Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero - SELF LOVE | Positive Morning Motivation | LISTEN EVERY DAY!

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

“I am going to make everything around me beautiful - that will be my life.” - Elsie De Wolfe

I'm going to make everything around me beautiful. That will be my life. Elsie DeWolf. Changing for the better is not about the creation of miracles. It's about choosing to see the ones that already exist. Life is hard, but coincidentally, hard things tend to be the gatekeepers to the important one. We are let in. when we bring ourselves finally to shake hands with

and embrace the very things we once saw as the problem. Whereas Ryan Holiday has famously put it, the obstacle tends to be the way. How funny, how counterintuitive, how upside down life can see. But I think that's it. Sometimes it's not even that we're looking, at the wrong things. So we're looking at the right things the wrong way.

Avoiding the call to step further into the world and deeper into ourselves. Terrified of scraping our knees on the climb, we burden ourselves. With the much more painful choice of staying at the bottom of the mountain and looking up. But the scars we've collected and will continue to collect on the way, up. They do not make you less than. No, they are what make you beautiful. You see yourself and those scars is imperfect. I see someone who has lived, who has taken risks, fallen, and bounced back. I see character and wisdom and elegance and boldness. In an imperfect world, those quote unquote flaws and scars may, funny enough, just be the closest thing to perfection we'll ever experience.

It's from our courage to step out, our willingness to crack that we flourish. Living necessarily includes a deterioration over time. But a deterioration of the external, because the internal, the internal, it stays, young. It's underneath that forever crumbling world around us that we find the divine. It is because of our scars, not to spite them, that we grow our wings. They aren't to be feared but coveted. You are more because of the mistakes you made, the challenges you face, the adjustments you had to see through. and I believe our value increases with each tear and break, resembling the Japanese art of Kinsugi,

where a pot that breaks and is put back together with golden lacquer holds more value than the original unblemished piece. See, Wolf says, I'm going to make everything around me beautiful. And I think this simply calls for an optical adjustment, a shift in relations between things and how you perceive those things. Me, I don't want the whitest, cleanest, newest shoes. As far as I'm concerned, there's very little beauty to preserve there. I want shoes with worn souls from the miles and miles they can.

carried me. Holes from the distance I had to walk to find the people who add joy to my life. Cracks from running in the rain while the rest of the world stayed inside. I want my imperfections to show that I lived while I was here. So from now on, let's stop conflating perfect. perfect and beautiful. Perfect is no skin in the game. Perfect is standing forever in the doorway looking out.

Perfect is dreaming and wishing and hoping, but never leaving. Because leaving is where our vision brushes up against a reality we may see as too big. No, we want not perfect but beautiful. We want scars and flaws and lessons and loss because from those things as difficult as they may be we're born again.

Imperfection is life and life is beautiful. So here's to more scuffed shoes and scraped knees, to walking and imperfect, yet beautiful road ahead. You ever wonder how much of you has materialized? Like if what F. Scott Fitzgerald says is true, and our lives are defined by opportunity, even the ones we miss, then how much remains in the ether?

And I don't think it's about playing a game of what if. You know, that would be endless. It would be self-defeating. No one's perfect. I don't even really think it's about making a right turn instead of a left. Because as long as you're moving and moving with conviction, life ultimately brings you where you need to be. But more, my concern is the steps never brought to people.

My ideas on the hatch, my opportunities, I either knowingly or unknowingly left on the shelf. Because it didn't seem real enough. Like a Broadway play between my ears, that as a spectator I knew would end. After all, that's what stories do. How much of ourselves have we cast aside as simply the things we don't say out loud?

At first, it's infinite. We've yet to be taught to limit because limits aren't things, their ideas, and ideas must be adopted. That's why they say some of life's best things were done by people too ignorant to know they were impossible, too naive of the notion that they couldn't say them out loud,

Then it's comparison. They have what I want, but it was meant for them and not me. How delusional to think I could have it. How crazy to think that life has yet to be written. And I am an author. My date is with normalcy in the box where I keep those things we don't say out loud. And then we look around and we see highlight reels. We see awards and vacations and smiles.

But we don't stop to think maybe they're just like me. Maybe they're people who struggle and question themselves and doubt the road ahead. No, it must be the past diverged. They took happiness and I took those things we don't say out loud and then there's everyday life when things don't go as planned When the world presents curveballs and you haven't learned to hit off speed so you feel small and you feel Inadequate and ill-equipped and you could reach out but that's not cool. That's not right. That's something that you don't say out Loud but we keep it in like all in and eventually becomes the if onlys and I wish I had it's the quiet envy gazing longingly towards those who just cared less who realized maybe life's not as serious as we make it out to be, who turn thoughts to things, not by burying,

but by embodying them. And maybe that's the trick to unlock the gate, keeping your perceived reality from the possibility of a new one. The one you could create, if only you promoted your fleeting thoughts to forward progress. See, dreams can fail to come to fruition in two places, in your head and outside of it. But at least outside, it has a chance. At least, outside, you can take the common, normal, everyday background and make it the back drop to your movie where you play a lead role. But it must be accepted and acknowledged, not thought of or even whispered, but screamed so that the details and the trivialities that exist now work for you. That's right, they are now yours. Not because you thought about it, but because you reached out

a hand and you took. You asked the world for something. And in life, it will always be be true that you don't get what you do not ask for. So when you find yourself staring up a wall comprised of self-defeating narratives and manufactured limits, be ignorant, be irrational, be the reason your dreams have a chance. And when you look around and you see more and wonder why you don't have it, know that you can, you're allowed to, if you sacrifice you will, but you must believe you are worthy of Not in the back of your head where you keep your locker combo and movie quotes, but in reality, where words bounce off lips.

And when you feel like life is treating you unfairly, like they're happier or have it better, know that life is peaks and valleys, not just for you but for everyone. And how you internalize that and carry on makes the difference. And when you feel lost or stuck, you are not hopeless, but in progress. being broken down so that you can be reconstructed, stronger, better. Victory is not in hiding those struggles, but accepting them as the difference, as the reason you created the miraculous. Not because you had dreams, but because you said them.

It was never a runner. Until one day in grade school, I got running shoes and decided that I was. I never ran a successful business until I saw myself as an accomplished business owner. See, something I've realized through the years is that we are nothing more than the role we are playing. And every day, we are auditioning for a part. I'll never forget years back listening to some actors doing a Q&A session. and a film student asked one of them for some strategies and approaches to getting into character

and one of the actors who volunteers to answer he looks down at his feet looks back up and says it all starts with the shoes that we wear because from the ground up they define how we carry ourselves how we feel they allow us to embody a specific character

and sort of move forward taking on that persona. What he had just done must spell out the relationship between identity, the story that we've convinced ourselves we should live by, and the actions that we take. Our lives are defined

by the metaphorical shoes we wear. You can only be what you believe you are and you will never believe it until you own it, live it. Even though you haven't identified as something in the past today is different, the script is new. Just like an actor is not confined to his previous role, why would you be confined to yesterday? That abstract idea we used to bundle up recent events and make them tangible just so that they can act like an anchor. Oh, yesterday, I couldn't complete my workout, so I'm not. a runner. Yesterday I was shy at the conference so I'm an introvert. Yesterday I failed my math

test. I don't do math. Look my question is, is that right? Is it you? Or are those simply the shoes that you've chosen to wear? The role you were playing because it never fails. If that's how you think of yourself, that is positively the result you're going to get. Wanting something better, positive change, greatness, it requires more than wishful thinking. It requires a deliberate shift in mindset, a change in character, becoming something new. Maybe you're a millionaire. Maybe you're a millionaire with no money right now. Maybe you're a millionaire with a hell of a lot to learn. But if you don't believe you are right now at this very moment, you will never be one.

People always live up to the image that they have created of themselves. Period. How you think of yourself is what you'll get. We are actors. The majority of us playing the same role, the one we played yesterday and the day before and the day before. But if you could just convince yourself to be something new, to wear the shoes, to sing the song and dance, the dance, you'll evolve. You'll walk away from the fiction holding you back, just like the elephant tied to the plastic chair. You are not the problem. It's the shoes on your feet and the way that you think about them. And I suspect that it's time for a new role.

That morning, as I looked out the window, I could feel my increased heart rate. a sense of both excitement and anxiety that you can only really understand if you've lived it. I was worried about what people might think, what I might lose, what life might have in store for me, because that was all I knew to focus on. I'd programmed myself to do one thing, and when your one thing is worrying, it's inevitable that you see life through a lens of scarcity. Your setting is on maintain, meaning you protect the little you have as opposed to seeking more.

You play defense to keep the world out as opposed to the offense required to bring the world in so that it may be reshaping. That morning, cold, wet, gray, I was numb. But deep down, completely oblivious to me, there was a little fire too small to recognize. A spark of courage in its infancy. See at that moment, if someone asked me, can you even be scared and courageous at the same time? I would have said those two words do not go together.

We're talking night and day, fire and water black and white, but time's job is to reveal, and it has shown that there is no courage without fear. There is no fire, no matter how bright or powerful, that doesn't by default bring about those mysterious shapes, dancing in the shadows. If you want fire, great. But you must learn to dance

with what hides in the periphery. You must learn to go where your impulse begs you not to. And so that morning, I went to dance with my demons. What if the one thing holding you back in your life was you?

And look, I know the world is a complex, multivariable, unfair, sometimes even cryptic place. I've never said anything to the contrary. But what humans do so well, sometimes for good and sometimes to our detriment, is see life through stories, ideas. And whether you know it or not, you are playing by a set of rules. Right now. As you take this in, you have defined a set of parameters and deemed them acceptable.

Decided they are what you deserve. You've allowed for yourself a certain level of growth. A certain amount of happiness, a certain amount of time to do what you love. A certain expectation around the role of work in your life. A certain window of income you've identified as reasonable overall. A certain feeling. you get when you look in the mirror. And my objective is not to tell you that any of the above is good or bad.

It's to remind you that they are all stories. Our current state is not etched in stone. It's clumsily drawn on a dry erase board. Clumsily, because how could we know everything? We learn along the way in a dry raceboard, because there's never a moment in time in which you, cannot begin again. Think about that. Never. Good, bad, or in between, there is never a situation from which you can't emerge as something different, from which you can't choose to take a different path. Change the

narrative around you, your relationships, your job, your goals. But like the elephant tied to the chair with the rope, one must learn that it is not the chair holding them back, but their perception, their understanding of a supposed role in life. So as I drove away that morning, I wasn't leaving a physical place, but a mental constraint,

turning my back on a manufactured idea about who I was and what life would allow. Not in a snap. No, not all at once, but an adventure that would begin pulling back the curtains one by one. On all that I'd walked right by. See, the first step to getting more is understanding you've been accepting less. That is where new roads present themselves, and it is that new road that I want for you. That understanding that so much will be given to those with the courage to ask. So as you stand now, examine what you've been asking of life.

My hunch is that perhaps it's not enough. Perhaps there's more. Perhaps a new chapter is waiting to begin, and right now is when that first page gets turned. Joseph Campbell says that the cave you fear holds the treasure you seek. Why? Because to face the dancing shadows is to gain power over them. It shows our mind that reality is far less scary than our perceptual. of reality that no chain or lock or wall can be more debilitating than the mental

constraints we create by ourselves in our heads. It shows that the man guarding the door can just as easily be the one who unlocks it. And so what better a time than now to turn that key? step out and confront what was once nothing more than a vast emptiness. Jump into the cold water of opportunity that shocks us at first, creates pins and needles and discomfort, but ultimately provides a chance to acclimate to and navigate a foreign world. You, you just need to jump.

not a mountain but a foot. Enough to start earning that confidence, creating that self-trust, believing in yourself. So drive away. To the understanding that there is always another level if you want it. To the belief that nothing is outside the realm of possibility,

those boundaries can be redrawn. To the idea that no one tells you who you are or what you're capable of, the world doesn't give orders, it reacts to who you decide to be. To the awareness that possible victories always outweigh in magnitude the possible defeat. To the realization that who you were yesterday is in no way related to who you can be tomorrow. All chapters end, and you decide when that happens. Everything else belongs in the rear view. Success is knowing this. It's believing it, holding on when others would let go,

be reassured by the incremental nature of what's ahead. Zero miracles. Just the courage to begin. Just push the ball down the hill. Give life a chance to help you create momentum. No more thinking, worrying, worrying, procrastinating, just go. It's incredible how fast things change

when we grant ourselves that freedom, when we see all of the world that's open to us. But will you open your mind to that opportunity? I've said this before, and I'll say it again, nothing is sure in life, but you are guaranteed to lose if you don't go. It's to let falsehoods and debilitating stories guide your way. So stop letting these narratives tell you who you are and create reality with your feet.

Why? Because you can. Because you were meant for more. And because more starts now.