You Need to Train Your Brain to Overcome ANYTHING [Here's How]

I'm going to share a really vulnerable story with you today because I've shared this story with a few people close to me, other entrepreneurs that express that when I shared this with them, it helped them get through a tough time a lot faster. The story goes back a few years ago when I went through a really hard time. I went through a hard time where a few business projects didn't work out. I lost a few million dollars, which hurts, by the way. And I started to doubt myself. And I started to wonder if my successes were lucky breaks. I started to wonder if maybe I wasn't that good at being an entrepreneur. And I wondered if my best days as an entrepreneur were behind me. And as a result of going through that time, I would just call it like a losing record for a while, a slump, if you will, that lasted about 18 months. I started to doubt all of the projects and all the opportunities that were coming my way. I didn't realize that my mind was stuck in a negative place until I was driving around the city of Austin with one of my new team members. And we were driving around the city for about 30 minutes. And during this mini tour of Austin, I was sharing with him just some things I observed in the city. I said things like, oh, this is an office building that I tried to buy a couple years ago. I really wish that I had bought that, but I got cold feet at the last minute. And then over here, here's a house that I sold. I wish I had never sold that house. We were driving around for about 30 minutes and he said to me, ryan, we've been driving in this car for 30 minutes and the entire time you have been telling me about things that you regret. Do you just drive around the city seeing things that remind you of failures? And I was like, no, I don't do that crap. Yes, I do. And it was the first time that I had awareness that I had a record playing in my brain. I had a loop going over in my mind about things that I regretted and failures from this 18 month slump. And it was the first time that I had the awareness that I had a voice in my brain that was telling me that I had failed. I started to notice that there was a record of wrongs in my mind. And I started to see that when a new opportunity was put in front of me, I doubted it. And I doubted it not because of the empirical data or the situation or the circumstance in front of me, but because of the voice that was going over and over in my head telling me, well, this One failed. So this one coming up next is going to be a failure, too. Our brains are there to protect us from dying, from death, from harm. That's our primary response instead of seeing joy or opportunity or future success. And when we have a failure or we experience a setback, our brain wants to avoid that pain from happening in the future. Obviously, it's kind of like when you get punched in the face by somebody. Your brain says, maybe we should hang out with that person anymore. But as entrepreneurs, when we experience a setback or a failure, our brain interprets that as a small death or a punch in the face. And our gut reaction to that is to avoid that situation again. But as entrepreneurs, our job is to pursue opportunities that other people can't see, which is really hard to do when our brain is in a loop about past failures. So. So during that same period in which I had a business failure, I had some investments not work out. I had wins as well. I launched a book that sold over a hundred thousand copies. One of my business doubled. One of my investments did extremely well. But my brain didn't play over a loop of those wins. My brain didn't play over wins of those successes being evidence of me being a successful entrepreneur. I only played over in my mind the failures and the setbacks. And as that was playing over and over in my mind, it would find more evidence for those thoughts to be true. When you think you're a failure or you think something is going to cause permanent damage to your reputation or your career, and the brain wants to avoid that, it finds more evidence for why something is a bad idea or something is not safe. It's funny how a little piece of code can get planted into your brain and it can run rampant, finding more evidence for that negative thought to be true. And that's what was happening with me. A new opportunity would come in front of me, and I would doubt that it would work. I would doubt that I had the capabilities of making that thing a success. I tell you that because I work with thousands of entrepreneurs, hundreds of entrepreneurs who are millionaires, as a result of going through my content or going through our trainings or listening to my podcast or watching my videos, and every time I share the story with people, someone can relate. Because whether it is a failed product launch or it's a negative review or it's a competitor passing you or it's a product not working or a past business failure, it's really easy to fall into the trap of that being evidence of you failing in the future, too. And it's very easy to fall into the trap of letting that thought hold us back from pursuing the next opportunity. I shared this story with a friend of mine, and I told him, you know, I might be psychologically projecting on you right now, but I hear you expressing to me doubts about this business that you really want to start, that you really want to do. And the doubts are all based in things in the past that didn't work out. He was telling me about a business that he wanted to start that he felt really passionate about. And every time we would talk about the opportunity for him to move forward, he would reference back to something from three or four years ago that didn't work out, that had nothing to do with this project. It had nothing to do with the opportunity in front of him. It had nothing to do with the strategy that he was going to implement. But he had a reference point from three or four years in the past that he used as evidence to doubt the opportunity that was in front of him. I think we've all experienced this to some extent. We've all experienced something that we wanted to do, but immediately upon feeling the excitement of the opportunity, we drowned it out with doubt because we have some unrelated failure in the past that we don't want to repeat, because the pain of that failure was so great that we don't want to experience that again. And the interesting thing is that most of us go through life collecting these. We collect this large data of evidence of why we might fail. If you've been trying to start a business or you've been on the path of entrepreneurship, and you are inevitably going to experience setbacks and failures, it's part of the process. And if we let those collect and we let them matter about ourselves, if we allow them to say what we're worth or what we're capable of, we will never move forward. We will instead make the tape louder. We'll give that voice in our brain more evidence and more kindling for the fire that is burning to tell us why we can't do the thing that's in front of us. And the irony of all this is that it's the thoughts that we are practicing that make the evidence that we are perceiving true or false. I think this is why there are so many people who know about entrepreneurship, who know all of the strategies, who know all of all of the different ways that everybody else is experiencing success, and yet we have more entrepreneurs than we know what to do with. I wish it wasn't the case that the success that we Experience as entrepreneurs is a direct reflection of how we view ourselves and the thoughts that we are thinking. I wish that was not the case, but I've experienced in my own life that how I view myself and how I view my own capabilities and my own talents determines whether or not I can take advantage of my own skill sets and my own opportunities. And the only way that I was able to get through that time and come out of it the other side, having more confidence and more drive and more optimism, was by recognizing that I was stuck in that loop in the first place. I really wish that I could share with you a very quick hack for getting through this, but the answer through it is a lot more.

Well, airy fairy. And it's that accepting the losses and accepting the failures as just being part of the process and realizing that it has nothing to do with you or how anybody perceives you was my way of getting through it. I once heard it said that in your 20s, you spend your time worried about what other people think about you. In your 30s, you learn not to care what people think about you. And in your 40s, you learned that nobody was thinking about you in the first place. And when I heard that, I wondered if I could get that lesson faster, could I learn that lesson before I was in my 40s? I'm 34 now, and I've started to learn that nobody's thinking about me. Everybody's thinking about themselves. I don't think about other people. I think about myself, think about my own failures, think about my own past regrets. I don't think about others. When somebody that I care about has a big loss in business, I don't care. I don't think less of them. I'm like, all right, next opportunity up, you're going to be fine. And I realize that that's how other people saw me, too. In baseball, they say that the best pitchers are the ones with short memories. They're the ones that can go out and forget about the home run that they gave up the game before. They're the ones that can go out and say, it doesn't matter that I just gave up a base hit, I just got to get this guy out. And entrepreneurship is so much like that. We are going to go through days in which we want to quit. We are going to have times when people say things about us that don't feel good. But it is having the short memory and focusing on what is right in front of us that allows us to take the next logical step forward. But when we're playing over in our minds, again and again, the failures of the past, it is almost impossible for us to take the next step forward. The way we get through these hard times and these ruts is by actually giving ourselves permission to fail. I read a book recently called the Last Word on Power. I read this book because it was my friend Brooke Castillo's favorite book, and she says it radically changed her life. And in this book, the author suggests that when we pick a goal, we first must accept the fact that there's a high likelihood that we will fail and choose to pursue the goal anyway, even though the failure rate may be high. Because if we recognize that the goal is not the point, but the goal is an anchor point to align our focus to move forward, that's the win. Because if we view life as different when we achieve the goal, then we are in resistance to the experience of life that we are having right now. And the weird irony of entrepreneurship is that most of us get into this game because we don't like our lives today. We're not happy with the amount of money we're making right now. We don't like the job that. That we are in right now. So we go about the journey of doing something different to change our lives, all the while feeling in resistance to where we are right now in life. And so we are in a constant state of dissatisfaction that is no place to operate from when we are pursuing a goal. And so the way around that is to say this is my goal, and I will probably fail on the way, and I might even fail in the goal, but yet this is a worthy goal for me to pursue. But on a daily basis, regardless of what happens and regardless of what the outcome is. When you can take that sort of a mindset, then you can say, it might be this business, or it might be another business that I come up with on the road to that goal, or it might be something that I can't even see right now, or as a result of me being on this path, I will meet someone else who will open up a door, and maybe that will be the thing that takes me through. But it does not matter, because I'm here for the journey and the experience. Experience and the person that I will become along the way. That's the win. And the great thing about that is that when that is the focus, then it doesn't matter what the result is. We're fully present in the experience, in the unfolding of the business and the journey as it is, because we are the same person whether we succeed or we fail when the goal is just to align our focus so that we become the person that is capable of achieving that goal, then we have won from the get go. And again, the irony of that is when you can operate from that mindset, the goal becomes inevitable. But only then when the goal is, I'm gonna become the person that can do this and I'm gonna get through the hard times because I know I will have them and I will become the kind of person that can overcome those challenges, then your success is inevitable. It was only when I became aware of the tape playing over in my mind and I said, I am willing to accept these losses. And I am willing to say I accept where I am and I am now going to move forward with this new set of opportunities. That was the only way that I could move through it. I don't know how to make you have that realization. I don't know how to flip the script and make you turn the page on between what was and what can be, except to remind you that you are closer to what you want than you have ever been. We always are. Tomorrow you will be even closer because you will have even more information, even even more experience, even more relationships. And when you can finally accept the loss and say, I am now going here and I will deal with what comes up along the way, then you have all of the evidence, all of the data, all the relationships that will unfold and open for you to help you pursue that. I believe we live in a, in a universe that conspires for our good, for us to accomplish what it is that we want, for us to line up with the goal that we have and to accomplish it. Once we fully accept where we are and believe where we are going, there's no lack of information, there's no lack of relationships. But you have to be willing to see them. And so what I encourage entrepreneurs to do is, is to start collecting evidence that what they want is possible. Whether that is a billion dollar empire or a million dollar business or an eight figure exit or 100,000 followers. If you can start seeing all of the data and the information that you're processing as evidence for it rather than evidence for your success, that's when you'll win. And that's when you will have the firepower internally to, to actually do the work required. And the beautiful thing is when you believe it, the work is no longer a grind. Grinding and hustle is something that we do to overcome the fear of failure and the doubt that we experience. But when you actually believe it. Every step forward feels fun because it's evidence that what you want is getting closer. And it can be like that. I hope you get this lesson faster than it took me because it took me years. And I might need this lesson again in the future. But where I'm at right now is believing again that everything that I want is possible and starting to see doors open that make all of it inevitable. And I wish the same for you. If I can be a resource for you on your journey, I'd consider it a privilege. I hope you decide to subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment below. Thanks for watching. I'm rooting for you.