Credit Deserved - Acknowledge Your Wins and Stop Negative Talk

Most people spend their entire life stressed without ever giving a single thought as to what it is they really want or what's important to them. See, I'm here to cut through all that noise, connecting you to yourself and the life that you were meant to live. I used to slave away at a corporate job that I hated, but I broke through the social norms and pursued my passion. As a result, I own my own coffee company. I'm espresso sommelier, and I get to travel the world. You, too, can live a life that you love, but it starts with getting clear about what you want. It starts with a new decision. I'm your host, Donnie Rouse, and you're listening to the podcast One Life. Hi, guys. Donny Rouse here. And this podcast episode here is about giving credit where it is deserved. And when I am talking about credit, I'm talking about giving credit to yourself. It is so easy to beat up on yourself for where you think you should be. But whenever you're doing this, a lot of the time what you're doing is you're failing to acknowledge your wins. You're failing to acknowledge the gains that you've made over time. You're failing to acknowledge the fact that you are still in the fight and you are still throwing those punches. The inspiration from this podcast came from a session with my coach. We were looking at the area of control in my life, and she asked me the same question when we were working together about three or four months earlier. And she asked me, she said, hey, Donnie, I want you to rank your level, the level of control you feel in your life at that time. I gave myself a six. On that score. On that, for the score. And then this time when she. When she asked me that question, I thought about it for a while and I was like, well, I do feel like I know that I'm making strides. I know that I've been taking steps and all right, let me give myself one more point. I'll give myself a seven. When I gave myself that score and she made a lot, she kind of chuckled at it. And she goes, you are not giving yourself the credit you deserve. And she went on to describe, well, what exactly that meant. Like, what is having control of your life mean? Part of that definition was when things knock you down, you don't just take it and throw in the towel, but you get back up and you figure out a new way. You look towards a new path. And what it's doing is you're taking control of your own actions. What you have control, right? You can't control the world around you. You can only control your actions. You'll only control what you focus on. And when she reframed it in that way, it made me reflect on my life and made me look at my life from that third person. And with this new set of eyes, I saw that I was actually. I had a lot more control over my life than I was giving myself credit for because I was constantly making new decisions based on the feedback that I gotten. One of the perfect case in point is every part of my life really like the. The One Life blueprint. As well as cold ramen, we'll use cold ramen. So getting in, doing a reformulation, it's constantly getting feedback like, oh, this is not going to work because you're packaging, right? All right. Oh, God, I have to look for new packaging, right? Or this is not going to work because this ingredient flavor doesn't match the raw flavor that I'm using in my drink. Right? And so it's this. I could take it and say, like, oh, my gosh. Well, I guess it's not going to work, right? Or I could say, okay, well, all right. There has to be an answer. I know there is a way. And then looking for the answer and taking new action, never giving up. When I looked at it from that perspective, I saw that I actually was exercising a tremendous amount of control over my life. And as a result of that awareness, I started to get emotional as it sometimes. Well, as it not sometimes, it usually always happens because she's highlighting the things or she's making me aware of the things that I was not seeing or not recognizing in my own life, giving me grace where I was not giving myself grace. And the reason I am sharing this with you today is because chances are, you are not giving yourself the grace. Chances are you are being extremely hard on yourself and you are not acknowledging all the growth that you've had. And while you may think that it's a good thing, right, because you're like, oh, well, you know, it helps me do better. No, you don't benefit by beating yourself up, right? When you feel like shit, you're not going to take better action. So get that story out of your mind. It's bullshit, right? You want to feel good about the steps you're taking, the progress you're making, because it gives you more momentum, right? You can only build on success. You're not building unfairly. Yeah, you might. You know, it might. Having a failure might flip that switch to keep going for sure. But, you know, we. We don't want to put all of our focus on, on what's not working or what's wrong. So looking at that, and I, I'll leave one more, one more kind of insight for this. And this comes from working in my life categories when looking at my life categories. And I, I, this one, this particular category is with regard to physical health, because it is one of the areas of my life where I mastered looking at that category. And I was rating my categories on my Wheel of Life. And if you don't know what a wheel life is, wheel life is where literally you assign numerical score to every area of your life. And the purpose of this exercise is so that you can know where you are. So this way, you know where you have to improve and what has to be done so you can close that gap. For my physical health, I had rated myself, I think I put myself like a seven. And it's funny, because most people, if they were, you know, if they see me, they're like, what do you talk about, seven? Well, one, you look great. You look younger than your age, your body looks insane. And they'll be like, well, what do you mean? And what I mean is this is that where we have success in our lives, we forget that at one point, where we are now was a dream, was a vision that we had. And so when you get there, you almost take it for granted that, like, oh, wow, you're not looking at how far you've come, but you're looking at how far you want to go. So when I was looking at that, I realized that I was being extremely critical on how I was grading this category of my life. I mean, is there changes that I want to make in my physical health? Yes, you know, like flexibility, range of motion, get outside more. But these aren't, you know, the bulk of the work has been done. And I'm willing to bet that it's the same for that area of your life where when you're looking from 10 years back, you might see yourself be like, man, you know, 10 years back, I never in a million years would imagine that I would be here right now with these results. But when you're looking at it now, failing to acknowledge where you came from, you still feel like you're, you're behind, and you're like, you're trekking uphill. And the second point I want to make is that there's always another level. So when you get to that, that what you would say, see, as a 10, now, all of a sudden there's another level right because we always want to keep growing. If we're not growing, we're dying. And when you get complacent, you start to go to. It gets painful when you're complacent about an area of life. That's why you always have to keep in motion. When you get comfortable, you get complacent. It's a vicious loop going back to the main purpose. The reason I am telling you this is so you can realize how far you've come and also just give yourself a pat on the back for still being in the game. Even if you're like, you know what? Shit, it's been a struggle. It's like I don't even see the results yet. You know, maybe you left your job to start your own business, I don't know. But give yourself credit for taking action, for still being in the game, for not giving up. Because you are taking steps, you are in process and you just have to keep on going and give yourself the grace for taking the courageous actions and steps that you already have. Because by acknowledging those wins, that is what's going to fuel you to move forward and to keep making more progress. Keep keep taking bigger actions and taking bigger strides in that direction. So I hope you enjoyed this. But again this is somewhat from my self introspection and just kind of seeing how I was processing things and how it was literally negatively or adversely affecting my mood because I was focusing on the wrong things, not where I was going and all the progress I made and as a result of focusing on the stuff it makes me feel more grateful about the progress that I've had as well as where I'm going. So again, I hope you enjoyed this. If you know anyone who will benefit from this Share this with five people Hit that like button. Hit that subscribe button. If you have a question, throw it in the comment section. I hope you enjoyed this episode again. Remember, you only get one life. Live fully, live passionately and most of all live now. God bless and I will see you again soon.