The Leap of Your Life
Page 5
So, what’s stopping you from 100%? We’ve already covered the common suspects: fear, the unknown, judgment, or a mix of all three. Often, we believe conditionally, that is, when I see proof of my outcome coming true, then I’ll believe.
It doesn’t work this way, and you know it. You must believe first. We’ll explore belief deeper in Chapter 8, but for now I’ll leave you with this quotation from Stuart Chase:
“For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no proof is possible.”3
Now that we’ve identified the most common forces standing in the way between you and a life you can’t wait to wake up for, it’s time to explore the biggest price we pay for not taking our leap: a life unlived.
Chapter 2 Key Takeaways
Fear is always part of your leap; it’s how you use it. Reframing your relationship with fear is the first step: if fear wasn’t there, you wouldn’t be thinking boldly enough.
The unknown is where the magic happens. The greatest moments of our lives happen in the unknown. Instead of looking at it from a place of worst-case scenario, flip the script and embrace the place where anything can happen.
Judgment is part of life, no matter what you do. Whether you play small for the approval of others or live out loud, someone will judge you. The question is will you judge yourself?
CHAPTER 2 LEAP POWER STEP
What is holding you back? Without spending too much time analyzing, identify five reasons you’re being held back. Putting them on paper allows you to step back and see them for what they really are.
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Notes
1 www.susanjeffers.com/home/detailtemplate.cfm?catID=2234.
2 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/385500-you-will-become-way-less -concerned-with-what-other-people.
3 https://spartacus-educational.com/USAchaseS.htm.
CHAPTER 3
Life, Unlived
In the personal development, do-these-seven-things-to-ensure-your-success world, there’s endless chatter around morning routines. You can’t spend any time online perusing a blog in this world without mentioning these routines, or the countless books that have sprung from them.
I say these things, too. No doubt there is an incredible power in setting the tone for your day with clarity, energy, space, and rituals to put you in a peak emotional state. However, one of the most powerful morning routines I have has nothing to do with gratitude or aligning my chakras.
It’s reading Reddit. Often considered the garbage bin of the Internet along with Twitter, reading Reddit is a crucial part of my morning routine.
The truth is, I’d be lost without it. I’d forget to live with purpose. I’d fall prey to the little details trying to pull me away from my vision—gossip, what someone posted on Instagram or how my bulldog still can’t follow through on a “paw” request.
I don’t simply read Reddit aimlessly, I read one specific post.1 In fact, aside from this one post, I know very little about Reddit and spend no other time on it.
The post I read every single morning is shown in Figure 3.12
Figure 3.1 My favorite “Today I F****d Up” post on Reddit.
Ouch. There isn’t a time when I’ve read this text and not experienced a sinking feeling in my gut, and if you did too, great. This text hits me hard. Bourbon, neat, to the face, hard; sparring with a UFC champion, hard; 41 degree-ice-bath hard. It hits me harder than the thousands of books I’ve read in other disciplines. And it hits me this way because it’s real. I can feel the emotion of regret in every word and the heaviness it comes with. Within these words, I learn the most valuable lesson:
The pain of regret will destroy our lives. It is the life we didn’t live. It’s the mundane existence that comes from it. I could tell you what it is, but you’ve just felt it by reading about John in Figure 3.1. We’ve all felt John’s pain in our own lives, at least to some degree. The unlived life is an easy trap we can all slide into. It’s a hollow existence and feels like something is always missing. Worse, you feel like it’s simply too late and the window has closed. This is the path where hopelessness is the only option.
Regret doesn’t discriminate. You can achieve all the external markers of success—the bank account, the cars, and even the relationships. Sometimes, these make everything worse. An unlived life is exactly what it sounds like—being alive in this experience called life, but not truly living it. You get to a place where you’re resigned, apathetic, and believe it’s too late. You missed your shot. And now it’s over, so what’s the point?
Now, if I were to spend time with John, I’d tell him it’s not too late. In fact, this post made the rounds on Reddit with over 4,000 comments and he received endless support to get back on track, finish the book, and repair the relationship with his son. I’m hoping he made that choice because while life does have windows of opportunity, they don’t fully close shut until we’re gone.
In this chapter, we’re going to go deep on what it means to experience an unlived life. We’ll explore the real price you’re paying for not taking your leap, and why it holds the keys to ensuring you don’t experience the heaviness of regret or thinking it’s too late for you.
Leap Tip: (Reverse) Visualization
You’ve heard of visualization for success, but what about reverse visualization? Instead of your dreams, I want you to amplify the pain of the future if you stay in the same place. If you choose to not grow, and to play small.
What does life look and feel like five years down the line? Don’t stop until it hurts, and play out the worst-case scenarios.
The Greatest Price You’ll Ever Pay
Bonnie Ware spent a significant amount of time in deep conversation with people who were dying during their last days. She stumbled upon this career by accident, yet her compassion kept her in it. She also knew she was experiencing the highest level of wisdom one could ever receive: from those who had nothing to hide.
They were naked. Sometimes literally, but mostly naked in the sense they were sitting at death’s door. Some would go on to last a year, some a couple months or as little as a few days.
Honesty and truth were at the core of what they’d pass to her—with none of the filters so many of us tend to use. She’d engage in these conversations, and then the person she was caring for would pass. She’d have a heavy heart and remember their gems. And the cycle would repeat itself.
What Bonnie learned was compiled, posted online, and it went viral. Resonating with people of all backgrounds, her content became a book and a platform. She possessed a level of raw wisdom few achieve until older age, and she needed to share it with the world. The number-one regret she identified in her conversations was simple:
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”3
This is the ultimate price you pay for not taking your leap. It’s heavy, and it hurts. There is nothing more heartbreaking than getting to the end of our experience here and coming to the stark realization we didn’t do it.
We didn’t push the chips to the middle of the table when we had our shot. We didn’t go all in when we had the chance. We didn’t say what needed to be said, and we didn’t pursue the path calling us forward. We didn’t listen to ourselves, and instead followed the external voices telling us what we should do. Not because we wanted it, but because we knew it’d make others approve of us.
Although this price is a heavy burden to pay during your last days, at that point, there’s not much left to do. What’s even more painful is living with this day in and day out, and you’ve likely experienced it. Life seems to be lackin
g color and there’s a stubborn voice in the back of your head reminding you of what’s been missed.
Every day that passes, is a reminder. Time does little to help and even adds to the frustration. You’ve been there, and you may even be there right now. If so, great. Because you still have time to chart a new path, make a bold decision and choose something different. No matter how off course you may have been, there’s always an opportunity for a detour and course correction.
Understanding Regret
Regret is an emotion we experience daily. A 1984 study revealed regret was the second most frequently experienced emotion behind love. Defined clinically, regret is simply “a negative emotion predicated on an upward, self-focused, counterfactual inference.”4
I know, you have no idea what it means. Put simply, regret is the feeling expressed by John in Figure 3.1—wondering how a different choice or decision in our lives could had led to a greater result. Psychologists call these “alternative histories,” and the imagined futures they generate, “counterfactual thoughts.”5
We’ve all experienced these firsthand. The missed opportunity in talking to the stranger at the event, the chance we had to launch the business—the time we knew we had to act yet chose to wait.
But the thing that makes regret much worse are the tapes we replay in our heads on what could have been.
What Makes Regret Much, Much Worse
It’s one thing to experience regret in life, but it’s another to obsess over the endless scenarios on where we fell short. This process, labeled rumination, is considered the worst part of regret. People who can’t let go and let their past keep them stuck right now are ruminators. So is the friend who mentions the same exact business deal or relationship gone wrong from a decade ago. It’s the co-worker who’s still agitated at what he or she didn’t say to their boss last quarter.
Dr. Amy Summerville knows a little something about regret. She runs The Regret Lab at Miami University where she studies all forms of regret and its impact on human behavior—past, present, and future.
She expands on this topic of rumination:
. . . what we found is that people who have ruminative regrets—so that they’re both having this regret, but also having it be something that’s intrusive and repeated—tend to be people who are also experiencing the most negative outcomes, so are more likely to have clinical depression symptoms, anxiety symptoms, things like that.6
Rumination made Bronnie Ware’s patients reflect back and identify their lifelong regrets. Meaning, they’d have regret over a part of their life they didn’t take a chance on, or where they played it safe.
Once life began to slow down with advanced age and health issues, they had more idle time to reflect and bring these regrets to the surface. Instead of looking back with a wide smile, they looked back with more disgust than awe.
Leap Tip: Visit Your Local Cemetery
When faced with your mortality, you remember what’s real. You focus on the essential, and the day-to-day problems dissolve.
One of the most powerful practices you can do is visit your local cemetery once a month. Treat it as the powerful wakeup call it is; you, too, will be there soon.
How do you want to be remembered? Often, our mortality is something we avoid—and yet, it contains the reminder we need to live right now. As Steve Jobs once famously said,
Remembering that you’re going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.7
You Will Regret What You Didn’t Do
Flash back to the biggest regrets of your life. Where do they come from? For most people, they don’t come from what has been done. They come from what hasn’t been done, and what could have been. Even if the action you took was considered a mistake, it usually involves less regret as time passes, because there’s no element of mystery, and we can often find a silver lining within the mistake. We can tell ourselves “at least we went for it.” We can extract a win: a lesson from the experience, trusting ourselves or simply finding a new opportunity that was otherwise not available earlier.
To summarize: there is no loss in going for it. There are countless coping mechanisms we use to soothe the discomfort of regret, with one being the thought that there’s always another chance.
Although this can be psychologically healthy and give us hope, sometimes, it simply isn’t true, and the opportunity is gone for good. A 2017 study, The Ideal Road Not Taken,8 expands:
In contrast, “undoing” a failure to act is often impossible. The one who got away may now be married to someone else; some talents can only be fully developed if one starts young; a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity comes around only once.9
When you feel the pull to do it now, don’t wait, or else you may miss your window.
#NotesFromTheLeap
Jay Nixon
Owner, Thrive Fitness and Author
What’s the boldest leap you’ve ever taken and why was this important to you?
I left corporate America and start living my life instead of merely existing to fulfill someone else’s dreams. No money, no clients, no ten-year plan. Just an unwavering belief in myself and a sincere desire to help people. At the time, I just existed. My life wasn’t purposeful, profitable, or passionate. I knew I couldn’t live the next 70 years that way.
What did you feel as you made this leap, and what happened after?
Extreme uncertainty [was] followed by the biggest adrenaline rush you could ever imagine. I would assume this is what someone that does drugs feels like (I’ve never done a drug in my life, I know I’m super boring). On the other side I found true wealth. Not just money, but [in] all areas of my life: Health, Relationships, Money and Spirituality. What I’ve been able to create is truly that, it has given me wealth both in the tangible and metaphorical sense.
Looking back, what would you tell someone else in a similar circumstance knowing what you now know?
You can be, do, and have everything you desire if you are willing to make the decision that you will take obsessive action on your goals everyday—and most importantly on the day you don’t feel like it.
Don’t Miss Your Window
We have windows of opportunity in life, snapshots in time when a door opens. These moments are designed to take us on the ride of a lifetime. During these junctures, we have fingerprint-specific combinations of life experience and timing that can’t be replicated.
Often, we let those moments pass. We tell ourselves we’ll have another chance. There’s always tomorrow. We let ourselves off the hook and package up logic disguised as fear.
But what if we’re wrong? What if we had that one moment when everything changed? What if there’ll never be another chance like that again? For me, I recognized I had a window a few years ago. That window lasted all of 15 seconds.
It was a random Tuesday afternoon in early January, and I desperately needed a Wi-Fi connection. An urgent business email was pending, and a few thousand dollars were at stake. I was in a rush, and as I flew down the highway, I remembered there was a Starbucks around the corner.
Rushing out of my car like a madman, I walked feverishly with my head down; I was a man on a mission. Wi-Fi was all mine.
And that’s when I saw her. Striking, beautiful and with an energy that seemed to pull me. It was 1:13 p.m.on a random Tuesday. She was crossing the street. I had to find Wi-Fi. I wouldn’t even know what to say. My mind was scattered. I can’t be distracted.
Next thing I know, we’re having a conversation. We spoke for a few minutes, had a mutual connection, and exchanged contact information. On a random day and time, crossing a 15-second crosswalk—both our lives changed forever. Fifteen seconds on either side, and the opportunity would have been either painfully awkward or simply missed.
I never planned I’d meet my fiancée that way. I thought I’d meet her at an event, or through a mutual relationship, yet it was perfect. I had a window, and a t
ight one at that. Facing rejection, awkwardness, or some random guy interrupting her daydream, I did it anyway. This is the power of recognizing the window as it happens.
Now, let’s paint a different outcome if I had stayed committed to Wi-Fi and ignored the pull I felt when I saw her. The Wi-Fi, in this case, represented my logical self. It’s a responsibility. So, it would have become easy and convenient for me to rationalize the window I had missed by saying:
“She was probably busy, not single—and oh, yeah, I really needed this money.” Truth be told, it would have been easy to talk myself into this. After all, it was partially true. I did need the money. Thinking she was not single was fear taking over and winning.
But something deeper would have been eating away at me, and that represents the ideal self. The part of me that knew this interaction could be special, otherwise I wouldn’t have been energetically pulled. Maybe she was single. Maybe she was open. Maybe because of one 4-minute conversation, my life would never be the same.
This is the price to pay for missing our windows in life. But the only reason I was able to step into the opportunity that day and risk rejection was because of I was able to use past regret as leverage.
And you can do the same.
Using Regret as Leverage
Despite all the downer talk on regret, it’s not all bad. In fact, it’s the most hopeful emotion from the batch of commonly experienced negative ones. Because it’s not whether you and I will experience regret. What separates regret from becoming hopeful versus hopeless, debilitating versus empowering is simple: what we do next.