Overcome Failure and Reach Your Goals! | Jack Canfield

Hi, everyone, I'm Patti Arbery and we're back here again for another session of Ask Jack where our community, whether it's Instagram or Facebook, sends us questions and we get to Ask Jack for the answers. So are you ready to go?

I'm ready to go. And I'm going to rename this Ask Jack and Patty, because as we were talking before we started filming this, you have some good answers to these questions as well. So we'll go back and forth if it makes sense.

All right, Well, I learned from the best, so if my answers aren't good, you own it. Alright, so the first question comes like this. How do you overcome the feeling of failure or rejection after being laid off?

Well, first of all, it's a meaning you're making out of it. Being laid off is an event and it's not necessarily a failure. If in fact the company had to downsize basically because we're in a pandemic or because there's a new technology that's come along, it may not be your fault. Now, if you know that you did something wrong and that's why you got laid off, because you weren't performing correctly or you did something, you know, stupid like called your boss an idiot or whatever, then you could take some responsibility for that. But I think in general what happens is that, you know, employment is constantly changing. You know, as we're recording this, you know, I think a fourth of the American labor force is out of work at the moment, you know, and so you can't blame yourself for that. There's an external event, and we Talk about E R equals O. That, that there's an event plus a response equals an outcome. And so when that event occurs and you then have the consequence of that event, you might say it's not the event that determines how you end up feeling or what you're telling yourself. First of all, you can't feel like a failure. Feelings are mad, sad, glad and scared. Failure is a concept. It's a mental construct. And so basically, if you tell yourself, I'm a failure, I'm a bad person, you know, whatever the reality is, that's you making meaning out of that event. That's not serving you. And so I think what you have to do is say, okay, this might be an opportunity, you know, something. I mean, there have been books written that have talked about. I mean, the titles were something like, you know, getting fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. And the reality is then something new emerged, something new occurred. I was working for a job corps center in Iowa many, many years ago. And it was a place where kids who had dropped out of high school were now being trained in job skills because they were too old to go back to high school. And that year that President Nixon was elected, which tells you how long ago this was, he basically took all the job corps centers that were in Democratic congressman's districts and reopened them in Republican congressman's districts as kind of a political favor to those people who voted Republican. And ours was in a Democratic district. And so everyone lost their job. And some people got rehired months later. And I was kind of bummed out, like, oh, my God, I lost my job. I love this work. And what happened was I go into the seminar at the W. Clement and Jesse V. Stone foundation to learn about achievement motivation, and I was complaining. I just lost my job. And they said, well, you've been working with African American and Puerto Rican and Native American students, and we need someone that knows that world. We'll hire you. I went from making 8,000 a year to making 12,000 a year, which doesn't sound like a lot, but with inflation, that was enough at the time. And working in Chicago, which was much better than this little town I was in Iowa, and also it was much more exciting. And it literally led to the work I do today. That's where I learned the basics of the success principles that I now teach. So what looked like a bad thing actually turned into an opportunity. So every event that looks like a negative obviously always has a seed of an equal or greater benefit, as Napoleon Hill said. So I think that's the first thing to say is it's not what happened to you, it's what you tell yourself about it. So if you're telling yourself, I'm a failure, I messed up, life sucks, whatever, then you're going to feel bad. But if you're saying, look, I did the best I could, this is what happened, and then say, here's what I want my future to look like, and then start putting your attention on creating the new future as opposed to focusing on the the past event, which happened yesterday, last week. You know, whenever you always want to have your energy in the present moment, focusing on what you want, and then come back to the present moment and work on creating it.

That's a good answer. I like that. I think it's always too that there's always the opportunity. You know, it looks like an obstacle. There's always that opportunity, like you were saying. But also, you have a blank slate and you get to go back and ask yourself, if I could do anything, what would it look like? And maybe have the opportunity to become more of an entrepreneur, not work for somebody else, set your own schedule, spend more time with your family. I mean, there's all kinds of opportunities there when you don't just have a regular day job.

Yeah. And I can understand how when you first hear that news, it might be a little upsetting. And don't, you know, don't try to pretend it's not. Give yourself permission to feel your feelings. But the main thing is to realize it's your beliefs about it, your thoughts about it, the meaning you're making about it. It's not the event, as much as that lets you feel bad.

The stories we tell ourselves that don't support our future is what you're trying to say.

There you go.

Okay, so the next question. How do you stay motivated and keep your goal moving past the thinking too much to get to the fruition? So basically.

How do you get in?

How do you not get stuck in the weeds when you have a goal?

Well, I think a lot of people, we talk about ready, fire, aim. And most people are ready, ready, ready, ready, aim, fire is the way it's supposed to go. And a lot of people are aiming, aiming, aiming, aiming, aiming, and they never fire or they're thinking about what they're going to do. They're planning, planning, planning, and they never pull the trigger. And I think the reality is that we have to realize that it's in the doing this of something that we get the feedback, we get better at it, we learn how to do it better. And so I think for me, you know, I will say I'll take time to plan. I do like to think things through and plan and look at all the different possibilities of what might happen. You know, and you and I are. We teach that you want to look at what are the possibilities of things that might go wrong or the obstacles you might face and have a couple of options for what you're going to do if you reach those options. But at the same time, I think what we learn more by being in action. And so for me, I have a limit. I give myself a deadline by which I have to start doing something, and then it's called keeping myself in action. I find that having an accountability partner that I have to report into out of my rule of 5 of what I'm doing that day, that for me is the most important thing, more than just thinking about it. I belong to mastermind groups. We talk, we brainstorm we think, we plan, we have strategy meetings in our company. All that's really important. But at some point, you have to just do the doing this. And so for me, it's just setting a timeline by when I have to decide and get into action, keep the goal in front of me, the deadline I want, and then have some kind of accountability system to keep me in action. I think the biggest problem for a lot of people right now is they're working from home alone. And so you don't have a boss. You don't have anyone telling you what to do, especially if you're a solo entrepreneur, which a lot of people that come into our bailiwick are, you know, they're a coach, a trainer, you know, an intellectual property sharer. There's someone that's out there that's, you know, bringing their wisdom to the world and doing podcasts and all that. And so how do you keep yourself moving through the fear? Because one of the things that often happens, you plan, plan, plan, plan. Cause you're really just afraid that it's not going to work, that you're not going to be perfect yet. And I think the thing that I always tell people is you're never going to be perfect when you start. I don't care how much you plan, but you only get better. I don't think anyone ever reaches perfection, but you get better. You get more excellent if you do the work and then respond to the feedback.

I like what Seth Godin said the other day. He said you only have to be perfect if you're building bridges or you're making pacemakers. Otherwise, just get ready to make mistakes, because mistakes are fixable and you learn from your mistakes. So really, mistakes aren't even mistakes. Right. They're just more data, honestly.

Right. I think several people have said you want to fail faster because Microsoft, they put out a program, we know it's going to have bugs in it. If they waited till there were no bugs, we'd never be out there. And so we always have this thing. Do you want to let Microsoft know about this error? And that's how they fix the program. And so it's true in life. And I think we all have to be willing to just do it and not be committed to perfection. I think for me, growing up, there was a lot of commitment to perfection. I went to military school for a lot of years in high school. And you had to, like, shine your shoes, keep your belt, and your locker had to be clean and your rifle had to be, you know, the inside the barrel had to be perfectly clean, no dust and everything. And so I think that perfection, the commitment to perfection, can actually stop you. And so while I think there's some value in it, we've often heard the phrase the curse of perfection, because it often stops you from moving forward.

Yeah. I think also if you are kind of that perfectionist, to know that you are and to team up with other people, that will keep you moving forward. I love the fact that you're a perfectionist, because I'm the furthest thing from a perfectionist. So you ask all the right questions, but we keep going and it gets done. And there's more accountability that way, too.

Right. Well, you've always pushed me to do things faster than I wanted to do them. I'd probably still be writing.

It's been like 20 years to figure that out. I wish I'd learned earlier.

Well, I'd probably still be writing the success principles, improving it, you know, but you said, no, we got to get this done. So we did.

Well, I think also when we did Chicken Soup for the Soul, the first book, and the goal was to get it published, and there were so many no's. There were so many people that didn't believe in it, and we kept on going. So what do you think the one or two main factors were in not giving up?

Well, I think the main factor was in our heart of hearts. We knew that it was good stuff because we were out there in the world telling these stories and people were responding to them. And I think that people in the publishing industry had no track record of a book of inspirational stories and actually selling. And so they had. You know, people were always looking for, what's the next Jane Fonda tape, back when she was the first exercise tape, you know, anything that works, people want to do more of it. So when the first book took off, like, before we were even ready, can we have another book? You know, because it was working. And we see the sequels to movies like Rocky and so forth, you know, because it worked. And so bringing something new to the table, it's hard. Harder to get it done. And. But I think that, you know, the reality for me is I knew. I just trusted in my heart this was right. And whenever you have that belief that this is something that needs to happen, that I want to do this and I'm passionate about it, you just have to follow that. That's what we did.

Yeah, I agree. Can't let people talk you out of your dreams. No, usually that stuff is the most important stuff. When it comes in that way when it's that intuitive, that is your path. And we so tend to ignore that. And it's crazy, right? So I know you say, don't let anybody talk you out of your dreams. Okay, so next question. What is the best way to strengthen your self discipline skills?

That's a challenging one for a lot of people. Self discipline, I think is one of the hardest things that you have to learn in life. I remember when I was learning to be a psychologist probably 40 years ago, this guy was saying, if you want to build self discipline every day, stand on a chair for 10 minutes and you're going to be sitting there going, I'm standing on a stupid chair, why am I doing this? But if you can fulfill that 10 minutes and actually do it, you're building a strength inside yourself called I can do this thing because I set my mind to it. Now, I'm not suggesting those of you watching this have to do that, but the idea is, can you set a discipline for yourself? A set of goals, a set of activities? Exercising, meditating, reading. For, you know, we teach the hour of power. 20 minutes of meditation, 20 minutes of reading, 20 minutes of exercising. If you set the goal to do that, then be committed to do it. And every time you keep a commitment to yourself like that, your willpower gets stronger. The other thing we know about self discipline is that willpower wanes throughout the day. Actually, willpower fades. That's why you can get up in the morning and think, I'm going to eat the perfect diet. And you do it for breakfast, you do it for lunch. About 7 o', clock, you don't do it anymore and you eat the thing you shouldn't eat. Now you've eaten that, so why not have dessert, you know, and the next thing you know, you're having a glass of wine. So the reality is that know that if there's things you want to really be disciplined about, if you do those in the morning first, that's the best thing you can do. So we always say when you're learning a new habit, if you can do it in the morning, that's the best time to do it because it's done. You know, a lot of times, well, I'll exercise at the end of the workday. And then the workday drags on because things came up you didn't know we're going to happen. You don't get home till 7 o' clock instead of 5 o' clock or, you know, it's not 8 at night, you go, I'm too tired to exercise. But if you get that 20 minutes to a half hour of exercise in the morning, it's done. You know, and I love what Brian Tracy says, eat that frog. Where he says, you know, if you got one thing you got to do today that's really uncomfortable, do it first thing. And his metaphor is, if you knew you had to eat a frog, let's say you had to eat it. Live like, you know, because people like frogs that are cooked. I never really had that. But the point being that if you knew you had to do it, you'd spend your whole day thinking about it. Now it's 11 minutes till midnight, you still haven't eaten a frog and your whole day has been thinking about doing that terrible thing. So if you do it in the morning, it's done. Now you have this momentum for the rest of the day because you kept that discipline. Another thing to do is to have an accountability partner. So if I have to tell you I exercised today or didn't and you're my accountability partner, and if you're not familiar with an accountability partner, someone you talk to every day for maybe two, three, four, five minutes, and you say, these are the five things I'm committed to today and I'm going to do them and tomorrow you check in with me and we find out if I did them or not. Well, I wouldn't want to tell you five days in a row I didn't exercise or I didn't meditate or I didn't stick to my diet or whatever it might be, or write five pages for my book. So it's having that accountability partner is really, I think, crucial for most people because most of us have proven that, that we have weaknesses. If you have a weak arm, like let's say you've broken a bone, what do they do? You put a cast on it, they support the arm so it's weak. So we need to have casts in our life which could be a coach, could be an accountability partner, it could be a coaching program, a mentorship program, whatever it might be, that's going to provide that external support that we can't provide ourself until we're ready to do that. When you're a parent, you have a child, what do you do? You're teaching them the discipline of sitting alone without their headphones on, without TV to do their homework. They don't want to do that. I've got a seven year old grandson, he does not want to do that. And yet if he does it long enough, it becomes a habit. So the parent has to be the support for that to make sure they're doing it until it does become a habit. So we need that accountability built in to do that. The other thing you can do that's very powerful. All motivation is either to something or away from something. We're either motivated toward moving toward pleasure or motivated to move away from pain. So if there's a hot stove and my hand's getting too hot, I pull away. If there's something over there that I want, that's a reward, like ice cream or, you know, $100 or whatever, I'll move toward that. And so the reality is, if you have something, you know, you want to be disciplined about doing, like one of our friends who, you know, friend said, you should read the Bible every day. And he said, nah, I don't want to read the Bible. He said, you're a Christian. You should read the Bible every day. And he said, okay, I'll commit one minute a day. And so every day he read it for a minute. And what he noticed was after he read it for a minute, he got kind of interested. And he'd read for another five minutes. Pretty soon he was reading six, seven, ten minutes, half hour. And he read the whole Bible. But it was that starting to be committed. And so what you can do is give yourself a consequence if you don't do it. If I don't read the Bible today, or if I don't exercise today, or if I don't do my ex, you know, meditation or write for. For an hour or whatever it might be, I'm going to write a check to some organization I hate, you know, because I don't want to have to do. But I've made a public declaration. I'm going to do that. You know, I'm going to learn. Our friend Marty Root said, I'm going to learn to dive off a diving board or I'm writing a check to the Ku Klux Klan for $1,000. Now, Marty's Jewish. The Ku Klux Klan tends to be anti Semitic. That would be the worst thing in the world for him to do. So that was such a motivator for him. He did it. He learned how to dive. The same thing would be, if I finish my book, I'm going to give myself a weekend vacation in Sedona, Arizona. And so you're working toward a reward or you're working away from a consequence. Build that in. Make a public declaration so everyone knows they can hold you accountable. Hey, you said you weren't going to eat chocolate eclairs. You're eating a chocolate eclair. Well, people don't know that to give you that feedback if they don't know you've made that commitment. So those are some things I think that will help you stay disciplined.

Well, I think also to strengthen it. Like you talk a lot about when we sometimes we bite off more than we can chew or we say we're going to do too much and then we fail. And so then we have this reinforcement in our brain that oh, I say I'm going to do something but I don't get it done. So you talked about working out in the morning, making that scary sales call early. I always say when I'm in the shower at 7am the world is amazing. And by 3 I'm like, what was I thinking? So if I haven't done those ideas or made those calls or asked for what I need by then, it's not going to happen. But doesn't it sort of erode your self esteem when you make that commitment? You don't keep it. It's almost like a parent who's not consistent. You get an out of control kid.

Right.

So that consistency is so key. So maybe it's like take it in tiny chunks and not try to go be a bodybuilder in one day. Start with like the Bible story was great one minute. Then if you go over one minute, your self esteem gets to celebrate that you did even more than you said you were going to do.

Right.

But we set ourselves up a lot for, for unrealistic expectations.

I think now one of our students actually teaches what she calls three minute meditations. Everybody can find three minutes. You know, most people think if you're going to meditate, you got to sit down for an hour in some uncomfortable pretzel position that you can't put your legs in. Then you got to sit there for an hour or half a day or a month or whatever in a monastery. And it's not like that. But if you can commit to three minutes, after a while, three minutes doesn't seem that long and then five minutes seems less. So it's like starting small. I totally agree with that. Start small and then work up to it.

Well, I hope you found this segment valuable. If you have questions that you want to ask Jack or ask Jack and Patty, please feel free to send them in and make sure you send us your comments or you can even post them below.

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