Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - NEVER GIVE UP ON YOURSELF | Powerful Morning Motivation

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

"It's never too late to be who you might have been." - George Eliot In this inspiring episode, we kick off with a powerful quote from George Eliot: "It's never too late to be who you might have been." This episode is a deep dive into the idea that our pasts do not have to define our futures. Through personal stories and insights, I explore how we often bind ourselves to our previous mistakes, identities, and experiences, mistakenly believing that they dictate the trajectory of our lives. I share my journey and those of others who have dared to break free from the chains of their past to forge new paths for themselves. We discuss the psychological barriers that hold us back, including fear, guilt, and the comfort of familiarity, and how to overcome them. This episode is a call to action for anyone feeling stuck or pigeonholed by their history, reminding us that every day presents a new opportunity for change and growth. Join me in this motivational journey as we embrace the possibility of change, the importance of self-forgiveness, and the endless potential of the human spirit. This episode is a tribute to the belief that our futures are unwritten and that with courage and determination, we can become the architects of our destinies. YouTube: youtube.com/yourworldwithin Newsletter: yourworldwithin.com/newsletter

George Eliot wrote, it's never too late to be who you might have been. See, you are a storyteller, a creator of narratives. In what you see when you look in the mirror are stories. Stories about your past. I am the type of person who does X, right? X being an accumulation of history, of things you've done, you used to do. And in theory, you know, there's truth to that. We are what we repeatedly do. But here's where it becomes a problem.

When you confine yourself to that narrative. When you become stuck there, when you are unable to become something new because you're telling yourself that's not who I am. Just because that was the narrative doesn't mean it always has to be. You can always pick up the pen. and start writing a new chapter. I put on a green shirt last year, last month, every day last week. Therefore, I am someone who wears green shirts. Therefore, tomorrow, I must put on a green shirt.

It's who I am. Seems a tad ridiculous, right? Until you change the example a little bit. You know, I was called out recently for saying, I am a runner trying to put on weight. Building muscle in the past has been a challenge for me, right? Because I am a runner. And I was.

I was running 7 to 10 miles a day. Well, now, in the present, the story's changed. I've essentially stopped running, at least distance running. I'm focusing on the gym. And in a group setting with my trainer there, I recently said, it's been challenging for me to put on weight as a runner. He looks up and he says, ah, limiting belief. You're still identifying yourself as what you were.

And he's dead on. 100% right, that's an old story. I ran long distance for years. Had a quote unquote distance running body type for years. So what? Therefore, I'll continue to have a distance running body composition, right? It's the exact same thing as the hypothetical green shirt. Just because you were that doesn't mean you have to be that.

Just because that's what you did doesn't mean it's how you must identify. No, it's time to flip the script. And when you start unpacking this idea, you know, it gets crazy quickly. Like you realize how many areas in our lives we create these limiting beliefs. How much we adhere to or shackle ourselves, tie ourselves to old narratives. They're everywhere, right? I make $80,000 a year. I'm looking for a new job that pays about $80,000 a year.

It's like, why 80? It's just as arbitrary as 25, which is just as arbitrary as 175. Like, why can't you aspire to be more? Why don't you feel deserving of more? I'm not talking about snapping your fingers, right? There's no magic involved in this. It's very practical. It's when you decide something is what you deserve

or something is what you're going to be, my friends, that's what you will get. You know, you have to decide you are worthy. You have to improve your worth. You have to see yourself as something different before the world will ever adhere to that or give you something new. You know what one of our greatest superpowers is? The reminder that we can change, that we don't have to concede or accept anything.

If it isn't adding value in some way, it can be changed, transformed, mitigated. I think the issue is that sometimes we just forget that we are the ones telling this story. I was reminiscing recently about 2013, 2014. commuting to work from Boston to Worcester with a friend of mine. And you didn't particularly love the job, right? And so on the commute, we would, you know, joke around every day, you know, and I put joking in quotes because we were truly hoping for it, right? It's like, you know, wishing we'd get a flat tire or something would derail the commute.

And, you know, as time goes on, hindsight's 2020, you look back and you realize just how like weak and pathetic that is, like hoping for external circumstances to guide you where you most want to go because, you know, I won't speak for him, but me personally, I couldn't manufacture the courage to change, right? Not for a long time, at least. Because here's the deal. No one was forcing me a gunpoint to be there. I didn't have to do anything. It was as simple as the story I told myself was every day over and over again. This is what you're supposed to to do. It doesn't matter if you like it or not. Doesn't matter if it lights you up. Doesn't matter if this is the best use of your skill set. This is what you do. That was the

narrative playing in my head, right? And therefore, it's what I did. Changing that thought pattern was one of the most challenging things I've ever done, but it's unequivocally true. That at any point, I could have looked around and said, this isn't me. I'm going to start building a life that is. Eventually, I got there. It just took time. And to one of the the reasons I'm so passionate about, you know, trying to give others that nudge to empower people, to, you know, make change in their lives, as opposed to looking around and hoping outside circumstances, you know, push you to where you need to be. It all comes back to that idea that we have way more control than we think we do. We just have to be aware of the lines we draw around ourselves.

There are so many places where it's like, oh, we can't step over there. Why? I just never have. This is what I do. This is what I've done in the past, so this is what the future must look like. It's all story. Everything is story and any story can be changed or rewritten. No chapter must be a continuation of the rules from the prior chapter. See, as George Eliot states, it's never too late to be who you might have been.

to walk away from the narratives in your brain that confine you. When you know something's out of alignment, that's something we feel in our bones, by the way. We know deep down that that's the truth. We just need to understand that what's happening now is not a life sentence. We're not confined to reality as it is. Again, your superpower is the ability to reinvent yourself. Just as acquisition is valuable and necessary, so is the ability to walk away. And on top of that, the ability to walk away usually precedes one's ability to let the important things in.

You're only stuck if you believe you are. You're only free if you believe you are. Therefore, what you believe is not some supplemental things sprinkled on top of reality as it exists. What you believe determines what reality means to begin with. If you remain calm in the midst of great chaos, it's the surest guarantee that it will eventually subside. Julie Andrews. One of the most powerful things about intentionally immersing yourself in difficult situations is that it prepares you for the inevitable adversity that will come your way when it's unexpected, unplanned. the obstacles life places before all of us.

That's why I so often draw a line from physical fitness and athletics to the real world. Doing difficult training, for me, particularly endurance training or interval training, is that creates a level of exhaustion I tend not to encounter anywhere else, right? It's a phenomenal practice at separating out what must be done in the moment from how we feel. It uncouples those two things. It's taming chaos in a controlled environment that improves our ability to handle stress out in the world.

And what keeps pulling me in is when you're in it, going from set to set 45 minutes straight with no rest. There are these particular moments where your heart rate's elevated, your body is fatigued, you're pushing your physical limit, and under a different set of circumstances,

you'd stop. Maybe you'd take a breather, because that's what makes sense to do. But this is what's powerful, right? In those moments, you learn to float above all of that. It's excess. It's noise. It doesn't matter, right? You're separating anything that isn't the question

what's next? You don't have to perform any miracles or break any records, no, only find a way to calmly engage in one exercise after the next, one step after another. Your job is to not stop. And again, this is a microcosm of what we deal with out in the world, when the world is chaotic and stressful. When our minds are worried about what's in front of us, because we aren't sure how much longer we can sustain what's happening in the present moment. That's when we get worked up in frantic, sometimes erratic in our decision making. But this reminds you you can be stronger than your environment, your circumstances. You can say no to the chaos that's attempting to pull you in.

As Victor Frankel has spoken, you may not have control over your circumstances. But you always have control over your attitude. What does this mean? Well, it is the incentive, the green light to step forward. You don't need to think about how you wish you felt. You don't need to think about how you might feel 10 minutes from now. No, the goal is breathe and consider simply what must be done. This idea, it translates beautifully when something goes wrong at work.

When a relationship becomes fractured, when you feel slighted by life, the temptation is to let it all consume. But if you're able to breathe in to compose yourself and focus only on what needs to happen next, there is nothing that can hold you back. When you don't relinquish your control to outside circumstances, you have everything you need to effectively navigate through them. Nothing matters. Nothing but your ability to carry out the task at hand. To conquer that adversity that is emotion in the midst of difficulty.

Simplicity, as the saying goes, is the ultimate sophistication, and it doesn't get simpler. than this. Breathe, execute, and you will find your way home. You know, one of the hardest things to do is to walk away from a situation that's just okay. That's fine. It's doable, livable. There's an idea that the enemy of great isn't its inverse. The enemy of great is not average or insignificant or, I don't know, Throw in any similar word. No, the enemy of grape is good. Why? Because it's incredibly easy to rationalize good.

It's incredibly easy to sit back and tell yourself, hey, things aren't currently broken, so why touch them? Leave it alone. It's why it's a dangerous place to be. Comfort doesn't, on its own, initiate action or evolution. there has to be some sort of stressor to ignite the flame. And I'll get a response, you know, every now and then, truly in good faith, asking, well, what's wrong with average?

Why can't I just be? Not everyone can be LeBron James or Adele or Denzel Washington. Eddie, this convo sends people down a path of false hope. Well, hear me out. Because I'm certainly not saying everyone can be LeBron James. but they can most definitely be LeBron James in their own world and instead are settling for some sort of bench roll. I'm not saying if you're not a movie star making $20 million a film you've lost.

I'm merely pointing out that perhaps you haven't even found the courage to star in your own movie, the one that is your life. And I can't speak for every human being. on the planet here, but I most certainly can speak for myself. The easiest thing for me, the temptation I always find myself grappling with, is the temptation to stay where I am. To accept things as they are, pass change off as something that's just a little bit out of my control. That's what my lizard brain always seems to want.

It's really nice to not have to feel the burden of knowing I can change things around me. Right, that prospect of creating my own friction, my own chaos so that I can, in a sense, tame it and elevate myself, that can be overwhelming. That's stressful. But you know what it is at the end of the day? It's thrilling. It's meaningful. And it may have taken me years to understand, but I'd trade a safe life for a meaningful one any day. It was my coming to understand that statistically, we'd be able to be able to be a meaningful one any day.

should not be here. The odds are so small that you're alive listening to this, that the word improbability doesn't do it justice. It's a miracle in every sense of the word, and so what do we do about that? How do you explain a feeling? How do you explain the cost of not going, of fewer sunrises, less laughter, untapped creativity, unwacked paths, journeys never started, You can't, which is why you have to go. Good is not detrimental because it's insufficient. It's detrimental because it gives you just enough to make stepping out into the world feel illogical. It's a warm blanket keeping you comfortable enough to forfeit that feeling you truly crave.

And I hope it's clear. My take in this is not that we are. aren't enough. It's that we have to be reminded that our biological compass points towards survival. And survival is a game of stagnation. Our souls, on the other hand, they need to run. To seek out the magnificence of life. And the more times we can be tapped on the shoulder and reminded of this, the better.

I don't dream of new horizons because I'm ungrateful. I've learned to chase them down because I'm so grateful that I refuse to forfeit the gift. To leave my curiosity packaged and confined, I want to bask in life's abundance before my time here is up. And that's just it. That's the whole point. The friction between the knowing and the doing. Making that happen, physically bringing yourself there.

It's not an easy thing. Certainly not as easy as putting your feet up and rationalizing this status quo. It's why I listen to voices that inspire me, read stories that teach me, I talk to people who lift me up. Going is harder than staying, but meaning resides in the going. So no, it's not about being LeBron James. It's about getting off the bench and at least shooting a shot. Whatever a shot means to you, wherever you are. Because if you don't, you'll never experience the thrill of having made one,

of having felt that success. It's not about what you're doing. It's about what you're leaving on the table. Is average terrible? I don't know. Is a Ferrari never taken out of its garage terrible? Not really, it's still a Ferrari, but it won't experience the very thing

that Ferrari was designed to experience. Again, how do you quantify that? You can't. Not until you go. So here's the stepping out of whatever the present definition of normalcy is in your world. Maybe not frantically changing the world around you, but certainly questioning the good, questioning yourself, questioning the rogeron.

Has the routine overshadowed the reason you put the routine into place? Has the way things are come to outweigh the way you'd like them to be? Has good become a distraction, misdirecting you away from both, life's brilliance and your own. Find something to make yours. I connect every few months with some of my good friends to strategize, kind of reflect back on the previous quarter plan for the new one with each of our businesses,

kind of share ideas, stuff like that. And I was chatting with my friend Keith about life before he found success in what he's doing now, the struggle and the turbulence he faced. as well as ultimately his decision, and that's entirely what it was, to turn things around. And I've talked about his backstory before, so I'm not going to get too much into it, but essentially he grew up in a very negative environment. Dealt with a ton of adversity, but got through it.

Started his own national business, installing and repairing commercial pizza ovens, and the guy's just crushing. And, you know, our conversation in that moment wasn't so much about the doing it was more on the overcoming and how mentally we had to recreate ourselves to have any chance of moving beyond what we knew. I've talked about it a little before. Kids are simply not taught in school how to thrive,

how to build, how to ask more of themselves in the world. They're taught to follow instructions, to do what they need to do in order to pass the exam, to progress to the next level. Then there's a gray area, because I'm not saying this is totally valueless, but I am saying that anything beyond that requires a reworking of sorts.

You ask anyone who stepped out of that cycle and they'll tell you the mental and psychological shift that needed to take place was almost overwhelming, right? It's a lot, but it's imperative. I recently looked up the word entrepreneurship, and this is the definition. The activity of setting up a business or businesses taking on financial risk in the hope of profit.

And in my mind, it is the risk precisely that's challenging that brings us so much pain, but also contains within it the reward. It's one of the craziest dilemmas we face. You know, you'll have to endure some of the worst times of your life, but because of that, you'll get to experience highs that would otherwise have been almost completely improbable. We have to rework the thinking that says discomfort equals run away.

It's like, no, discomfort equals the price of something better, and sure it's by no means mandatory, but it's where the upside lives. You have to train yourself to step out into the chaos with the expectation of taming it. And yeah, everything could go wrong, but also everything could go right. And just imagine.

Imagine what that would look like. That possibility alone validates the risk. We just need to convince ourselves. And that risk, by the way, is not just financial. In fact, most of the time it's not. It takes a variety of shapes in our lives. You run the race, you risk losing. You go up and talk to the girl, you risk rejection.

You pick up and move somewhere new. You risk winding up somewhere you don't want to be. And maybe temporarily things do fall apart, but maybe you win the race. Maybe you find the love of your life. Maybe you relocate to the happiest place you've ever called home. Calculated risk is the beginning of everything that matters. And so back to the Convo. We were talking about the different risks we've taken,

how some chapters were fun, some were challenging, and some some were both, and how for me there was even, from time to time, a conversation where I was asking myself whether it was really worth it. You know, when you're uncomfortable, the mind wants to do one thing, get rid of the discomfort. And I had to convince myself, remind myself that I'm someone who risks good to pursue great. Risk hurts. And somewhere in that conversation was when Keith said he remembers the exact point. the risk became worth it.

The discomfort became easier to manage. We're so used to taking orders to playing scared that the incentive just wasn't there until Keith's words, it became mine. The most invigorating thing he ever did was find a pursuit to call his own. That's powerful. His business injected him with a new energy

and in essence a new life because he suddenly had a stake in the game. in the game. And I think that's what so many of us in so many areas are missing. The risk appears bigger when it's not counterbalanced by something meaningful. So find something to make yours. The simplicity there is beautiful. Complex ideas expressed in simple ways are always worth holding on to, right? We are programmed to lose because we are programmed to live according to someone else's standard, to think small, to ask ourselves how do we not screw up? But when you can step outside that little self-imposed circle, and instead ask yourself what's something I can create that is my

own, something I care about, that I can nurture, invest a part of me into, that's when life really starts paying dividend. You're not existing, you're living. Or as I've recently discussed, you're empowering yourself to not just sit in the room, but be in the room fully. I use entrepreneurship as the model for this discussion, because that's been such a huge part of my life, where I've been injecting my time and attention and yeah, risk. But the point is not that everyone needs to stop what they're doing and become an entrepreneur, that's one path of many, obviously.

The point is that there is a risk-reward dynamic in entrepreneurship that we should all understand, extract and inject into our own lives where it best applies. We've learned to settle in so many ways that we must know there is tremendous value in asking what is it in my life I want to invest in? Make mine. Give myself the opportunity to experience the excitement of defining the things I care about

and watching them grow. Whether your current arena is, Your current arena is entrepreneurship or motherhood, fatherhood, academics, a particular relationship, some combination of these or anything else. To make magic out of the mundane requires we first make it ours. We take ownership, responsibility for the journey, we accept the risk and chase down the rewards. You can do amazing things when you realize what you're capable of and commit to its manifestation. So in a world where, yes, we are conditioned to fail, step out from those subtle shackles of learned helplessness.

You are anything but helpless. It's just that you've yet to reach out and pull your dreams into your orbit. You've yet to put a stake in the ground and say this matters and it's time to see it through. Because once you do that, the good stuff begins. was a point a handful of years back where I had one of the most important breakthroughs of my lifetime. And I've talked about this with people close to me, family and friends, to clients, business associates. And it seems like there's a commonality amongst all of us. And maybe, depending on the person that happened in a different way, certainly at different times. But everyone,

at one point or another comes face to face with the realization that they have a tremendous amount of control over their lives. And it's at that moment, you know, where one becomes empowered. It's like you realize you have the key to the cell you've been locked in this whole time. And at that moment, one is prompted to ask, well, why not start living like it? You know, there will always be responsibility and sacrifice in life. But that awareness makes one ask, well, what am I sacrificing for?

Where am I going? Am I spending time with people that lift me up? Am I doing things that contribute to a greater vision? And perhaps most importantly, am I even living a life that is true to myself? Because I'll tell you something, our time here flies by. Not only will next month, next year, next decade be here before you know it, but it's not even guaranteed. And if one doesn't take the time to look in the mirror and ask the tough questions,

life will keep on ticking. Time will not stop. No one's going to walk up to you and point out the fact that you're just going through the motions here. No, that one's on you. You have to see that this world can become what you decide it will be. That you are presented the tools, but tools require an architect and a creator. Tools require someone in seeing what is not yet there to pick them up and build. And so maybe this is the time for you to ask, what am I building?

Where am I going? And when my day starts, both feet hit the ground and I walk out the door. What am I moving towards? Maybe today is the day you realize that there are parts of your life that don't need to be there, that you can cut away. People that don't deserve your time, that don't elevate you or contribute to your well-being. Maybe there are places you're going because that's where you've all. always gone, things you're doing because that's what you've always done. But you don't need to live life on repeat.

If you're not happy about it, how about doing something to change it? There is nothing in your life that can't be adjusted or altered. Just like yesterday is now a story, so is the idea that you are confined to a specific set of parameters. Break down those walls. See things not as they are, but as they can be if you have the courage to walk away from old stories and characters. What if today you created a new ending, one that lights you up in the morning, contributes to your sense of purpose when you close your eyes at night? Again, remember, no one will come up and hand that to you.

No one will let you know you're selling yourself short. That transformation must be internally prompted. And so I hope you'll ask. I hope you'll ask the questions that you've been neglecting for far too long. I hope today can be the first page in an entirely new chapter. A chapter in a story that is truly an entirely yours.