You can’t reach great successes without exposing yourself to spectacular failure.
You can’t feel amazing without exposing yourself to a downfall.
You can’t feel great love without exposing yourself to a broken heart.
You can’t explore the world without exposing yourself to getting lost.
And what’s more: you won’t be able to fully appreciate the good things in life without having been exposed to the challenging things.
“Life made me who I am, and I can’t do anything about it.”
“While the past has shaped me, the way I choose to live my life today, tomorrow, and every day after, will determine who I am.”
You’re living anyway. Your actions are votes for an identity anyway. So you might as well do it intentionally.
The future I want to see affects the present I create.
And so does the future I don’t want to see.
Do I let fear of what could go wrong reign my day?
Or excitement about what could be?
Whatever I choose, I may well end up proving myself right.
Yesterday, we got to do it all over again.
Today, we get to do it all over again.
And tomorrow, we get to do it all over again, too.
Maybe that routine is what gives us peace of mind in the uncontrollable chaos of life?
Maybe that routine isn’t a drag, but, in fact, the beauty of life?
There’s nothing wrong with chasing quick wins, as long as you define them well.
Because the first quick wins are usually internal and invisible.
Only when you’ve won some battles against the inner critic who wants you to give up do the external quick wins kick in.
And that’s how it’s supposed to be.
You don’t have to believe you can do, be or achieve something today.
But you must trust there’s always a tiny daily action, fairly easy to take, that goes against your disbelief.
A tiny daily trusty builder, repeated every day, that chips away at your skepticism and plants a seed of self-trust in your brain: “Maybe I CAN change”?
Then one day, you wake up and you believe: I can be whoever I choose to be.
A voice in my head says I can’t write every day?
I’ll write 2 sentences every day, just to prove to that voice that I, in fact, CAN write every day.
A voice in my head says I don’t have the perseverance to train for (and then finish) a marathon?
I’ll do something small to prepare for the marathon every day, so at the end of each day, I can say to myself “The proof is there, today was another day of me persevering and preparing for a marathon.”
You can’t brute-force your way out of an “I can’t do this” belief. You can only take small actions that start proving the contrary.
Slowly but surely, you chip away at the credibility of the naysayer voice, until the scale starts tipping over, and an encouraging voice emerges.
