Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - GHOST EVERYONE. GRIND IN SILENCE. SHOCK THEM ALL | Powerful Motivational Speeches | Wake Up Positive

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

“Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.” –Pablo Picasso

I wouldn't make excuses for you. I wouldn't look you in the eye and tell you everything is great when in actuality the wheels are falling off the wagon. No, I'd point to the insufficiencies and remind you that you're capable of chipping away at them. I think that pragmatism can save someone's life. But guess what? Being human is knowing there are things you don't know.

Realizing that growth is picking up little understandings along the way and bringing them with you into the future. Allowing them into the evolution that is you. And part of my personal evolution was coming face to face with the fact that looking forward isn't all of it. It's part of it. Yeah, we need to be better, of course. Yeah, we can always squeeze more value out of the time allotted to us.

100%. this forward progression, as far as I'm concerned, is intertwined in human fulfillment. But we are, in this moment, the manifestation of the obstacles we've already overcome. We are the times we wanted to stop and didn't. We are the losses we bounce back from and the adversity we forged into opportunity. were the endings that we melted down into beautiful beginnings. We are the mistakes, the obstacles, the little encounters with hell that didn't define us, but instead changed us.

And that matters. So quick story time. For about five years after I graduated college, some of my friends and I have this fantasy, baseball league we'd use to stay in touch. And I think even they would begrudgingly admit that I was oddly good at it. I won like three or four out of the five years or something like that. And you know what my strategy was? It was simple.

I picked players based on who they were over the course of their career, not based on how they performed last year, which is a trap people seem to fall into. So a guy that hits 30 home runs six years in a row, and then last year suddenly only hits seven, it's not out of the question to think he'll hit 30 again, revert back to the mean, to his average, his track record. That, to me, is more meaningful than some recent struggle,

and I took that bet every time. Now, as you can imagine, the point I'm making here has nothing to do with baseball. It has everything to do with life in general. So much of the time, we completely focus on the current insufficiencies. The bad things happening now, the misfortunes in our lives, we're striking out and our brain goes into panic mode.

It says gap, gap, gap, how do we fill it? And again, yes, that's important. Our plan for resurgence is necessary, but we can't forget who we are and what we've done. We can't overlook our track record. As the saying goes, you've survived 100% of the bad. You've lived through countless struggles. You've climbed out of many catastrophes, at least I have.

And it seems as though it's when we need that reassurance most that we are most inclined to forget. It's when we, more than any other time, need to prove to ourselves that we are unconquerable, that we question our ability to persevere. I'd never say to you the road ahead will be easy. I'm not saying it won't suck at times. I'm not saying it won't take all of you. I'm merely saying that you are equipped to emerge victorious, to handle not some of it, but all of it.

I'm saying that the person in the mirror is stronger than you can even imagine. But understand you're not operating on blind faith here. You're not hoping for some miracle, you're operating on your own record of success. What you do is find a way. What you do is win. You don't believe me, look over your shoulder. Take a trip down memory lane. Glance back at all the mountains you've already climbed.

And life, it won't be smooth sailing all the time. You'll have your slumps and your adversity, no question. but they're not you they are what you were made to navigate everything has brought you to this point and it's great to focus on this point but don't lose

the everything sometimes it's not about who you will be someday sometimes it's about what you've already become it's about who you are now

It's been almost two years since I first read it, and still the main idea from the book, The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi deeply resonates with me. The idea that being happy is essentially dependent upon the courage to be disliked. And at first, it might not seem like the two, you know, whatever be related. Happiness and being disliked. An odd pair. Maybe even seemingly counterintuitive. until you realize that happiness comes from such a personal, authentic place

that allowing the expectations of others to chart your course means that you'd probably never arrive there. You have to do what's best for you. And doing what's best for you is going to create a divide somewhere. Why? Because everything creates a divide. Everything is subjective. I knew I wanted to dive into this topic, but wasn't sure the best way to do it.

So the other morning, I was trying to think of like an objective truth, something that no one could disagree with. I was sitting on my balcony and pointed up towards this guy. Thought, let's start there. Simple as it gets. Hard to refute that, right? I am pointing up. And I remembered we're floating on a globe, a giant sphere. There is no up.

Up is perspective. Everything is perspective. What's the difference between one and two? Some might say it's one. But technically there's infinity between one and two. You can have infinite decimals. 1.999 goes on forever, right? Point being there's subjectivity when we drill down into even the seemingly obvious truth.

Now, the value here is not to go running around, you know, arguing with everything, everyone that there's infinity between one and two. There are certain aspects of society that we must adhere to, otherwise we couldn't function together, right? But it's simply to show that you following the path you believe is right for you cannot be rightfully assessed by someone else. It's to place trust in your internal personal judgment. And when people don't understand,

understand your infinity, that doesn't mean it's wrong. And by the way, I don't have blinders on to the fact that it's hard to do. In many ways, it goes right up against our lizard brain biological wiring. We're fitting and equates to survival, and ostracization becomes a death sentence. But we are, fortunately, beyond that. It's in our interest now, and in fact, I think the courage to be disliked is a critical lifelong journey. I'm better at this than I was 10 years ago, no question, but do I still have a ways to go? Absolutely.

There are still things I'm working on every day to let go of. I remember reading in Jefferson's biography about how it was so hard for him to be demonized in the press all the time that it almost dissuaded him from jumping back into politics before his presidential run. And being attacked is a hard thing. But ultimately, he let his beliefs and personal values drive him. his ambition in a lot of ways, and came to see the scrutiny as a cost, decided it was worth the price. Or like I use this all the time, take one of the biggest pop stars of our day, say Justin Bieber. You look at what people are saying about him in the comments of his video.

A lot of it's wonderful, some of it's great, sure, but some of it's awful. And that's just the price of anyone putting themselves out there. And again, you think of an inverse scenario. Imagine if he didn't. Imagine if he limited himself or didn't dive fully into what he does because he knew some folks out there would have some bad things to say. Now, we are, for the most part, neither famous politicians nor pop stars, but our worlds contain the same elements at different scale.

There are things we're all scared to do or say because of how it will be received. There are parts of ourselves that we repress because we don't know what the feedback will be. We're all scared to fail in some capacity because of how it will look or what others will say about it, which is why being disliked is courageous.

As Aristotle has said, the only way to avoid criticism is to do nothing, to say nothing and be nothing. The opposite of being fully, truly yourself, is becoming the manifestation of that quote. It's never pushing yourself, never seeing what you're capable of, never exploring or executing on your dreams, your ambitions. Now, this is speculation, but if I were a gambling man, I'd place everything I own on the idea that when we're old, looking back on our lives, we'll spend less time thinking, about who criticized us or disagreed with us, then how we spent our days and who we shared them with.

Did we live in a way that made us happy that was meaningful? Because on a sphere, everyone believes they are pointing up. But in actuality, none of us are. We're all merely navigating the subjective universe behind our eyes. So why not truly explore? Why not capture the magic out there before the hourglass runs out of sand? It's hard. Sometimes it hurts.

It takes all we have. It requires courage. But I think we'll all come to find that the decision to live fully in our authenticity, regardless of whether others agreed, disagreed, or were indifferent, was the best decision that we, ever made. Remember what's yours to control and what's not what must be let go. Remember that nothing is so futile as attempting to move the immovable or change the

unchangeable. Remember that your greatest strength is focusing your time, talents, and efforts, exhausting your energy on that which you. can control. And sometimes this distinction hurts. But to fail to see it is to shackle oneself to delusion. Right? You can complain about the weather all day, but to complain about it, to focus on it, to be stuck in it is not going to change it. Your time would be better suited looking at how to adjust yourself to it. And that's what life repeatedly tells us. There's plenty we aren't happy about, plenty we wish we could change.

But to stay there in that space is to forfeit your greatness, your strength. Why? Because there is so much you can control, so much you can do. You can always position yourself to succeed. But that calls for first separating what's yours and what's not. If there are people I wish were different. There are situations I prayed were alterable. There are outcomes that are given without my asking. That's just life.

And a losing mentality is to fight that, to feel anger or resentment at the people that let you down. Why couldn't they be how I want them to be? It's to dwell on the situation that occurred despite your wishes. Why couldn't it have just happened my way? It's to refuse to acknowledge the outcomes that have already materialized. Why couldn't it just have evolved differently? All that, as hard as it is to see, is embracing a mentality of victimhood.

It's walking down a path that has no desirable destination in store for you. When you accept the unchangeable, you then become the architect. of your reality. Sure, people, places, and outcomes weren't always the best, but now you ask, how can I navigate around it, or better yet, use it to my advantage.

It is, to use the famous metaphor, not shaking your fist at the wind, but building sails for your boat, creating a path to take you somewhere new. So let the energy, the time, and emotion that's wasted on the immovable dissolve. The question worth asking is where do you most want to be and how can you get there? And while those details outside the scope of your control can feel like a bottomless gap in your way, I promise that what's around you is enough to build a bridge over it.

There's enough there for you to find your way. So long as we learn to separate the gap from the bridge, the details from the solutions, when all you see is why you can't go or how it can't be solved or how impossible something is. It's not that you are looking at an unfortunate truth, it's that you are looking at the wrong supporting evidence. When we stop seeing the details and outside circumstances, as the deciders of fate, we win. When we place our eyes upon the controllable, when we step into what is ours to move and shape and transform,

we finally see that the journey to something bigger is not only possible, it is inevitable. Most often, our greatest source of pain comes not from the moment, but what we suspect that moment will mean. It's not the situation, but in how we perceive the situation. This is an idea or a concept that I connect

pretty directly with fitness or running simply because that's where, to me, it's most apparent. It screams at me. So being that I run quite a bit, let's dive into that. Most days when I'm out for a jog or I'm running it strictly for endurance, you know, cardio base, chance to get out there, breathe or reset thing. But then there are times when I say to myself, this run's going to be a little different. It's going to be dedicated to seeing what I'm made of.

Right? I'm going all out, going to push. And what I find is I gradually increase my speed over the course of the 8-mile route is that my body. brain likes to focus on what's ahead. It becomes fixated on how much is to come, consistently warning me about the distance yet to be traveled and asking whether I have enough left in the tank to get there. It's most extreme in the last mile or so when my body is most exhausted, when I'm pushing as hard as I possibly can. It's a straight shot. I'm looking up at the road ahead my eyes are constantly reminding my brain that I'm not yet done that there's more creating an association between more road and more hurt in a way creating a little cycle of

panic that sometimes appears and hangs out as I'm simultaneously talking myself out of slowing down now is not the time to pump the brakes have come too far and the finish line is so close, but it eventually dawned on me that while the adversity contained in this last stretch of the run is difficult, it's the idea that more weights ahead. That's what hurts the most. It's not the body, but the internal voice that's creating the discomfort. In fact, I bet I could run for hours and hours and hours at this speed if it were a life or death situation. If I had to, it's not the task laid out before me. It's my perception.

And so this little line has helped me rethink and readjust my approach. Not just in situations like this, or when doing interval training or working out, But when trying to do everything else associated with my life, grow my business, build a brand, nurture relationships, push boundaries in any other aspect of what I do. Three words. Stay within yourself. It goes to the idea that your job is so incredibly simple that it's almost insulted. Put one foot in front of the other. Sure, look up so you know where you're going. But you don't need to analyze or interpret or dissect.

There's no gap between there and here, then and now. There is only this moment. And so step. Again and again and again. When the brain starts thinking about how much much is left to go I've betrayed the mantra. Nothing external is allowed. Stay within yourself. You have a job to do and you're capable, beyond capable of doing it. But the external must be kept out. The distraction must be kept at bay. And sometimes when you get it right, you hit this

stride, this pace that is equivalent to flying, a rhythm that's unparalleled. Stay within yourself. Step by step by step, the air making its way into your lungs and then exhale back out into the world when you simplify life down in such a way. Seemingly large things are exposed for what they really are, a mere commitment to do the little things consistently. It's funny to look back on all the places I've run over the years and identify or match the geography with the lesson, the routes with the epiphanies, the maps forever entwined in my life,

what they gave me and what it meant as I took it all forward into the world. And here we are again, new chapter, new lesson. Then after the shoes come off, the rest of the day commences this little stretch, this last mile plays the role of mentor. Eddie's simplification is everything, it says. The hard thing is not that hard because it's not that big, it's not that complex. Your monsters are self-created. Your hurt isn't a spotlight on the now, it's pointed at the road ahead. It's asking what if things go wrong?

It's asking how long can this be sustained? It's asking whether I have the strength to endure this. Every question breathes life into an adversary that has no business existing in my world. They're not helping me get to any finish line. In fact, they're that negative self-talk. I try so hard to mitigate. Except here they are very good at disguising themselves as reality, as just facts of the case, but they are not. They don't belong anywhere near me or around me. Breathe and step.

In fact, I need to deconstruct the world around me down into one word now. And what you find when you remove the emotion, The excess is the simplicity of the task at hand. Maybe not easy, but simple, and complexity is the enemy of progress. Right now may not be comfortable, but at least you're operating with clarity, and that is always enough to simply carry on, to move forward, to stay within yourself. And that's what this is all about asking the question, where are you letting what's down the road

get in the way of what you're doing now? Where are you letting the pain of what's not yet here, the pain of roads not yet traveled, keep you from doing something that is 1,000% in your wheelhouse that you are capable of? See, in this example, it's to breathe and step. It's to in a sense turn the mind off and go into autopilot. Find the pace and hold the pace.

But the question is, what is your last mile? What metaphorical race are you running? Have you identified, one, the finish line, and two, what needs to happen right now to get there? Forget about the gap right now. Now, what is the simple solution? What is required of you in this moment? And perhaps most importantly, what needs to be pushed out and mitigated?

It's often true that we stagnate, not because we don't have the tools or ability, but because we're oversaturated with the wrong things, the wrong routines, the wrong thoughts. The best way to break through that self-imposed wall is to actually build. walls that will prevent complexity from even attempting to rear its ugly head. What is your run, breathe cycle? So stay within yourself because when you do, you see how strong you are. Stay within yourself because you are the author of your story. Stay within yourself because all you need is now to push your own.

forward. Stay within yourself because that is where the power lives. Stay within yourself because the only way to lose is to let the external end. Stay within yourself because at some point that road will have been traveled down. The finish line will have been crossed and it will have been precisely your ability to condense it all down into the simple, the ground under your feet that allowed you to get there. Life tried to pull you 1,000 different directions, tell you 1,000 different stories, but you pushed it all away, found that power within the moment and stayed within yourself. The thing about time is that it comes and goes. Tomorrow will make today a distant memory,

and as quick as you were here, you'll be gone. What's in front of you is an opportunity to make right now something you'll never forget. You have the ability to write history, to create a story that will live with you forever. Think back to all the days leading up to today. All the training, the hours of preparation, the pain you felt. They have brought you to this moment. They are the armor that you wear. Right now is about execution.

It's about taking all those hours and turning them into the best version of yourself. Today is about being better than you ever dreamed you could be. These are the moments you live for. Are the insecurities, the doubt, the disbelief, this day is yours. Look your opponents in the eye. They cannot give what you can. You have built this opportunity piece by piece. You have created an unstoppable force, and it's finally time to reveal that to the world.

Let people doubt you. They'll see with time. Let the obstacles stand. You will run right through them. Let everything in this universe tell you know. You have already told yourself yes. The hardest thing in this world to stop is someone who knows they've won before the game has started. This is your everything.

Embracing. Make it so that you never forget. Today. You are the God of your world and in your world you write the script. There is no tired you left that in the wait room years ago. There is no unsure pushing yourself to exhaustion every day took care of that. There is only when. When do you rise up? There comes a point when you've just given too much. Your sacrifices too great to accept anything but the very best. Everything else is noise.

It's your day. It will not disappear with time. It will live on. You have earned today. Go make sure the world knows. The difficulty we face in life is not personal. If you remember this, you disarm every adversary obstacle, every complication you'll ever face. So, quick story.

Recently, I was renewing a lease for my apartment. Something that usually is pretty simple, right? Only this time, things were not simple. Confusion, chaos, misunderstanding, after misunderstanding. I received emails and letters saying, you need to provide these documents in order to renew. You need to have X, Y, Z information submitted to his ASAP. And I'm sitting here thinking, guys, you have all this info. I've lived here a year.

Same guy. Let's put two and two together. And after a while, I started to get truly annoyed, eventually to the point of taking it personally. So I stopped what I was doing. and I go down to the front office thinking I'm going to go scorched earth here I really wanted to emphasize how absurd and ridiculous all this was I opened the door and just kind of stop in my tracks first thing I see it's a crowded room filled with tenants asking for things making requests looking for info and the people that work

there were so patient and kind running around doing their absolute best to make everyone and get everything done. And almost immediately I realized, Eddie, you made this about you. This is not in any way about you. Basically, I created this fallacy that because things weren't working the way I wanted them to, then there must have been some universal resistance, right?

There's an idea I heard a while back that very rarely steers me wrong. It's that two things can simultaneously be true at once. So in this case, is there opportunity for these guys to tighten up a bit? Bring more clarity to their operations and best practices? Yeah, certainly true. But on the other hand, was building this up as a them versus me match in my head dumb and counterproductive? Yes, also true. The world will always provide adversity, right?

That's not news to anyone. It's just what the world does. That adversity will take a thousand different shapes and appear an infinite number of ways. But here's the deal. Life is neutral. Things just happen. They aren't good or bad. They just exist in the ether.

We as storytellers decide to put a charge into things. We decide whether it's happening to us or for us. We choose. And that's the takeaway here. There's power. remembering not to take things personally in any aspect of life. Because when we do, we actually lose our grip on reality. We become emotional and not rational.

And this is visible everywhere. Take rejection, for example, something we all deal with. It's not personal. The person on the other end is thinking about themselves. They're locked in on their own incentives. They're not thinking about you. And however you feel about this, It's just the truth.

So assess the situation. Sure, maybe find some areas where you can improve and carry on. Being mistreated. Again, not about you. As the saying goes, hurt people, hurt people. Same goes for criticism and hate online. Something that a lot of people truly fear. It will almost always be true that people who are more accomplished than you,

or further along in their career trajectory, won't waste time bringing you down in the comments section. No, it's people saying things hoping that their comments will get approval and attention, so they can feel validated. Their actions are being carried out for, ready for this, themselves. And to misdiagnose or take it as a shot to the heart,

well, that's creating a battle scenario that doesn't need to exist. It's not them versus you, it's them versus them. You're just in the crossfire. Now, does this perspective or point to not take things personally mean that we abdicate personal responsibility? Does it mean we say, well, it's not me, it's the world,

so not my problem? No, of course not. This perspective gives you the power to do the right things and the necessary things, because you understand that the problems you face are not a giant indictment of you as a person. Getting angry creates a scenario where, you know, you reallocate your energy from doing what's best for you to instead being mad at him or her or this group or that circumstance or the world in general. You know, bad things happen. And by the way, they happen to everyone. Everyone gets rejected

at some point. Everyone gets let down by people close to them at some point. Everyone loses their way at some point. Everyone has their expectations fall short. Everyone has pushback. It's not just you. It's the world doing what the world does. And there's eight billion of us running around operating in our best interest, trying to navigate a big, crazy world that's often incredibly difficult to understand. So with this perspective, going forward, you know, my lesson from a few weeks ago, what would I have done differently during all that chaos with the apartment? A handful of things. First of all, remind myself that in the grand scheme of things, it's trivial. It's just not that important. Two, understand incentives. These folks aren't trying to make things hard for me.

They're trying to do their jobs well so they can live their best lives, which brought their attention to other things it happens. And three, when you're calm, you can actually solve the problems at hand. When you don't stack your problems up to look like adversaries working against you, when you instead see them as merely a challenge or puzzle to be solved,

life starts to look a lot different. It just feels different to walk around as though life is on your side. As though hardship is nothing more than the water necessary for the seed to grow. As though all those challenges you face are opportunities being presented to you. Because I'm not sure you can simultaneously fight and solve. I think one of our most important decisions is to select one. You can make the rejection an opponent, the criticism, a rival,

you can make the disorder your nemesis, or you can realize that all of it falls squarely into the box that is life. Pieces to be taken out one by one so that you can construct the ideal. Life comes down to the advantages that exist all around us, the choices we make, to live freely with the wind at our backs or confined by the walls we build around ourselves. And sure, your current obstacles might be because of decisions you've made, maybe even decisions you wish you could take back.

But the current moment right now in this second is neutral. It does not hold a grudge or have an agenda. Now, right now is simply right now. In the same way that 2 plus 2 is 4. 4 is not good or bad. It doesn't want you to win or lose. It's just 4. Same goes for the crossroads before you.

And that puts the onus entirely on you to decide what you will make it all mean. Will you slow things down to find clarity? Will you open your eyes to see the value? Because look, there will always be a delta between reality and the stories we tell ourselves about reality. That's just how human beings work. It's how we've managed to survive for millennia. So understand that and gift yourself the narratives that bring you closer to the place you want to be. The road before you will be challenging, not because its pushback is personal, but because amidst the resistance, you'll find the components you need to live your very best life.

We sat around in a circle on a beautiful fall morning to build dream catchers. Something, to be honest, I never saw myself doing in a million lifetimes. The feathers and strings and beads and glue stretched out on a blanket in the middle of the circle. As we built, we took what we needed piece by piece. And it's safe to say, mine was far and away. the least, let's say, aesthetically pleasing of the group. Black and bright yellow string wrapped around the top, above which an assortment of random beads

sort of dangled carelessly below. It wasn't the most beautiful dream catcher ever made, but it was mine. After a quick Google search, I learned that some Native Americans believe that the air at night is filled with dreams, both good and bad. And that the purpose of the dream catcher is to protect from the bad ones, the nightmares, and the evil spirits. Interesting, I thought, putting it away, expecting that to be that and life to move on.

But a few days later on the flight home, I got up mid-flight to grab a charger out of my carry-on overhead. And in the same side pouch was, you guessed it, that little black and yellow dreamtube. catcher. One of the dangled strings had snapped. My sloppy craftsmanship already was causing the top to loosen up. But something compelled me to grab it along with my charger and I sat back down. I had 8.5 hours to kill. Put my chair back and closed my eyes. The previous week had been an important one. A complete break from, you know, my typical day-to-day routine. And probably more important, some forced introspection. I like to think of the trip as briefly leaving the heart of a city,

which when you're in a city, you obviously know you're there, but you can't really grasp the magnitude and scope of the place. Not until you leave it and see it from the outside. The gorgeous skyline with the lights and buildings that extend into the clouds, A picture you only get from a distance. That skyline from five miles away just doesn't feel like it could be the same place you live in. You navigate every day street by street with carhorns and cafes and people talking, coming and going. It just kind of flips life upside down for you.

It presents new perspectives and questions, and I felt like that's what I'd done, stepped outside that metaphorical city. And I had picked up a solid handful of new questions. There were plenty of firsts for me. Met some incredible people, tried new things, went new places, explored new foods. All made me realize that, you know, my worldview had slowly, over time, as tends to happen when unchecked, collapsed in on itself. That there was so much more, so much hope and opportunity, so much left.

to the extent that the flight back didn't feel like the end of a trip. It felt like the beginning of something new. Like I wasn't leaving these things. I was taking them with me. But here's the deal. Beginning only matter if you make them matter. Things only change when you make them change. When I was in junior high,

one of my teachers would sometimes joke that The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Half serious, but the point is important. It's not what we intend to do. It's what we breathe life into. It's what we allow to take shape. Let's say that little dream catcher in my hand was a magical entity that sucked out of the sky all the bad dreams and nightmares

and left me with only the good stuff. Let's say it was the gateway to all that was powerful, meaningful, and important, because removing what I don't want is critical. But what I'm then left with is mere opportunity, not guarantee. Dreams are only potential, and life is only what we make it. So growth must be a team effort between me and this little black and yellow defender of worlds, watchmen of the night. A duo. And we agreed. It reminds me of what truly matters and I show it that I'm not afraid to make something of what remains.

Of those ideals granted passage to the space behind my eyes. I have to live up to my end of the bargain. And sure, it will be messy at times. Shaky, sloppy, ungraceful. But that isn't a problem. It's par for the course. Plus my lack of elegance will get no sympathy from my unraveling black and yellow ball of string and disordered beads.

The goal is not perfection. It's organized chaos. It's a commitment to the unknown to taking the pieces and building something with them even when we don't understand what it will become. And as the pilot, Philip's voice interrupted my sleep through the inner calm, letting us know to prepare for landing,

I realized the magic of where I'd just been and how it would evolve into the road ahead. That when we know in our hearts life is pointing us a certain direction, when we've separated the good dreams from the bad, we are halfway there. Now we must have the courage to realize what's possible. To be strong enough to stand up when we have something to say. To embrace what calls to us to explore where our paths may lead. To get up and dance when the music plays. To stop holding back tears when they must fall.

To smile when our hearts intend. To leave the old stories and narratives behind and to step beyond our egos. and towards our authenticity. This is how we make sure that the dream catchers' work is not in vain. It's how we make the most of this gift we've been provided. And so we sat in a circle on a beautiful fall morning to build dream catchers.

Maybe not to collect the bad dreams, But to remind ourselves that it was okay, no, necessary, no, everything to let ourselves make the good dreams, reality. The road to this moment wasn't an easy one. There were times where you thought you knew, but simply didn't. There were plans made that drastically differed from the one's fate had prepared. There were days that made you question yourself, your beliefs, that made you ask, what is my purpose? Look, to live is to have felt these things, asked these questions, to have seen firsthand the discrepancy between what we draw up and how life was. unfold. And I think about this discrepancy often. The swings and misses, they hurt. You know,

that quick shiver you feel down your spine when thinking about the wrong turns made, the tugging at your heartstrings when reflecting back on things said or perhaps worse, left unsaid. It's easy to get lost in that feedback loop. Letting the past dictate the present, letting yet, Yesterday define today. But here's what I've come to see as the truth. To experience the things that make life beautiful. We have to be vulnerable in a way we otherwise wouldn't. Open ourselves up to an unknown that, you know,

we could have skipped altogether if we really wanted to. All that pain, all that hurt the past provided, could very easily be the reason you shut down, the reason you play small. That hell you walk through could be your justification for never stepping out into the chaos of life again. That would at first glance appear to make sense. Seem ideal, even.

But that pain could also be the reason you look around, you and say after all that, after experiencing everything life through with me, I'm still here. And as I stand here now, I'm looking out at an array of possibility that is infinite. I'm equipped with an understanding and a worldview that was once foreign to me. I'm armed with the perspective that has changed my life for the better. By stepping out into the often dangerous, brutal, unforgiving world, I have elevated myself. And that has made all the difference. And while it may feel intuitive to run from a reiteration of yesterday's pain,

it's wisdom that urges us to instead use that pain. as a multiplier the key to something more something miraculous not to cower because we once endured it but to stand tall because we overcame it and that's what we often miss we can think back to the adversity sure but we're often unable to see how that adversity shaped us our own strength it's never going to scream out at us. It's never going to let us know it's there. We have to take the time to acknowledge its presence. We have to peer over our shoulders to see how far we've traveled. We'll always have obstacles before us. That if we don't stop and assess, we won't see that the

obstacles have gotten bigger. Not because life's gotten harder, but because our own evolution, evolution has permitted us to step into bigger arenas. It has equipped us to take on larger adversaries. A simple willingness to be vulnerable has become the flame that lit up your soul. So the question is, will you step out? Will you see that vulnerability not as a crack in the foundation or a chink in the armor,

but as to love, it requires accepting a susceptibility to being hurt. To play the game requires an acceptance that you just might come up short. To bet on yourself means understanding that you might fall right on your face. To want more than you have now means acknowledging that you might be humbled

along the way. This is what it means to live, giving a piece of yourself in order to acquire that which means the most. The torturous, often counterintuitive willingness to step out into the darkness of night when your heart races and your mind moves a million miles a minute, that's vulnerable. That is power. And it's an important. And it's an important. investment in a tomorrow that otherwise would not have been available to you. You are not your past. You are the wisdom derived from its lessons. The courage removed from its trials.

And the hurt, that hurt that was perhaps at one point the only thing you felt, it's not your reason to shrink into yourself. It's your reason to step back out. To say to the universe, I have the strength to again dance with the unknown. To risk the short-term discomforts that life often hands out like candy in exchange for the chance years from now to look at your reflection and say, I got back up. I did the hard thing. I followed my heart. I wandered into that darkness to obtain the wondrous reality that is for a time concealed.

I did that. So love again, grow again, try again, build again, believe again, see again, feel again, step out into the world, world again, this is who you are. Underneath the fear and insecurity, underneath all those reasons to not go, there lives the beginning of the miracle that is life. And it won't be easy. The timing will never feel perfect, but the question will always exist. It will always exist within an arm's reach of where you stand.

Can you be that vulnerable? Can you be that courageous? And not just when things are going well, but amidst the turmoil, the chaos, the self-doubt, when your memory only wants to play highlight reels of where things went wrong, where you swung and missed, Will you choose to see those moments not as the chains that confine you, but as the strength that elevate you?

Will you be vulnerable enough to give away some of you in order to expand and transform?