160: Victim Mindset No More! - #GrowYourLife

Hey everyone, thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski, and on this podcast I show course creators, coaches, trainers, authors, speakers, consultants and leaders, anybody who's in business online, the strategies, the tips, the mindset tricks, what you can do on the Internet, how to use direct response marketing in a way that gets results. Now today I'm going to talk more on mindset. We're going to talk about how to not be a victim in your business and how to create a winning mindset for your business. And the truth is, is this, is that a lot of times I see people in business, they're putting themselves last. They find it hard to say no. They're, they're always blaming other people and they're suffering what's called this victim mentality. This victim mentality is that they're powerless to everything else that's going on around them. It's outside of their control. And that if only all these other things would change, then they could be successful. And it really, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that you're powerless, you won't take action to change your situation. If you don't take action, nothing will change and it becomes this loop. And so the victim mentality is opposite of what will allow you to be successful in business. Okay, so that's what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about dealing with this victim mentality. I want to talk about dealing with this mindset and how you can start to take more ownership in your life. I struggled with this for a long time. Dealing with the victim mentality, the victim mindset, blaming everybody else, not taking responsibility for why my business was going a certain way. I had a desire for it and things weren't working out. And I talk with my clients a lot about this. They're like, yeah, my spouse bothers me all the time. You know, my, my, my dog died and so I can't do this. Or my, my family had a family member that got sick and then it basically derails their business for, for years, like two years. They're still using the, the death of the family member for why they can't succeed. And I want to have compassion for that. You need to grieve. The big reason behind this is that we're not allowing ourselves to feel those feelings and grief and we're actually trying to stuff them away. Okay. That's one of the biggest issues with this, is that when we don't allow ourselves to feel the pain, we keep reiterating the victim mindset because we're trying to validate to ourselves that we have permission to feel this way and then we end up focusing on it. That's what was going on for me as I kept re. Traumatizing myself. Re putting myself through the victim scenario every time that I would bring it up and use it as a crutch and as an excuse. And for me, a big one was when I started this business. Right now, the one that I'm building right now, we're about 160 podcast episodes in. This was four years ago. I had been working for my mom and I was no longer working for her. And so I had a. My income was dropped down and I was making excuses and operating as a victim, blaming my, my wife and my family and blaming my mom and blaming everybody else around me for why I couldn't be successful in business. It was ridiculous. And so it was a, it was blocking me by playing the victim from even doing the things that I know that I was called to do. How many of you are blocking yourself from doing the thing that you were born to do because of these situations that are going on in your life? Or maybe you're like, you know, my spouse won't allow me to build my business or my kids won't allow me. My kids, my kids. I got no time because of the kids. And I can't do anything because I got church and I got people and I got responsibilities. Responsibilities. And I got my friends. That's the victim mindset. That's the victim mentality. You are a victim to something that other people did to you and are doing to you and will continue to do to you and that you believe that they will do to you. And so you do all of your actions to avoid trying to get those things done to you. And it's no responsibility of your own. It's everybody else's fault. And so that mindset is prevalent in people that struggle to succeed. They'll blame their wife, they'll blame their boss, they'll blame their job, they'll blame their ex boss. They'll blame whatever it is that they need. They'll blame the government, they'll blame Joe Biden, they'll blame Donald Trump, they'll blame Obama and even George Bush or Ronald Reagan, who cares? You know what I mean? Like, it goes back as far as people need to create a narrative for why they can't be successful. It's crazy. It's insanity. And if you're listening to this right now and you're, you still can continue to listen to this podcast. I believe that you're somebody that doesn't want to live this way, that doesn't want to operate this way, that you got goals, you got dreams, you got visions, you got ideas, you got things that you want to do, but this mentality has been holding you back and you're ready to say no more. I'm done with the victim mindset. I'm done with the victim mentality. Either that or you're going to write me and be really angry at everything that I just said because I'm not compassionate of your situation. Okay, one of those two things is going to happen. If you're listening to this, listen. I do understand the pain of this. And I was somebody that was blaming everybody for my life. My whole life. I blamed the fact that I was homeschooled for why I struggled to communicate with people and the fact that how I was raised in the church and all this other stuff that I was blaming for why my life was not going how I wanted it to until I took personal responsibility. My friends, we have to live our life where we're stopped blaming and making other people responsible for our life. That's called codependency. When you study, when you read. There's a book called Codependent no More, It'll help you with this. Where we're codependent on other people, and other people are the reason why we feel, live, talk, and operate the way that we are. That is by design, a constant victim cycle where you are constantly the victim of. Of another person. Other people are a victim of you, and we're responsible for other people's emotions, thoughts, and feelings, and managing those things as our. Is our primary responsibility. A way that this manifests in relationships is, you know, if. If you're afraid of angering and upsetting people and then your happiness is tied to somebody else's emotional response, okay? And it becomes this addictive cycle that we get in. We get into this with. With other things in our life. Could be an inanimate object. You could have. There's, There's. It's called traffic trauma. Somebody crashes their car and now they lose their job, they lose their dignity, they lose their. Their. Their life because they made a mistake. And so they're blaming the situation for why they can't get to where they want to be. And my friends, we have to divorce this thinking. We have to break up with this thinking that tells us that things outside of us are the reason why our life is going how it is and stop making excuses for why it is now. That's why I said, again, grief is important. There's a book called Rising Strong by Brene Brown that's really good on this topic about when you get knocked down and life beats you up, how to get back up again. And what it breaks down, if I can, like summarize it for you, is you have to feel the grief. You have to feel the pain. You have to feel that pain and acknowledge it so that it no longer has control over you. Until you do, it will continue to have control over you. Okay? And so that's what working with a therapist and even psychology can help us with, is being able to release those feelings so that we don't release them on everybody else around us. See, that's what ends up happening when we're not releasing it in a safe way and letting it go and forgiving ourselves in the situation, accepting things for how they are, accepting that our plans didn't work out, accepting that our goals didn't go exactly how we needed them to be, to feel safe and secure. And we're okay with that. And we're okay with that. Things are not going exactly how we wanted them to in our perfect little fairy tale plan that we made up in our head and that we can instead grieve the fact that the version of our life that we thought was going to happen didn't happen. We're okay with that, right? It was a big grief for me. When I started my own business. I had a version of my life and my future of working with my mom and her company that I had to grieve in starting my own business in order to allow me to even start to do the work that I'm doing today, to be able to communicate this way, to be able to talk, to be able to make videos, to be able to make content, to be able to impact people with courses and trainings and to make an influence on people's lives so that they can be more successful as a business owner. And so, my friends, we got to break up with the victim mindset. We got to break up with the victim mentality that says that. That. That it's other people's fault and it's the situation's fault. For why I can't build my business, for why I have been unable for two years to do anything now. Now that. Accept that. Accept that for two years you've been doing that. And then change it tomorrow. Change it like that. It takes that long to change it. No more dwelling on what happened. No more dwelling on the past. No more dwelling on the pain, no more dwelling on all that. Feel it. You felt it to heal it. The goal is to heal it. You want to feel it, to heal it, not to sit in it and feel it and bathe in it and re. Re. Create the. The past. See, a lot of us are trying to recreate the past that we wished happened by recreating the trauma in our life, by reiterating the story in our head. And it doesn't help anybody. It's a choice to do that. It's a choice to do that, my friends. And it's also a choice to then step up, rise strong after you grieve, after you heal, to build your business, to show up, to learn new skill sets that you didn't have before, to learn the skill set of communication and talking with people and direct response marketing and growing your business and getting your message out there. See your mess, that story, that scenario of what happened to you, that's your story that you're then going to use to influence and impact people. So you, when you heal from that story, you're able to share, just like I did, not from the pain, but from the scars that are healed. And you say, you know what, you don't have to live that way. And you can inspire a whole generation of people to no longer live that way, to no longer operate that way. Your story could be the message that will change a generation. It could be when you choose to not live in the victim mindset and you choose to take personal responsibility. You know, one of my, two of my favorite books on this topic, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, really good. It was written about as long ago as the Bible was written. He was a Roman emperor and he wrote in his journal stuff that's very relevant today about pain and about dealing with the mental anxiety of leading the largest empire in the world. And that learning from that, it's called stoicism. Learning from that allows us, it gives us a framework to operate from, to not let things defeat us, but instead we rise again. We rise stronger. Another great book is Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. How the US Navy seals lead and win and they'll help you lead others and lead your own life. And how to take personal responsibility, personal ownership for how things are going in your life. Instead of blaming and playing the victim game, instead you can take back control of your life and start to create the life that you want. Another great book, how to do the Work by Nicole Lepra, is about how to identify some of those pains in our life, to feel some of the unfelt grief in order to heal, in order to no longer live in a victim state of mind. Okay, my friends, so hopefully this has been helpful for you. Hopefully it's given you a lot to think about. Go check out some of those books. If you got questions about this, I'd love to hear from you on my social media. I'd love to talk with you. Listen, if you want to build a business, if you want to be successful, somebody who is a course creator, a coach, somebody that makes an impact on the world with your story, you're going to have to commit yourself to personal development and growing in the areas that previously you needed help in that previously held you back. You can't make excuses anymore. It's time to start to take action and move forward. We'll talk soon. Everybody have a good one.