بهانۀ چهارم: من برای موفق‌شدن کافی نیستم

EXCUSE 4:

I’M NOT ENOUGH TO SUCCEED

I’ve talked a lot in my writings and my speaking about my lifelong battle with not feeling good enough. It is one of the topics I get the most notes about, so I know I’m not alone with those insecurities. For many of us, the list of not enough comes in every size and shape. We battle with feelings of lack in almost every major area of our lives. But it’s a whole different ball game when we are setting out to achieve something we’re unsure we can actually do.

The lack of enough in other areas of our lives is hard as it is. I’m not pretty enough to find a spouse. I’m not thin enough to be beautiful. I’m not old enough to pursue that. I’m not young enough to pursue this. We’re already grappling with feeling like we’re not enough simply in our existence, and now we’ve got to throw a goal out in front of us. Are the insecurities we feel about regular life supposed to be absent in this area? Of course not! In fact, when we set out to pursue something, we’re often dealing with our fear of what we lack multiplied by a factor of nine million.

You think you’re not fit enough in general, and now you’re supposed to run a half marathon? You think you’re not smart enough in school, but somehow you’re going to build a successful business? You think you’re not dedicated enough, but you’re going to attempt writing a book? And so, what happens too often is that you subconsciously decide that you’re going to fail before you ever even attempt to succeed. The irony, of course, is that the thing you’re attempting to take on might be the exact thing that proves your misconceptions about yourself wrong.

If you successfully run the half marathon, it would affect the way you feel about what your body is capable of. If you build an incredible business, it would adjust your beliefs about how smart you are. If you stick with it and finally finish that manuscript, it would prove that you are dedicated.

It’s a catch-22, because your feelings of not enough keep you from proving to yourself that you are. You haven’t yet achieved the things you hope for, and so you decide that you’re unable to.

Why do we treat only certain areas of our lives this way? When you fall down while trying to learn to walk as a toddler, you don’t stay down. You get right back up and try again. The first time you drove a car, you were probably scared and nervous and holding on to the steering wheel with a kung-fu grip and a proper placement at ten and two.

Nowadays you could likely steer with your left knee while handing a sippy cup to someone in the back seat without missing a single word of the Dora the Explorer soundtrack you’ve got on repeat for school drop-off. We fail and slip up and screw up and fall down over and over again in our youth, and yet we keep on going.

But ask a thirty-seven-year-old woman to take up CrossFit for the first time, and she’ll immediately start to imagine all the reasons she’ll suck at it, and before she knows it, she’s talked herself out of even trying a single time.

I think this is because the younger you are, the more failure is expected and the less aware you are of what other people might think if you fall. But, girl, the things you’re attempting to do now aren’t things that you’ve accomplished before, so they should get toddler status. It’s not that you’re not enough to cross the finish line; it’s just that you haven’t yet figured out how to run this particular race.

But I get it. This is something I have also struggled with. The thing that has hindered me from chasing down one of my biggest goals in life has been the belief that I’m not smart enough to build a big business. Or I guess I should say that I’ve felt like I’m not educated enough.

When I admit that, it tends to surprise people, I suppose because I recognized this limiting belief years ago and have since worked hard to shift my perception of myself. You see, anytime we feel lacking, the only way to successfully fight back against that lie is with a truth that makes it irrelevant.

I’ll admit that I am uneducated in the traditional sense. I have a high school diploma and one year of acting school. That’s it. It wasn’t an issue when I was an event planner, because people were hiring me for my skill with design and organization.

Nobody cared about whether I had an MBA. But over the last handful of years my company has grown exponentially, and with that exponential growth has come more revenue and expenses, and you guys, I am freaking terrible at math. Because it’s not an area I felt confident in, I did my best to ignore the financials of my business.

The more revenue we brought in, the more I struggled to understand a balance sheet that suddenly resembled the budget intricacies of a small island nation. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It pains me to admit this to you, but a couple of years into this process of building my company, I had barely looked at our books. They overwhelmed me, and I didn’t understand what I was looking at. So I hardly even glanced at the financial reports our accountant would run for us. As long as I had enough money to cover payroll and clients were paying their bills on time, I didn’t really pay attention.

Truthfully, it wasn’t laziness or complacency that was driving this decision. It was fear. Every time I looked at a financial statement and didn’t understand it, that voice in my head—you know the one, that jerk version of yourself that likes to point out all your flaws—would list out all the things I was deeply worried about. You’re not smart enough to run a company at this level.

Who do you think you are? These people are trusting you with their livelihoods, and you can’t even read a balance sheet. You’re going to fail. This fear and this circle of self-recrimination went on for years, and then one day I just got sick of it.

I was reading an excellent book on sales, and I was super fired up about all these ideas I was gathering about growing our revenue and lowering our overhead. But in order to do those things, I understood that I had to—absolutely had to—get a handle on where we were financially. Immediately the fears started to creep in, but my excitement over where I wanted to go was greater than my fear. My loud Okie family has a saying, and that morning, as I was sitting at my desk, it popped into my head.

“Rach,” I said out loud to myself. “Either piss or get off the pot.”

Crude? Absolutely. But sometimes you need to hear your grandpa’s straightforward, no-nonsense voice in your head to remind you of who you really are. I was either going to run this business and scale it with courage and determination and faith in myself, or I needed to stop playing at it. My limiting belief was that I wasn’t smart enough because I lacked an education in business finances to help me understand. I needed to counteract this limiting belief with a truth that took away its power.

The truth I reminded myself of was that I had always figured things out in the past. Always. I’d owned my own company for fourteen years and had never one time shrunk from a challenge. So what? Now that I was actually becoming successful on a large scale, I was suddenly going to give up? Just because I was unsure? No way! As I started to pump myself up with this truth, I got enough clarity to ask myself a better question. Instead of accepting that I wasn’t smart enough, I worked the specific problem in front of me. How could I better understand this? Was there a class I could take?

Of course there was! I immediately applied for and got accepted to an online business accounting program through Harvard Business School. The idea, of course, was that if I felt I wasn’t smart enough, the antidote to that must be applying for one of the most difficult online programs available for me that day. Once I passed that class, I told myself, that would prove to me—nay, to the world!—that I was good at numbers. A psychologist would have a field day.

Taking that class was an abysmal failure.

For one thing, it was freaking expensive. For another, I aced my tests and pulled good grades, but it was only because I studied and tested well. Once it was over, I truly had no greater knowledge about any of the concepts than I did when I started. Also, it was hugely time-consuming, which actually made me way more anxious about successfully leading my company, because I was spending a good chunk of my day on schoolwork.

I’m telling you this part of the story because I think it’s a pitfall that many of us make on the road to personal growth of any kind. We identify the problem. We decide that we’re going to fix it. We attempt to fix our personal problem by doing something that in no way resembles us personally.

It’s like Sara deciding she’s going to get in shape and signing up for a series of crazy-expensive SoulCycle classes. Her sister loves spin class, so there must be something great about it. Never mind that Sara hates group exercise and that the SoulCycle studio is forty minutes across town. Or maybe it’s Megan who needs to make more money as a single mom, so she decides to take on a side hustle in direct sales.

She’s not really into the product and is mortified at the idea selling in front of a crowd, but her best friend has been really successful at it and she’s sure she can be too. Or maybe you’re an entrepreneur who dropped out of college because you struggled to learn in a classroom environment.

You learned every single thing you know about business on the job through your own research, but when you need that learning the most, you decide that the best thing to do is pursue the one type of learning you absolutely hate.

Friends, personal growth is supposed to be personal.

It’s not one size fits all. It has to be customized to you and the way you learn best, or it’s never going to stick. Be strict about your goal but flexible in how you get there. Sara should have committed to putting on her favorite music and training for a race. She loves hip-hop and being outside, so she could have customized her workouts to her personality and achieved real results. Megan should have gotten a job at her favorite local coffee shop. She can pick up extra hours while the kids are with their dad, and she gets to chat with the people who come in and be in an environment that she loves.

And me? It took me a minute (and several thousand dollars in nonrefundable tuition), but I eventually recognized that I needed to learn this skill for my business the same way I’d learned every other skill. I asked myself, Are there books I could read? Conferences I could attend? Could I hire someone? Could I be more honest about what I did and didn’t understand in order to get clarity?

The answer to all of these was, of course!

Was it easy to learn about a topic I’m not particularly interested in without a clear outline about what to do next? No. Was it comfortable to admit to people that I couldn’t understand the financials I’d pretended to comprehend before? Absolutely not. But what was the alternative?

My grandpa’s voice in my head rang out—louder than my negative self-talk.

I had always figured it out before. I will always figure it out. So I got to work. I learned the difference between a balance sheet and a P&L in a YouTube video. I went to business conference after business conference and sat down front for every session on accounting—even though it seemed duller to me than watching paint dry.

At one such business conference I happened to take a class by Keith J Cunningham. (I’m listing him by name in case any of you happen to struggle with this same insecurity. Find a way to see him speak live!) I have never had someone explain business finances to me as clearly or as simply as he did that day. I literally cried like a baby because I finally understood things I hadn’t before. I mean, who in the world sobs over basic accounting principles?

Someone who thought she wasn’t smart enough to ever comprehend them.

That’s the craziest part about not feeling like we’re enough to achieve our dreams. The only way to prove that you are is to get yourself to the other side of doubt. That’s much harder to do if you’re following someone else’s path. You need to focus on what has worked for you in the past and apply those ideas to this new venture. You also need to believe in your possibility instead of focusing on the probability.

Not having the knowledge just makes you teachable, not stupid. Not being in shape just makes you moldable, not lazy. Not having the experience just makes you eager, not ignorant. Flip the script and force yourself to see the positive where you’ve only seen negative. What are the advantages of not knowing, not understanding, not conquering, not having, not achieving your goals yet? The yet matters. The yet reminds us that we have a whole week, month, life ahead of us to become who we were made to be.

You are enough. Today. As you are. Stop beating yourself up for being on the beginning side of yet, no matter what age you are. Yet is your potential. Yet is a promise. Yet is what keeps you moving forward. Yet is a gift, and you are enough to get to the other side of it.

For me, getting past this limiting belief in myself as an entrepreneur came with acknowledging all the things I had done instead of focusing on the things I hadn’t. There’s a great exercise for this I learned years ago that I think might be helpful for you if you’re doubting whether you can do something.

Write a letter to yourself, from yourself. More specifically, write from your tenacity, from the part of you that never gave up, from the exact opposite place of your fear. Write from your self-assurance. Write from your heart and your gut and the piece of you who always gets what she sets her mind to.

When I ask women to do this at our conference, there’s always this moment of confusion. “But I haven’t done anything,” they tell me. “I don’t have anything to write down.”

Sis, the problem isn’t that you aren’t accomplished; the problem is that you don’t give yourself any credit for the things you have done. You need to write a letter from your truth to extinguish the lies about who you really are. So if you worry that you’re overweight and out of shape, then write a letter to yourself about all the times in your life when your body was incredible.

Did you play sports as a child? Did you carry a baby inside yourself? Did you grow another human life? Those arms that are too squishy and untoned? How many times have those arms offered love and comfort to other people? How often have those arms helped you care for your family or do your job or create your art? You think your dream is too big, too impossible? Write down all the times you did things nobody thought you could.

I’m going to share with you the very first letter I wrote to myself, and I’ll tell you right now that the original letter included a lot of cussing because A) I honestly never planned on anyone reading it, B) sometimes a well-placed f-bomb can fire me up, and C) I love Jesus, but I cuss a little. For today’s purposes I’ve toned it way down and removed the words that might have this book banned in several countries. The original letter still sits inside the spiral-bound notebook I wrote it in that day. I don’t have a date on it, but I know I wrote it in the middle of my struggles with my worst insecurities about whether I was smart enough to grow my business. I wrote to me from my persistence.

Dear Rachel,

I am your persistence, and this is what I want you to know about me. I am a badass. I was born in pain and fear, and I fought my way out. I graduated early. I moved to a new city. I got a job I was too young to have, and then another, and then another. I built a company that shouldn’t have worked and then another after that. I wrote five books. I’ll write even more.

I took on foster care and raising five kids. I do stuff that nobody else can do in less time than anyone can believe. I am self-aware. I work hard on myself. I face the hard stuff again and again and again. I don’t give up, not ever. Your fear may be powerful, but there is no defining force greater in your life than me, your persistence. You have thirty-three years to serve as an example of that!

This exercise was so powerful for me at the time because I truly didn’t give myself credit for all the things I had done. I needed to remind myself of the truth. I may not have had a formal education, but I did all those things I listed, and I continue to do those things. That is what I want you to do today. That is what I want you to do this weekend, and in three months I want you to do it again. Then three months after that, I want you to do it again. Every time that fear of not enough shows up for you in whatever stupid way it tends to, I want you to remind yourself of the truth. Not the opinion.

For most of us, women especially, we hold on to some little nugget, some little lie, some limiting belief that we’ve had since childhood. We’ve believed it for so long, we don’t even question it anymore. We heard something when we were younger and our feelings were tender. Someone said something, someone spoke into your insecurity about yourself, so you’ve spent a lifetime questioning yourself and accepting what they said as truth. The crazy thing is, it’s not true. It’s an opinion.

1+1=2 is fact.

Gravity exists here on earth. Fact.

Water can extinguish fire. Fact.

You being “enough” of anything? Opinion. Someone else’s opinion, or maybe your own, but either way, it is not grounded in any actual reality other than the weight you give it. So how much of your life are you living—or rather, not living—because you’ve been treating an opinion as a truth?

Here’s what’s so crazy about the idea of enough. Whatever your issues with not believing you are enough, that is the opinion someone else gave you, whether intentional or not, and you have accepted it and made it a doctrine in your life.

We never boil it down like that. We never really think, Oh, I don’t feel like I’m enough, because the media told me so, because my aunt said something to me once, because a girl in eighth grade commented on this and that became my reality. Have you ever thought about how ludicrous it is to be living your life, to be making choices to hold yourself back from your goals, to not try things, to not put yourself out there because of something some random person said to you once upon a time? Whether it came from a voice of authority or a chick on the internet, if you’re hesitating because of someone else telling you that you are not enough, you’re still living your life and making choices for yourself, and, subsequently, your family, based on someone else’s opinion.

Other people don’t get to tell you what you can have!

Someone else doesn’t get to tell you who you can be!

The world doesn’t get to decide what you get to try.

You are the only one who can make that decision.

Here’s the flip side of that. You’ve got to stop blaming your problems on the world. You can’t be like, “Well, I got teased my entire adolescence, so now I’m insecure.” Or, “My parents did these things to me, so now I can’t cope.” I’m not belittling the trauma we hold from our childhoods. It’s so incredibly harmful to walk through trauma, particularly at a time in life when we’re so malleable to other people’s opinions. But here’s the deal. High school’s over.

Junior high was a long time ago. You are not a little girl anymore, and you cannot keep living your life with a seventh grader’s mentality, no matter how painful seventh grade was. You have to decide right now that you’re going to take hold of your life, and you are going to let all of that other crap fall away because it doesn’t matter.

Because whoever said the thing to you, your mom or your sister or the mean girl or the mean boy in high school or whoever it was, they don’t get an opinion on your life. They’re not in the ring. They’re not in the game. They’re not the one taking the punches. That’s you.

It’s a simultaneous thing. You can’t live your life for their opinions, and you also can’t keep blaming them. You need to embrace your path. You need to accept that whatever happened did happen and choose to be mindful of the steps that you’ve got to take now to heal and get past those things. You cannot keep living in the excuses of something that happened fifteen or twenty years ago. Because, seriously, how is that working for you?

I know there are people right now who are thinking, But you don’t know what they did. You don’t know what I went through. You’re right, I don’t. But I do know that if your past is still affecting your life today in a negative way, holding on to it is not helping you.

Does it make you feel better about yourself? Does it make you kinder to people when you live in that state of misery, in the state of, “I’m too fat. I’m too thin. I’m too young. I’m too old. I’m too . . .”? How is it making you feel?

It’s making you feel like crap. Nobody is living in a place of not enough and happy about it. Nobody is inspired and making great choices and enthusiastic and excited for every day while they are living in a state of not enough.

The amazing thing is that this is all perception. It’s all what you believe to be true. And you get to decide what you believe. If we were girlfriends in real life I would shake your shoulders and remind you that you get to decide.

I am living proof that your past does not determine your future.

I am a living, breathing example.

I am your friend, Rachel, and I am telling you that I walked through trauma and I walked through pain and I have been bullied and I have felt ugly and unworthy and not enough in a hundred different ways. And I have decided to reclaim my life. I have reclaimed it and fought back against the lies and the limiting beliefs over and over and over again. I have built on that strength by looking at what is true, not what is opinion. And you can too.