome to a very special week on the podcast. It's the What's Possible Special Series.
This is the first half of a book I wrote a few years ago, and it will include the 10 truths extraordinarily successful women know. I will offer two of these truths per day over the next five days. If you want coaching on these topics, make sure you join me for What's Possible Coach Week starting soon.
You can go to the lifecoachschool.com board slash possible to find out more. Five, extraordinarily successful women know that life is 50-50. Life is a combination of positive and negative.
Have you noticed? It's a balance of good and bad, happy and bored, positive and negative. We spend a good part of our lives trying to overcome this truth to no avail.
At some point, we were led to believe that we should be happy most of the time, and so we spend a lot of time feeling bad about not being more happy. When I teach my clients that they shouldn't be happy half of the time, and that in fact, that's not even the way life is meant to be, they often get upset with me. They want to change the ratios, make it so they can be happy at least 80% of the time, as if I'm making the rules and somehow cheating them out of their fair share of happy goodness.
But really, I'm just conveying the news. I'm letting them in on the truth of how the world works. We try to outrun this truth by fixing our lives, other people and the world.
But have you noticed that that doesn't work? We can't fix the world. Every time we make it better in one way, it gets worse in another way.
There is and always has been evil and bad and reasons to be upset. It hasn't ever changed, it's not going to. We like to believe in a time when we will make the world better than it is.
Or sometimes we talk about a world that was so much better than it is now. We are wrong on both accounts. It was 50-50 then, and it's 50-50 now.
The flavors are different, but the ratio is the same. The same is true for your emotional life. Your life is great half the time and not great the other half.
One half actually makes the other half possible. When people argue with me that they want a life that's more positive, I tell them that they can have that, but they just have to be willing to be positive about everything. They have to be willing to feel good even when quote unquote bad things happen.
When I point this out to them, they usually end up agreeing that they want to feel bad about bad things, and they want to be unhappy about unhappy things. This is a very important concept to grasp if you want to have extraordinary success. And before we even start on the journey, you have to understand that it will still be 50-50 when you get there.
You can't manipulate your life to get out of the truth of 50-50. There isn't enough money, success, famousness, stuff, or contribution that will change the truth of balance. The topics will change, but the balance and the ratio will always be the same.
This will confront you with the reason that you want to be successful. Because if the reason isn't so you can be happier or have a better life, then what is the reason to work so hard? If you aren't avoiding the negative side of life, then how can you justify the work it requires to be extraordinarily successful?
I thought a lot about this question and my answer has always been about growth and evolving. I see the purpose of my life to keep moving forward into a different and more evolved version of myself. So the balance stays 50-50, but the scenery and the problems change.
In fact, I think the intensity of both positive and negative increase with my capacity to be able to handle them both. This creates a life that is more engaging and exciting, for sure. It feels new and different instead of the same old, recycled positive and negative experiences, thoughts and feelings over and over.
Setting extraordinary goals and creating new possibilities for your life is going to bring up lots of negative emotion. You will feel levels of doubt, worry and frustration beyond what you've ever felt before. When you understand that these are emotions you are choosing on purpose in order to grow, and you will be required to experience discomfort 50% of the time anyway, it starts to become more and more worth it to pick bigger and scary goals.
You get skilled at processing the negative emotion that accompanies the climb to the best version of yourself. When the negative side of life appears, instead of stopping, quitting, hiding or rebelling, we can open our arms and welcome in the other half of life as something to experience on our way to greatness. We immediately move forward towards bigger possibilities.
We stop hiding from fear and worry and start finding things that bring up in ways that help us grow and contribute to the world we'd otherwise be hiding from. If you think about the worst possible emotion you could feel, and you learn that it is completely harmless and part of the experience of being human, your life begins to change. You will stop being afraid of emotions.
You will stop being afraid of being afraid. You will realize that discomfort is going to be there either way, so you might as well feel it as part of the journey somewhere, instead of feeling it when you're stagnant and in the same place. The fear of shame, humiliation, rejection, and inadequacy has cost more people more dreams than I can even count.
Notice it isn't even the emotions themselves that cause the immobilization, but the fear of those emotions. The anticipation of negative emotion is the most dangerous thing we can do for our lives as it applies to creating new possibilities. I unfortunately can't promise you that you won't feel negative emotions.
In fact, I can almost guarantee you that you will. But what I can promise you is that all of these emotions are harmless if you're willing to process them through. Emotions are simply vibrations in our body caused by our thinking.
They are small chemical reactions that create sensations through our chest, head, stomach, and extremities. They make our heart beat faster sometimes, make our chest feel heavy, or even make our face feel hot. When you really think about emotions, they aren't even that physically painful, more uncomfortable than anything.
When we resist them, they get stronger and more aggressive. But when we breathe into them and allow them, they simply vibrate. They get processed through our bodies, and then they pass.
They might come in waves and leave to return back and forth, but as long as we continue to allow them to be there, and not avoid or react to them, they don't need to change anything about our progress. 50% of the time, we will need to allow for negative emotion. We will need to allow for the likes of frustration, boredom, agitation, confusion, and even shame.
If we open our hearts and breath to these emotions instead of building our lives around avoiding them, we will create possibility beyond what we have known in fear. By exposing ourselves without emotional protection to our lives, we realize that we never needed it. We never needed protection from feeling hurtful emotions.
We can embrace them, feel them, and keep moving forward. We can't control that life is balanced between negative and positive, but we can often control which negative and which positive we choose. Yes, you can and will choose your negative emotion in order to achieve extraordinary success.
In fact, that is one of the best secrets and skills of success, choosing negative emotion that makes you stronger and more resilient, inviting in the negative emotion and using it to evolve as a human being. Let's take an old school example. Imagine you are a woman in a cave thousands of years ago.
You're lying naked on the ground, feeling safe and lonely. 50-50. Safe is the positive emotion, and lonely is the negative emotion.
At this point, you have a choice. You can venture out of the cave to find a tribe. In order to do that, you will need to give up the emotion of safe in exchange for the emotion of afraid.
You're still going to be experiencing negative emotion, but the idea is that it will be a means to an end instead of a more stagnant negative emotion. The same theory applies to your life. One of our privileges as human beings is our ability to choose our pain.
We can choose the pain of being over our weight or the pain of deprivation. We can choose the pain of growth or the pain of stagnation. Our free will lets us choose the 50 percent flavor that we move towards.
To create an extraordinary life filled with success, we need to learn to move toward the emotions of courage, fear, rejection, failure, and overwhelm. In exchange, we get to let go of the feelings of stagnation, purposelessness, boredom, scarcity, and inadequacy. A great way to decide what the 50 will be is to ask yourself what emotions will move you forward, evolve you, and make you stronger.
If you are going to experience the balance of emotion no matter what, you might as well choose feelings that move you towards extraordinary success. What this means is when you face an obstacle on your way to your goal, you will move toward that obstacle. Encourage the negative emotion that it evokes, use it to make yourself stronger, and learn, and then do the very next thing to overcome that obstacle.
All too often, I see my students quit at the first sign of an obstacle. They get negative emotion all stirred up and decide it's too unfamiliar and decide to go back to the negative emotion they're more used to. This is a huge mistake.
The decision has to be to open up and breathe in the new negative feeling as you can process it through and digest it. This will teach you that negative emotion is actually harmless. It can't do any permanent damage unless you try to avoid it, or resist it, or react to it.
The way through to success is emotion. The way through to extraordinary success is extraordinary emotion. You keep moving towards it and inviting it in and learning.
6. We know failure is the price of success. We spend 12 to 16 years in school, hearing that failing is a bad thing.
The very worst thing we can do in school is fail and get it wrong. Well, in order to have extraordinary success, we have to learn the exact opposite of that rule. We have to learn how to fail and how to do it well.
We have to try all the things that won't work in order to find all the things that do. Think about this hard. You were trained to do what you were told to do.
You were trained there was a right and a wrong answer. You were trained not to challenge the right way of doing things. And if you didn't do it right, you failed.
And that was a very bad thing. The more you fail in school, the less successful you are. The more you fail in life, the more successful you can be.
It's almost like school was out to get us to prevent us from creating new and exciting things in the world. There's a reason why some of the greatest inventors and creators of our time did not do well in a structured school system. If you want to have extraordinary success, you're going to have to risk being a failure.
You're going to have to be willing to feel every single negative emotion that is available to us as human beings. If you can embrace the emotions of humiliation, confusion, defeat, and destruction, you will be well on your way to extraordinary success. In fact, the only thing between you and taking actions on your dreams is your anticipation of the feelings of failure.
And when those no longer stop you, there will be nothing you won't be willing to do to keep going until you arrive. The best of us try to avoid or outwork the side of life that hurts or sucks. And this is the very reason we end up doing things to avoid failure.
We don't ask for what we need in case they say no. We don't put ourselves out into the world. We don't talk about our offers or show up in big new ways.
We keep our ideas and our creativity to ourselves. Because the truth is that half of our ideas are terrible. Half of our attempts won't work.
But in order to get to the half that will, we have to go through all the negative crap in the way. We have to do the work of failing and failing over and over again in order to win. Think about what it's like to learn how to walk or ride a bike.
There is absolutely no success in the beginning. It's solid failure. It's failing not walking in the beginning.
It's getting up over and over and over. There's a long period of time where walking is not happening. It's just a bunch of failing.
This is the exact same thing that happens in striving for success. In the beginning, after you come out from comfort hiding, there is nothing but negative know and failure. This is the path to success.
It doesn't feel like winning. In fact, it feels like losing right up into the point of winning. The only reason we don't want to fail is because we don't want to feel bad.
We don't want to experience the half of life that doesn't feel good. But why does it feel bad when we fail? What if we could actually start to feel good about feeling bad?
What if we learned that the half of life that feels bad is actually what gets us the other half of life that feels good? And we don't need to be in a hurry to feel good if we can get better at feeling bad. It's an easy thing to say and to understand, but when we live it, that is when we can create possibilities worth living into.
I want to take a minute to address the idea of trying to outrun failure. I see this all the time with my students, with the crazy busy people in the world. You can't outrun it.
Being busy and working until eight hours of the night will never shield you from failure. Taking smaller risks or no risks at all will not shield you from failure. We just call that failing ahead of time.
You can't outwork failure. You can fail working eight hours a day and you can fail working 12. It's just not worth it.
Just stop trying. Decide to fail and walk into it and through it every single time. The truth is, failure gets you there as fast, even faster than success.
When you are trying for new possibilities in your life and work, you will need to try lots and lots of things. Most of the things you try won't work, but each of them will teach you something about what doesn't work and what does. You will know you were doing it right because the minute you fail at an attempt, you take notes and try something else or try again.
You keep moving along the path. Your momentum keeps you moving towards and eventually all that failure leads to sweet success. When you do it right, success doesn't end up feeling that much better than failure.
They are both sides of the same coin. You will start embracing the idea that failure is simply currency and success is simply what you're buying with it. When it becomes a dance of feeling both bad and good, you know you have figured it out.
As you go through the possibility formula that I'm going to teach you later in the journey towards extraordinary success, you will go through a process of testing combinations of money, value, and people offerings that will more often than not, not work. The crazy thing about success is that you have to fail your way to it. The truth is ultimately that successful people aren't good at success.
But they are rather good at failing. They are willing to keep failing until they get the result of success. For example, when you are learning how to create value that would be valued by the world in a way that pays you the amount of money you want to make, you have to find a combination that clicks.
You have to find the right value for the right person at the right price. In the beginning, you might have something very valuable. But if you're offering it to the wrong person, or you might have great value and you're offering it to someone who's only willing to pay you less than you want to make, or maybe you have a financial goal that is much bigger than the value that you are offering, when the combination doesn't work, it's going to feel like failure.
So many of you will want to make this mean that you are a failure or that this formula doesn't work or that it will never work. This is just you having an adult temper tantrum, and you will most likely have many of them, if you're anything like me. The trick is to overcome the tantrum and try a new combination as soon as possible.
The formula isn't difficult, but the feedback sometimes is. When we spend time creating something we think is very valuable because of the time and energy we put into it, and we find out that no one in the marketplace is willing to pay for it, we have to start over. There is nothing easy about this.
We might feel defeated or even angry that our hard work is not paying us yet. But the failure is how we move forward. It's how we learn what works and what doesn't work.
When we anchor ourselves to success and believe it is possible for us in the future, even though it's impossible right now, it keeps us moving. It's like we know this ends up working. So what is the right combination of value to person that ultimately makes it work?
What is the problem you end up solving for someone where they are willing and happy to pay the value you were offering to meet their goals? Failure is how you find out. In my Self-Coaching Scholars program, in December of every year, I assign my students to choose an impossible goal.
I have them pick something they know is currently impossible, that they would love to create in their lives. I have them write 25 actions they will take to work towards that impossible goal each quarter. The intention is not for them to get the work done, or even to accomplish the goal.
The intention is for them to take action and fail to learn more about the goal, to engage them with the process. We find out very soon who is good at failing and who isn't. So many of my students who are very smart and used to knowing the answers and getting the win all the time, quit this exercise within the first few weeks.
They will often tell me that they think it's silly to work towards something that's impossible. They can't process the emotions that come along with failing and the discomfort that will inevitably come from working on something with no clear how to immediate success. But when you stick with this process and the formula long enough to create amazing value for a person who is excited to pay for it, it is similar to getting on a long, slippery slide at an amusement park.
Before you know it, everything starts moving faster and easier. You will have an employer or customers who are delighted to pay you and so happy to have you helping them in their life. You will have more money that you might have ever dreamed possible.
And it will all be because of your willingness and ability to fail.
If you've enjoyed listening to the What's Possible Series, you must join me for our What's Possible Coach Week, where I will be coaching you live on all of these topics, on what's possible for you, and introducing you to the possibility formula, which is the second half of the book that I wrote, that teaches you how to execute these truths in your life. You can come to the lifecoachschool.com/possible in order to join us live. We'll see you then.
