232: The Positive Power In Disappointing Other People - #GrowYourLife

Hey everyone. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Gracowski, and on this podcast I talk about ways for you to grow in your life and in your business. As a business owner, creating a mentorship, coaching, training, or thought leading business, or if you're an author of some kind. I've been in this industry for two decades. I've learned a thing, thing or two. I've seen a thing or two, or been around the block. And as part of my journey, I had to really make personal development a very important part of it because I was so focused for so long on the strategies of what it would take to successfully grow these businesses. That was the part that I had owned for, for two decades was getting clients, the tech aspect, Facebook ads. And I had to learn that when it comes to actually building a business, it's a lot more than just what meets the eye as far as the technical aspects of it. And there's a lot that you need to work through as a CEO and as a business owner. And that's what I'm going to be talking about here today, is one of those specific areas that I really had to work through that I follow tooth and nail. And it almost, you know, our desire as mentors and coaches, especially if we get into this industry and we've seen so many things. A lot of the people that I talk to, a lot of the mentors that I talk to, have been disappointed by other mentors and coaches. They've felt let down. Maybe you're listening to this right now and you felt let down by a mentor or a coach, or you've heard of other people being let down by mentors and coaches. And so what this does is this creates this sort of noble desire to not let anybody down, to not disappoint anybody, to over deliver on everything that you say you're going to do in your mentorship business. And I'll tell you this again, that comes from a great place in our heart. That's a great desire. It's a nice desire. But I had to learn that in business and in life. I have to be okay with disappointing people. I have to be okay with people being upset. And then I can't make it my mission to manage, maintain and control other people's emotions and feelings. Because what that'll lead us to is that'll lead us to not actually building our business. We're so focused and concerned on how other people feel all the time that we're not going to build our business. Because here's the thing, you could do everything perfect in your business and you're still going to disappoint somebody. Now I'm not talking about you intentionally going out there defrauding people, committing crimes, doing terrible things, and then narcissistically or psychopathically being like, hey, it doesn't matter, you know, I'm disappointing people. That's not what we're talking about at all. What I'm talking about is that in our, our pursuit of excellence in operating and building in a spirit of excellence, and I'd say most people who listen to us, they, they resonate with the idea of excellence. Even in that pursuit, you're going to drop some balls, you're going to make mistakes, you're going to let some people down, you're going to disappoint some people. And that I believe that being okay with disappointing other people, not being perfect. Society tells us we have to be perfect. And I've never been a woman a day in my life, but I've been told that society puts a lot more pressure on women to be perfect. And I have a lot of women who follow me. And so I understand there's like another layer that I've never even experienced to that. But I also know a lot of really successful, highly successful women CEOs, my mother being one of them, multi millionaire CEO. And she was one that, that taught me this. You got to become okay with disappointing other people. We can't let people pleasing and other people's approval of us be the driving factor in our behaviors in our business. We choose. See, what we want to do is we want to choose to do as best as we can as a choice. But there comes a level of what I've seen, a spirit of excellence that goes into perfectionism that then creates scenario where things are very, very difficult to be able to actually manage and create the kind of results that we want, particularly financial results. Because here's the thing, as you're in the process of building a business of some kind, you're going to disappoint other people. It's just an irrefutable law because. And you might say, no, I won't, it won't happen. It can't happen. I will never disappoint to anybody in my business. Understand that that might again. I started in that place and that's one of the biggest things that prevented me from making the kind of money that I make today in my business because I had made a commitment to never disappoint anybody. And it's one of the biggest things that I see that stops people from being financially successful is this belief and desire saying, I will never disappoint anybody. And so there's actually power in disappointing others. And before you get triggered by me saying that, and I understand, because I'm going against the grain of the normal message in society right now, this is actually a message that I had picked up from a lady. Her name is the holistic psychologist, the holistic psychologist Nicole Laa. And. And she was one of the first ones who really said, you know, she had, she had made a post that had inspired me. It inspired my mom this past year, I will be disappointing more people this year. And that my. Her new Year's resolution was, I will be disappointing more people this year. And I just, I found this to, to resonate so much. I love her content. I love her books, particularly, you know, her first book, how to do the Work, is incredible. It's what inspired me to actually work with a therapist. And I worked with a therapist for, for two years straight. I just texted a therapist this week telling him, you know, hey, I think. I think I need to have a few sessions, get back on it. It's been a couple of months, seeing a few things that I. That I need to work through. And, and that's where I think. I think that we, we have even this stigma around therapy and mental health and taking care of ourselves internally, when, in fact, that's what makes us a powerful mentoring coach. That's what allows us to show up at the highest level. And when you really work through your mental health, you get to show up and say, I am who I am. Take it or leave it. I don't need anybody to be pleased with me. I'm okay with disappointing other people. And there's a power in that, that especially if you're operating through the lens of delivering results, operating with excellence and integrity, you will become unstoppable financially in your business. When you become okay with. And you're not afraid of other people's opinions of you upsetting people, disappointing people, people being, quote, unquote, let down by you is no longer the most devastating thing that you can experience. And I find that this is one of those areas that it stops. Mentors and coaches that. I hear it often, people say it often. I have such a fear of disappointing others. And so let's explore that a little bit. You know, the fear of disappointing others usually comes from a situation in our past where it was unsafe to disappoint somebody or a group of somebodies. Any corporate job is going to convince you to do this. A lot of spousal relationships even, and this is an area where I, I, I'm so grateful my, my wife taught me and helped and support with me is like, you're gonna make mistakes. It's okay. Don't, you don't need to beat yourself up. Self punishment. I was raised with this idea of self loathing and self punishment and anytime you make a mistake, you, you basically berate yourself mentally and make yourself feel worthless until, you know, you feel the behavior, you feel like you felt crappy enough for the behavior to change. That's what, that's what I was trained to do. So what my brain naturally does. It happened tonight before recording this podcast. Took me a few hours to recover to be able to record this podcast because I was in the situ. I literally, and it was funny, it happened and I was like, literally. This is an example in the podcast. I had made a mistake in our, in our house with a, with a coffee maker and we have a coffee maker that we clean and well, if you don't clean it, you might end up with. There was, there was actually gnats that had some larvae in the coffee maker. Kind of nasty. It was just in the one section that was able to be clean. But it was, it was gross because I had let it go. It was my responsibility to do. And I had let it go. And, and, and, and I knew that that was a hot button for my wife and it disappointed her. And, but it was actually, she had so much grace for me last night with it because she knew I had to record this podcast. And, and, and I was like, I was like, honey, this is a great example. But I had disappointed her. I disappointed myself. But, but the, but the, but the difference is, is that it was like, you know what? Let's just do better next time. And that's what my wife had taught me, had helped me with, had worked through with me and has encouraged me in, is that you can make mistakes, it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to mess up, it's okay to make a mess. Just do better next time. No, you know, we don't need to dwell in it, we don't need to sit in it, we don't need to, to bathe in it and wrap ourselves up in it. We just do better next time. And, and, and, and I know again, this is a, this is a contrarian message to what you might hear in a lot of other parts of society, but what you're going to get from me anytime I talk to people, self compassion, not being super self critical, learning to love yourself, have compassion for the mistakes that you make and not beating ourselves up or punishing ourselves when we make mistakes. And that being healthy behavior to love ourselves through the process the way, the same way that I will with my, that I do with my now 8 month old son is how I need to treat myself. And, and there, there comes a time where we need to even re parent ourselves in the area where our parents might have given us one example in our lives. You know, I was talking with my, with my father in law about this about a year ago. You know, my parenting example and his were very similar. I've re parented myself, not him as a father, but his mother towards him. Very similar to my mother in some areas that you know, him and I both would see are not a healthy way of parenting. But it helped shape the two of us in the way that we are today. And we both recognize that and the value in it. But the re parenting is what I think has helped me become so much more powerful, so much more, have so much more to offer, have so much that I've been able to create in my business is through that re parenting and being okay with disappointing other people, disappointing myself. Not that I seek out opportunities to disappoint myself or other people, my goodness, no. But it's just like we let go of that added pressure of I need to do everything perfect in our lives. And my wife and I, we found that like by doing that. And I would say the most successful people, my mother and I talk about this all the time. Like her financial success came from letting go of needing everything to be perfect. She used to be so ocd obsessive about the house being perfect growing up. And she looks back and she's like, I would never have been that way anymore. Like, you know, and so it's, it's incredible that every financially successful person that I know has this revelation that we just gotta let go of perfectionism. We gotta let go of the, the crown of doing everything perfect, managing other people, having all the puzzle pieces perfectly balanced in our life and realize that actually chaos is part of life and there's no perfect moment to do anything now. There's no perfect time to get started with anything. Just like there's no perfect time to get into a relationship. There's no perfect time to invest in the stock market. There's no perfect time to invest in real estate. You might be hearing me saying that, saying, wait, Jeremiah, what Are you talking about real estate? The stock market? There's perfect. No, there's not. And those are principles. You know, my mom, she mentors people on investing. That's a principle of successful investing. Up and down market, you want to be in the market, you want to be consistent. We can't wait until everything is perfect and work so hard to try to avoid disappointing other people and things not going. How. What's inside of our control so much. We can't control other people, no matter how hard we try. And no matter what you do, you're going to have somebody who is ultimately disappointed. And so you might as well just give up trying to be perfect, not upset people, not disappoint people, and just be. You just do. You just do what you want to do and build the business of your dreams. Go out there and be confident. I hear people say this all the time. They won't launch their mentorship program because they're afraid it's going to disappoint other people. It might disappoint somebody, then what? Why is that so bad? What's so terrible about that? And you might be hearing that saying, questioning my ethics and morals around that. Listen, I, I tell you, I filter this through, giving it my best, focused on creating results for my clients. Y' all know, in this, in my mentorship program, I'm making this like I'm speaking in my mentorship program. Y' all aren't even. This is a free piece of content right here. But those that are in my paid mentorship program know that I go above and beyond to deliver results for our clients. But I, but I, but I don't. I don't make avoiding disappointing other people be the driving factor of it. And when I gave up that crown, that's what allowed me to start and build a business that in the last 12 months has done seven figures because I wasn't afraid of disappointing other people. That's one of the, One of the greatest areas in my life that I think has contributed to my own financial success is every single time that I stop worrying about disappointing other people, my income increases. Because what I start doing is I start prioritizing, putting the pieces in order in a way that's going to serve my life, my business, and the vision that I have for my life, because I'm not trying to juggle how other people feel around me. And so this is one of the single greatest areas. If you can get this and you. And you legitimately, like, hold it, and you can say, and believe I'm Okay. With disappointing other people. And you qu. And you ask yourself why is that so difficult to say? Figure out what's underneath the surface. That's going to be a real indicator for you of what's underneath the surface. To learn and to discover A what you don't know and B what you can learn about yourself by seeing. Okay, why is this quote unquote so triggering overall this idea that I just, I, I can't disappoint other people. Why is the idea of disappointing others so tragic for us? And start to question where that teaching came in. Start to question who influenced us to not make ourselves a priority. To tell our, to tell us that that's wrong and selfish and even evil or wicked or whatever that is. Where did that influence come from? This idea that we have to be perfect and can't disappoint anybody. It's not healthy. It's not rooted in anything that's going to serve us. Again, it might come from a nice place, but overall it's hurting us in the end. And so again, it might not happen overnight. But I would encourage you prioritize the life you want to create for yourself, the vision that you have for your life. Even if it disappoints other people, even if they tell you you shouldn't be doing that thing, even if they tell you you shouldn't be going down that path. You know, it's funny, what I just told you as grown adults is a very healthy thing. You know, if I told that to my, my 8 month old or a 3 year old, like that didn't make sense, right? He needs to listen to what we tell him to do as adults. This is where we re, we activate ourselves and we re parent ourselves. And we, we, we give ourselves permission to do what we couldn't do when we were younger or what we couldn't do inside of a corporate job. And this is why as a CEO in a business, see, that's the difference in your own business, all responsibility falls on you. And so no matter what you do right, there's always going to be somebody who's disappointed. And some people use disappointment as a form of manipulation, by the way. Some people use that I'm so disappointed as a way to try to get their way and control and manipulate other people because they know that people are so afraid of disappointing others. See, that's what it is. And I'm. And that ends up happening. There's people I've met that are like, that is, they knew that I was afraid of disappointing people. So they used that to twist me, to control me, to do things I didn't want to do. And so if we're so worried about disappointing other people and we are so afraid of making other people unhappy, we become easy to manipulate. We become easy targets of somebody who is a manipulator. And so you can see even the benefit of our own safety to not get manipulated into doing things. I used to get manipulated into doing things that I didn't want to do because I got around some really nasty people that took advantage of my wanting other people's approval and not disappointing others. And I look back to this day, it's actually one of the biggest. It's one of the reasons I went to. I went to jail. You know, I had a guy, he. He. He dared me, and I was afraid of disappointing him. And. And so I did the dare. And the dare was what got me put in jail because I was afraid of disappointing him. So you see how, like, this extrapolates out to, like, really unhealthy behavior at that point. Like, that's an extreme level. But that same thing stops us from building our business, stops us from asking for the sale because we want to be nice and kind and not upset people and all that. And. And it's like at the point of when you're asking for the sale, people are ready to hear an offer. We can't let the fear of people being mad at us and disappointed in us stop us from being successful. And listen, the judgment that you might have on other people who have disappointed you, you might need to let that go. Well, I would never be the way that they are. I would never do the things that they would do. I was so disappointed and let down by them. I would never do the thing that they have done to me. And that's one of the worst mindsets that we can get into, is where we end up fully projecting and changing the behaviors of our life and our business through our. Through an unhealed wound of how somebody else had hurt us. And so there's so much benefit to healing in this area, to growing in this area, to be. To becoming stronger in this area. Instead of just letting our fears and our worries guide and direct us, we decide, hey, listen, I'm going to do my very best. But if. But if other people are not happy with me, that's okay. I'm going to continue doing what I know is best, and I'm going to continue going down a path even if I have people telling me that I should stop, because they don't like what I'm doing and that behavior as a CEO, that. That makes you unstoppable. That makes you to where you can go out there and create the life you want. Some of us are in an environment right now where we have people that are disappointed in us constantly, and we're constantly put in situations of disappointing other people. And we're around critical people, whether it be at a job, a workplace, customers of a workplace that you work at, a boss, a spouse, a church. It's a big one. And so we have to decide, okay, wait a sec. I want you to look at anybody in your life who's constantly telling you how wrong you are about things that you do. They're constantly criticizing and telling you how like. And it's not. It's not. It's. It's not in a loving way. And they might be saying it's for your own good, but they're just. They're very critical of you all the time. You're not going to change that person. That's their nature. So we gotta just accept that that's how they are. Let that go. But start to limit how much you take in what they say. That's a choice that we can make, is to limit how much we take, especially if we have to work with them on a consistent basis, especially if it's a spouse. I'm not. You know, there's a way to. Where we don't take in the criticism and we don't let it spiral us out of control. At that point, it's better to limit your exposure to that type of person. But if you can't, as you grow in your own mental fortitude and your own mental strength, you can actually get to the point where that type of person is no longer going to have as much of an effect on you at that point. And that's where I've gotten to now. And that's why I can recover so quickly. To be able to do a podcast like this immediately after a situation that would have just completely derailed me for an entire day or so. I mean, that was a big deal that happened this evening, but I didn't get derailed. I knew I had to make this podcast. I knew I had to connect with people. I knew I had to create this. And I couldn't let disappointing myself or others or any type of situation stop me from doing the thing that I needed to do in my business, creating this podcast. And that's the type of behavior that I want to encourage you to get to. It'll Change your life. It'll change everything about your life because you're not going to be afraid of things going wrong, making a mess, them not being perfect, people being upset with you, nasty emails from people. We can't let the fear of disappointing others control us. It used to control me for years and I found power in accepting and being okay with disappointing other people, not doing everything perfectly and just being myself. And that's what helped my business grow. And so I hope that this has encouraged you. I hope that this has given you some food for thought, some ideas that you can learn from, share with other people. This might be a paradigm shift for you. You might need to re listen to this podcast episode a few times to start to get it inside of you and to start to even process through some of those triggers. If you maybe felt triggered listening through this, processing through those as you listen again and again and again will actually then it could be a healing exercise for you by listening to this podcast episode. But listen, if this has helped you, don't just keep it to yourself. Share this podcast with somebody. Share this with somebody that you know that it's going to positively impact them. I'm so thankful for you all that listen to this. If you haven't joined us for one of our live training events that we're doing. We help mentors, trainers, coaches and thought leaders grow their businesses, create massive amounts of impact and income in their life and in their business. And so that's the goal of this podcast. It's a free resource that I put out there because I know that free resources help people. It's my way of giving back and it also helps me tell people about the different things that we have to offer. Join us for one of our free live events. If you're not in my client Growth Accelerator group mentorship program where I'm helping mentors and coaches grow their businesses. Get on the waiting list for it. Jump in when we open the doors next to it. And I don't know when that's going to be, but you'll be the first to know and I'll talk soon. Everybody grow your life. Have a good one.