Category: Failing Forward

1. What question(s) are you trying to answer? Write your answer(s) as completely as you can. Try to incorporate stories whenever possible.
2. Wait at least 8 hours and answer again, but don’t read what you wrote the first time.
3. Repeat one more time.
4. Read back through everything you wrote and extract the key answers, insights, and stories. Edit to its most concise form.
5. Highlight the key trigger words that remind you of the complete ideas.
6. The first time you do Step 5, you’re most likely going to highlight more words than you need to. Repeat Step 5, but find ways to consolidate more ideas into fewer trigger words.
7. Practice presenting by only checking your notes for those trigger word(s)—share ideas in your own words in real time… don’t try regurgitating pre-memorized paragraphs.
8. Repeat Step 7 until you’re feeling about 75% ready to perform in public, then, go do it.

…Remember: you’ll never feel 100% ready. And you’ll never feel like you nailed it 100%.

…And guess what? That’s not what it’s about. It’s about getting out there and doing it, and doing it imperfectly, and learning from it, and growing from it.

…Not what you might’ve been conditioned to believe since you were a nose-picking, booger-flinging, direction-following toddler—that everything is graded and 100% is the only acceptable grade.

Unlearn this belief.

It’s not realistic. It’s not healthy. It’s not human.

In fact, if anything… it’s holding you back. It’s keeping you hiding in fear that you might get graded less than 100%. When the only thing that’s 100%… is that you’ll end up regretting not doing things like shine a light on your ideas, your uniqueness, your life.

Giving a public presentation today reminded me of the value of failure.

…I didn’t fail presenting publicly today, but I certainly have in the past.

And while the successes build a confidence more and more solid… the failures provide the care.

Nobody wants to feel like they’ve failed, let alone in front of an audience of people, let alone LIVE.

And so what do the memories of those failures make us do as we approach another shot at the same task?

…They make us do our homework, practice our technique, refine our message, align with our spirit, and humbly seek help—or at least they should.

They give us the motivation to do better… to prepare better… to step closer into who we were always meant to be.

And who’s that you ask?

The person who is confident, yes—and can stand up with great posture, speak wholeheartedly, while emanating a sense of empathy, understanding, and calm—but, just as importantly… the person who does so with deep care.

…Because they know deeply the other side of success.

See, both grow in proportion—success and failure—so long as you approach each with the appropriate mindset. So don’t run from failure. Grow from it. Grow with it. Let it guide you to a greater success than you could’ve ever experienced otherwise.

One of the essential mindsets in self-defense is that there’s no right and wrong—per se—there’s just works and doesn’t work.

Yes, we train to improve technique, expand awareness, and build better instinctual reactions.

But what’s so important to remember when training is that if a “mistake” is made in a real self-defense scenario—as in the student did something different than what was taught—there’s no do-overs. And if you ask your training partner to stop, rewind, and do the simulated attack again—that’s what makes the self-defense wrong.

Of course there’s a time and a place for slow, smooth, rewind-able practice… but, generally speaking, when it comes to self-defense—we want to always be in the mindset of making it work. Which means if your training partner throws a simulated attack and you react “incorrectly”—you don’t stop and ask for a rewind… you get back on track asap… in whatever way you’re able to with the training and instincts you have.

Because while, yes, technique makes a difference—mindset makes an even bigger one. And mindset needs to be trained just as much, if not more, than technique.

…And so it is with life, eh?

When life throws a hook punch your way and knocks you off balance… do you curse the hit or figure out a way to quickly rebalance and refocus? When you make a mistake at work, do you obsessively ask for a do-over or do you take responsibility and figure out how to get back on track stat?

Don’t get in the habit of trying to rewind time… get in the habit of making things work in real time.

I asked one of my martial arts students after she tested yesterday, what she felt good about from the last three months… and she said her patience in her ability to not push herself too hard or too quickly when healing from an injury.

Couple this with my morning workout when I was doing heavy squats and felt my back twinge in a way I knew it wasn’t supposed to. I pivoted exercises so quickly that somebody watching might’ve thought it was all according to plan.

Both this student and I have been in situations where we’ve been impatient. And we pushed ourselves too hard or too quickly and it resulted in even more pain and delays. When you meet these pains and delays with denial… it’ll only ever lead to more and more of the same.

When you meet the pains and delays with inner work… and reflect more carefully on how you got there… and better understand the warning signs and bodily communication… you solidify your understanding of the situation so that moving forward, you get less and less of the same.

…Until eventually, you can feel the pain just barely start to come on and you can pivot like it was all a part of the plan anyway.

…Because after all, in the grand scheme of things, who’s to say it isn’t or wasn’t?

A martial art student I occasional work with texted me the other day some frustrations she’s having in competition.

She said, “I’ve been feeling kind of lost currently with my fighting, I just don’t feel like me in the ring so just frustrated with that…”

And what I said to her was something along the lines of, sometimes our path makes us humble before it allows us to become great. This way we can truly appreciate everything that comes with greatness… because we know *truly* what it’s like to struggle… to lose… to be incredibly frustrated.

And what I told her to do with that frustration was channel it into a ball of constructive energy and use it to train harder, to train smarter, and to train more purposefully.

…What she’s going through now is the exact same thing all the greats go through. The question of whether or not you’ll become great comes down to how you manage these pivotal moments over the course of weeks, months, years, and on.