a beautiful journey
I want to compare a new lifestyle, health & wellness journey or any journey towards reaching your goals and dreams, to climbing up a mountain. It is going to be a beautiful journey and you will discover lots of new beautiful things you did not know about before, including things about yourself. You are about to discover which areas you are very strong and fit in and in which areas you still need some more growth, strength training, fitness and resilience. There will be resistance at times. From yourself and others! You need to be prepared! Physically and above all mentally!
You are going to need encouragement and assistance from those climbing this mountain with you (and therefore you need to reach out and be real about your struggles and ask for help when you need it) and at other times you will need to be the one providing encouragement and assistance to others on their way up this same mountain.
At times while climbing this mountain you are going to slip and fall and slide down the mountain a bit and it might almost feel like you are losing ground if you are not careful. You ARE going to struggle. The struggle WILL be real. At times you will be walking in the shade and you will enjoy those cooler times and you will be able to climb faster. You will take some breaks on the way and just enjoy the beauty of it all and discover some hidden treasures. At other times it is going to get hot and messy! It is all part of the journey up the mountain. Your goal is to start at the very bottom of this mountain which is the place you find yourself at now at this very moment and the end goal is to get to the very top! It is going to be a spectacular view from up there! There is just one way to get to the top of the mountain and that is to take it step by step.
you cannot fail!
It sounds hectic but there is absolutely nothing to fear! You cannot fail if you don’t allow yourself to fail.
Let me tell you why you cannot fail and why you don’t have to fear failure!
When you stand facing a mountain that you want to climb you stand at a certain level. The bottom. You cannot really say that you’re proud of climbing a mountain if you didn’t start the climb at the bottom of that mountain. You start climbing that mountain from the bottom up with the goal and intention to get to the top.
You have to start climbing from the bottom level and that is the lowest level of the mountain you can get. You cannot go lower than that and therefore you cannot go any lower than you start from. And therefore you cannot fail. Even when you climb and you slip and fall and slide all the way down, you cannot go lower than the level you started from. No matter what happens. So you cannot fail! If you fear failing and you think failing is sliding all the way down to the bottom of the mountain then I have news for you… you are already at the bottom! So you might as well climb this mountain because you are already at the bottom and the only way you will be stuck at failure is if you don’t start climbing at all. There is no failure to fear then! You’ve got no ground to lose. Nothing to lose and so much to gain.
Sometimes you will climb faster than other times and sometimes it will be much harder and a real struggle. You might slip and fall here and there and sometimes you might even lose a little bit of ground by sliding down but whatever you do don’t quit.
a powerful key
The key to making sure that you won’t slide all the way down when slipping and falling on this journey lies in your attitude. Your attitude on this journey will determine your altitude on your journey. And one way of changing your attitude is by changing your way of thinking about things you see as failures. You have to start reframe how you think about failure. Guys, we do not lose, we cannot lose. We win (meaning we gained ground on this journey up the mountain) or we learn (meaning when we slip, fall and slide down the mountain a bit we learn from it – we learn from that mistake and we learn what we need to do different from what we did and we change what we need to change, we tweak what she need to tweak and we don’t look back – we continue up the mountain ). But we don’t lose. The only way you can lose and the only true failure is to not even to try.
What you think of as failure is actually nothing else than just a learning opportunity and a learning opportunity do not make you a failure. When you think you’ve failed at something that does not make you a failure.
The fastest way if you want to fail is to not take responsibility and to not learn from slipping, falling and sliding down the mountain. You need to take accountability and responsibility for your slipping and you need to take own it and grow from it. The fastest way to slide off this mountain is because of the ABCDE’s. It is when you will start Accusing, Blaming, Complaining, Denying or making Excuses.
it’s all a part of the journey
Slipping, falling and sliding down this mountain at times really is part of the journey and part of making progress. You are failing forward, not backwards. Slipping, falling, sliding and struggling is part of growth and developing resilience. So don’t fear it. Embrace it. Learn from it. Grow through it and continue up the mountain. Put it behind yourself as quick as possible but take the lessons learned and apply it.
You will always pass so-called failure on your way to success. Is in inevitable. The only thing that will determine whether you are going to continue forward or slide all the way back lies in how you respond to it. Use the stones that came out from underneath your feet and caused you to slip or that tripped you up and turn them into steppingstones to get up at the mountain faster and more successfully. You turn stumbling stones into stepping stones by turning them into learning curves. So when you slip don’t go and beat yourself up and just throw all your hard work away. Make sure to make work of it. Sit down for just a moment and ask yourself what you need to learn from what happened, why did it happen and what do need to do differently in the future and immediately continue up the mountain.
I want to end this off with these words from Winston Churchill: “ Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts”.