68: Getting Back Up Again After You’re Knocked Down - #GrowYourLife

Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski, and on this podcast, I talk about ways for you to grow in your life and in your business to get more results and reach your goals. Now, if you're not part of the GrowYourLife community on Facebook, look up GrowYourLife and join it. There's 1400 people in there that are just like you, that are growing in their life and in their business every single day, working through their struggles and getting breakthrough to their goals, picking their lives back up again and going after their dreams in a real, tangible way that gets results. Now, on this episode, I'm gonna do something I've never done before. Share some stories in my life, from my life experiences about getting back up again when you've been knocked down, when you've been beaten down, when you've made mistakes, and how to stay on track when that happens, for you to reach those goals that you have when you repeat mistakes. And what I hope to happen from this is to activate you in reaching higher levels in your life. Now, for some of you that don't know, you know, many years back, I used to DJ in bars and drank a lot of alcohol, partied a lot. And I made my mistakes. When that happened, I got arrested a few times while drinking, lost income. I was making $750,000 a year in a business and lost all of that. The mental state that I got into sent me into a tailspin completely. Everything that I had built up in my life came crashing down, and I had to learn how to pick myself up again. In that moment, I had to learn to pick myself up again so that it wouldn't happen again. And I'm going to tell you this. Since that happened, since that day, I've probably fallen down flat on my face and had the choice to make of how I'm going to get back up again. Hundreds of times since then. Now you might say, well, Jeremiah, that makes you a total failure. Why would I ever listen to you? Or you might say, okay, I want to hear what you did to change that. The difference is, every time I fell on my face, I learned from that and kept moving forward, developed tenacity, developed the ability and the grit to get back up again and keep going after my goals, learning from the mistakes. You see, that's the thing. I've never. Those big mistakes, made those same mistakes again. And I'm thankful for that. Not getting arrested for alcohol. Alcohol. I mean, that's. I literally can confidently say that's Never going to happen again in my life, really, because of the grit and the tenacity of knowing who I am and where I'm going and the fact that nothing can get me off track and that's where we need to get to. Is establishing that not in a prideful way, by the way? Yes, absolutely. If I repeat the same patterns in the situations and the friends and the lifestyle that I had back then, I would definitely repeat those scenarios. I had to change my friends, I had to change my environment. I had to change what voices I was listening to. I had to change the goals in my life. I had to change my beliefs. I had to change what I thought it meant to live a life and go after my dreams and the reasons why I was making life decisions. That was the big change that most people, if I can be real honest, takes them a lifetime to make. And so I observed this and I thought, you know what? I don't want it to take 40 years for me to reach my goals. I want to accelerate the distance of time from mistake to learning to breakthrough and help pass this on to other people. Help pass on to other people that tenacity, that ability to get back up again. And I get it. When we make a mistake, it is very scary to go into certain situations again. It is very scary to do the same things, to be in the same environments. Here's the thing. Remember I told you I was a dj, right? Front and center, Performing with people could get a crowd moving, jumping, made mistakes during that process. Okay. I was afraid to make a podcast because of that. This podcast right here would have never happened if I let that fear keep me stuck right there. And I'm getting a little choked up by this because I know that that's what it was. You see, I thought it was influencing people is what led me to that. That. That when I feel the ability to influence, that I would go into that place. And every single time that I've fallen flat on my face is when I was in a place of influence, getting close to my goal. And then I fell down because I got so stuck on myself. I got so prideful about what was going on in my life. I got so prideful about what could and couldn't happen. I got so prideful about my beliefs about what was right, what was wrong, and having to prove myself to everybody. And the biggest thing that changed everything to help me get from where I was then to where I am today, succeeding far more wildly than I did back then, was I stopped having to prove myself to everybody. I stopped having to pretend to be somebody that I'm not. I started living my life authentically, without question. And I started shifting my focus off of myself and onto the horizon that's in front of me. I started taking care of myself, mentally, physically, relationally. I stopped finding my self worth in what other people said about me. I stopped finding my value in the opinions of other people and their judgment. Having the power to keep me from my destiny, having the judgment of what other people might say about me behind my back, what they might do. Feeling afraid of putting myself out there because maybe other people might attack me or come after me. These were fears that I had for the longest time. And I kept repeating these patterns. And these came in from childhood experiences, repeating these patterns. And I'm sure if you're listening to this right now, you've heard a lot of this before, that we repeat these patterns from childhood, that we repeat these things. But I want to really dive into how we can break the cycle, no longer repeat the same patterns of our past and develop the grit and tenacity to keep moving forward towards our goals, against all odds, in the right direction that will get the results that we know are possible, that we want, and to manifest the dreams and vision that we have in our life. And that comes from learning to trust yourself more. That comes from developing trust with yourself and giving yourself grace to make mistakes and having compassion on yourself the way that you would for somebody else when they fail. Those three things, compassion, trust, and grace. And the fourth one, gratitude. These four things work together. We're grateful for the lessons that we've been taught in our lives. And everything that we've experienced up to this moment in time has a blessing in it. A blessing because we learned what we don't want to do, we learned what not to do, and we got direction in which way to go, which direction to head in. We adjusted the course a little bit. This way or that way, just a little bit. Listen, if you're headed in this direction and you get knocked off track this way, you're gonna go off in the wrong way. And this happens. And many of you ended up here with me from when you got knocked off one direction to another. And so merely what I hope to do today is help maybe guide your compass just a little bit towards true north of your destiny, guide your compassion, your compass just a little bit towards the true north of what you were made for, and help you realize that you are not the sum total of all the mistakes that you've made in your life. You see, when I made a lot of those mistakes, I was identifying myself by those mistakes. I was saying, I am a guy who was arrested, alcoholism, made mistakes, couldn't control my emotions, couldn't control my temper. When people would trigger me when. When I would see injustice happening, I would get angry at injustice. Now you might be saying, wait, Jeremiah, you said. Are you saying that getting angry at injustice is a bad thing? Not at all. In fact, it is important that when we see things that are wrong, that we speak truth with boldness. But when we make proving that we are right more important than connecting with other people, we miss the opportunity that's right in front of us. When we make trying to change somebody else's mind more important than heading in the direction of our destiny, we miss the blessing that's right in front of us. When we make getting other people to agree with us more important than love, we miss the mission altogether. And when we make the mission in our lives more important than love. And if you know me, I believe in God. I believe in Jesus, I believe in the Creator. When we make our mission more important than who we are in God's eyes, than who we are, when we make what we want to happen our goal, more important than love, God is love. We miss the opportunity to step into breakthrough destiny. And that's what I was doing for so long. I was trying to accomplish these dreams, these visions, these goals. You know, I wrote down on my vision board to be a billionaire. I've told some of you that because I want to use that money, that wealth, to help people, to help people that are being hurt and abused, to help people that have experienced abuse, whether it be in family or church situations or whatever, you name it. Or, you know, I was reading a story the other day about these women that are abused in the porn industry and manipulated and lied to, told that they're going to be filmed for a reputable magazine like Vogue magazine, and then manipulated to take their clothes off. That hurt me and hurt my heart. And then some people say, well, what about the responsibility of those people who let themselves get abused? Right? What about that responsibility? Aren't they responsible for those choices they made? Absolutely. We must take ownership and responsibility for those choices, but we also must take responsibility and ownership over the choices that we do and how they have an impact. We can't control what other people think about us. We can't control how other people perceive us. We can't control how other people will choose to misinterpret what we say through the lens of their own pain to feed their story in their mind. We can't control that. It's not our job to at all. Because we can't control other people. When we believe that we can control other people, it comes usually from a place of. Because we felt controlled in our own life and out of control. And when you start to develop self control, which comes through self care and self love and knowing who you are, seeing yourself the way that God sees you. And when I say self love, I don't mean a narcissistic self love that says that I'm better than everybody else, that says that I don't need God because I love myself. What I'm saying is having the same view of yourself that God does. When God says that you are worthy of love, that's how you see yourself. You're not looking to other people to validate you, looking to other people to tell you that you are good enough for the destiny and the plans that are in your life. And whether you have faith or not, this applies, my friends. It seriously does. I'm not here to preach to you or do ministry time on this. There's a lot of great people that I look to for that. But what I wanna talk to you about is tenacity and getting back up again. And that starts with taking care of yourself and knowing who you are and establishing and building trust with yourself because you know yourself and then you can trust yourself. And then when you say, hey, maybe we shouldn't go in that direction, you trust that feeling that comes in your heart because of the discernment that's been established. When it comes time to get back up again and go after a goal, maybe to do something similar to what you've done before. Maybe you stood up in a meeting and spoke out against wrongdoing and you got shot down. And so you get scared to do that. And so maybe you become a people pleaser that's afraid to speak their mind, that's afraid to speak what's on their heart, that's afraid to tell people how they really feel and is trying to get people to see their side by not truly being true to themselves. When they go out there to speak to other people, to help other people, they're doing it in a way that is a little bit deceiving, deceptive and manipulative. Okay, before you shut this off, because I just said that many of you listening may be deceptive, manipulative and deceiving. I'm going to say this because that's what I was being. Okay, so we need to not have pride to say, oh, I'm not any of those things. I'm not saying that you are or accusing you of that. I'm just saying from my experience that I found I was so afraid of people seeing the real me that they would judge me. And so I would have to mislead people to say, no, I'm this guy over here when I was really like this. I see people do this all the time. I want people to think that I have a political affiliation over here, but I don't want to touch on what I really believe over here. We see this happen all the time. We're afraid to be bold about our st Stance on things. We're afraid to be bold about how we feel, and we're trying to manipulate the situation to get our agenda forward. When we have agendas and operate out of the pride of our agenda, we can be easily deceived. And we will do whatever it takes to get our agenda. And so we. We have to know, is the agenda that I have? Right. My agenda that I have is to empower people to no longer be silent in the face of injustice. I want to empower people to no longer shrink back the dreams that they have in their life. I want to empower people to no longer be afraid to sell something to somebody that's going to have a positive impact because they worry about. About how it's going to be perceived. To no longer be worried about putting themselves out there and promoting themselves for fear of being a narcissist. That's what I had for so long. I was afraid of being a. Coming across as a narcissist to people because I had been hurt by narcissists in my life, was attracted as a people pleaser. And so I never wanted to be that way. And so I was afraid to speak up, speak out, and be bold because I didn't want to come across that way. I was holding bitterness in my heart for the pain that I had. I was holding offense in my heart for how I had been hurt by other people. And I wasn't allowing myself to operate out of love. I was making my mission more important than love. You know, back in the day, my mission when I was DJing, it was to meet women. It was to find the most beautiful woman I could, kind of to put myself out there to be seen by women. And I made a woman bigger than love. When I finally got over that one, got some healing for some of the wounds in my life. I met my wife, Abigail. Abigail. And I met on social media, and she commented on a post that I did on social media, and we went out to dinner, and her and I were actually kind of both a little hesitant. I was the one that was, like, within, like, two months, I was like, I love you. You know, not, like, right away. I was not that kind of person within two months. But she was, like, needed a little bit more time. But, man, I'm glad we took our time through that relationship to grow and to connect and to learn who we were before we got into marriage back in 2017. And every single day in our marriage, we are making each other better, better versions of ourselves. You know who taught me the message of tenacity and to get back up again and try again, that I'm sharing with you today? Abigail did. Helping kind of coach me. Some people are like, you know, the coach needs a coach. My wife has been a coach for years. She was a coach for many years and was the coach to me through these things. And now I have other coaches and mentors that I look to. She's kind of like, all right, let's build our marriage. Let's build our family. I no longer need to be your coach. I've done a lot of work with you. It's time for you to go off in the direction of your destiny. And what she taught me was, when you fall down, what matters is the reaction afterwards. Do we get angry? Do we get violent? Or do we say, you know what? I'm gonna do better next time? Do we say, you know what? I failed that one time. I'm gonna get back up again and do better next time? And we don't sit and ruminate and beat ourselves up over the mistakes that we made. We don't sit and punish ourselves for the things that we did wrong. We don't sit and operate in the mental punishment of, you did this wrong. You better never do this again. You see, that's the message that I used to hear growing up. And that was the voice that I had inside my head. An unrealistic standard of what excellence means, that excellence meant perfection, that tenacity meant doing everything perfect. And that was a big lie that I was believing and allowing my perfectionism to keep me off track. And so what Abigail taught me was that it's okay to get as much done as you can and do your best in a day, to have a few things on your to do list left over to do better next time. She also taught me to make sure to prioritize what's important. And my Values in my life. For the longest time, my value was getting people to like me, getting people to agree with me, getting people to do what I said. Oof. And so when I made the values of my whole life, getting people to like me, getting people to agree with me, and getting people to do what I said, I was operating in this way that was just completely schizophrenic from my core values. It was crazy. And so the biggest things that happened was I stopped trying to get people to like me, I stopped trying to get people to agree with everything that I said, and I stopped trying to get people to do what I said. And you might say, well, as a leader, how do we lead then? It's by connection. It's by connecting with other people. It's by having a connection with the people on the other side of the camera or the computer that we're connecting with. And that first starts with connecting inside of ourselves and building trust with ourselves and keeping the promise that we make to ourselves. And that's the biggest thing that I want to pass on to you today is tenacity to get back up again, to do better next time, to keep moving forward. Only happens when we build trust with ourselves, when we establish trust with ourselves. You see, if I didn't trust myself to get back up again and to do better next time, I'm not going to get back up again and do better next time because I know that I have a track record of repeating the same negative patterns, right? And I bet maybe some of you have experienced that in your life. You have a track record of repeating certain negative patterns that have come into your mind. And so it's scary to think about being tenacious because you don't want to repeat the same mistakes as the past, right? Remember I said I'm not going to be arrested for alcohol related things ever again. You know, I said that about 11 years ago after I got arrested for the first alcohol related thing. Guess What? It happened three times again. Twice again. Yeah. Three times total. I never made that blanket statement for 11 years that it would never happen again because I was afraid to. I was afraid of falling. And now I can say there's a difference, you see, between pride, confidence, speaking out of a place of pride, saying, I'm never going to do it again. Pride comes before a fall. But I can confidently say today, not because I'm prideful, I know myself. I know that if I put myself in those situations again, I'm going to fall down. Want to know how I know I'm Not I'm confident to not cheat on my wife because I don't put myself into situations where that might potentially happen. How do I know that I'm confident enough to not react in a certain way that's going to create negative results in my life because I'm not putting myself into those situations? Now, you want to know what the truth is on this? This isn't fear. We're talking about tenacity. I actually am putting myself into certain situations that are similar to. I found new friends, new people to support me in the right things. I found people to support me that are in alignment with my goals. You see, that doesn't mean shrinking back and isolating yourself from other people. I'm not isolating myself and not having conversations with women because I'm worried that I'm going to cheat on my wife. I coach a lot of women, but there's boundaries there. And that's why boundaries are so key and important in your life, is to follow those boundaries in your life because you know who you are and you know whose you are, and nobody can tell you otherwise. You're not trying to prove it to yourself by what other people say about you. Tenacity comes from establishing and building trust with yourself to keep the promises that you make to yourself, to keep the promises that you make in every situation. How do you build a business that when you promise that you're going to build that business, that you keep that promise that you promise that when you're going to dedicate 30 minutes a day to writing copy and 10 minutes a day to doing a live video on your social media, that you keep that promise that you make to yourself and you stay tenacious. And you know what? You establish tenacity by doing it in the small things. You establish tenacity by staying faithful in the little. The Bible says that. That if we're faithful with the small things that will be made ruler over the big things. That's a paraphrase. Faithful with the little, ruler over much. It says Matthew 25:21. And the Lord said unto him, well done, thou good and faithful servant. Thou hast been faithful with little. I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of the Lord. Faithfulness is not based on performance. And this is where a lot of people miss it with tenacity. That this is a message of performance, that this is a message of doing all the right things, equating to our destiny. No, it's faith in who we are and faith in whose we are and being faithful Means full of faith Tenacity only happens when you have faith in your life of the direction that you're going and that you're headed. And we can only act out of faith in what we believe, which is why when we are believing a lie about going after our goals, we will never take action and walk in faith. We will be operating out of past experience, past pains, past hurt, past bitterness. And we'll stay stuck in that hamster wheel cycle that we've been on for so long. And so this is why it's so important to get healing in those areas. Big place you can start with healing is forgive yourself for the mistakes that you made. Forgive other people for the mistakes that they made. Pray blessing over yourself in your life and make declaration of the direction that you're going to pray blessing over the lives of the people that have hurt you. We're not praying curses over their life. We're praying blessing. I pray blessing over both presidential candidates. I pray blessing over human traffickers. I pray blessing over rapists and abusers and terrorists. Why? Not because I support those actions that they're doing, but because I'm praying the same blessing that I want in my life over them so that they can experience the love and the faithfulness of having a relationship with God and knowing who they are and impacting the world with love. I had a dream as a child of what if the most evil people in the world, rapists, child sex traffickers, terrorists, knew who they were, operated out of love, maybe in prison, and had the ability to impact others, to not make the same mistakes they did, and to influence people in a positive way for good. What impact that would radically have on the world not to go and do the same thing, to stop doing those things that they're doing completely and to change gears and directions into a positive direction. That's what I pray for people, and that's what we need to pray for people. I don't want to sound like I'm like being prideful about this prayer. I feel like that might have come across a little bit like I was being prideful there. I don't want to be prideful in my pride of trying to not appear prideful. Oh, Lord, please help me. For you to establish tenacity in your life, we have to walk in faith and declaration of where we're going, declare the outcome before it happens, and pull that destiny into our present reality. Science calls it quantum physics. There's the law of attraction. It's actually in the Bible as well. It talks about, David, how He prayed from the future into the present. In the Bible, we read about prophecy, we read about declaration. We read about walking in truth and faithfulness. Blessed are those that do not see, yet believe. What are you believing? Are you believing just what you see in your own life? Are you believing just what you experience? Or can you walk and step out in faith for what you've never seen before to happen and to manifest in your life the impossible things, such as a racist reconciling with those that they hurt? I have a friend of mine, his name's Will Ford, and he has a book that he wrote. It's called the Dream King, the Dream of Martin Luther King. And he wrote it with a man named Matt Lockett. And their story is incredible. You see, Matt's parents owned slaves back in the day, and Will Ford's parents were slaves. These two men met each other. They can't. Matt's family owned Will's family. And they came together and wrote a book about reconciliation and walking out dreams and destiny. That book is called the Dream King. And they're some of the most tenacious men that I've ever met. They're standing up against injustice on both sides of the political aisle because both sides are a mess right now. That's how I feel about that. Good, bad, on both sides. We have to come together and have a conversation and connect and listen to our brothers and sisters instead of just trying to prove our point, trying to prove our position, our agenda, connect and be true. And what this does is it establishes trust. And this starts with, if you want to have an impact on the world around you, establishing trust with yourself. These two men started in prayer alone with God themselves and God, and established this that way, this message that's impacting people for positive change in the world against injustice and racism. And I want to encourage you, I know some of you listen to this right now, have dreams in your heart to impact people on a level that seems impossible to you right now. I have dreams in my heart, too. We have to establish and develop tenacity, not out of performance, but out of knowing who we are and building trust with ourselves. And this starts by how we talk to ourselves about ourselves and keeping the promises that we make to ourselves every single day. You hear me talk about this on my social media all the time. It's time to start doing what you say and saying what you mean. Letting your yes be yes and your no be no. And not wavering, not people pleasing, not telling people what you think they want to hear just because you think they want to hear it. Not turning yourself into somebody that you're not just to get an end result, not manipulating situations to reach your desired outcome, but walking in boldness and authenticity and being yourself. And that starts with building trust with yourself. In business, when we are authentic and real, it makes a connection with people. People can tell when we are just saying something to get a result, a selfish outcome and when it's really coming from a real place. And authenticity has the most impact, especially on social media. I've said that so many times, but I know many of you struggle to go on social media and to stay tenacious every single day, to make content every single day. I want to encourage you that it's going to start by building trust with yourself, keeping a promise that you make to yourself. And I want to encourage you, whatever voice that's telling you that you're not good enough to do it, you are good enough today. And I want you to start to believe that, that you are good enough to go after the dreams that are in your life. I didn't believe that I was good enough to go after what I'm going after today in my past, the mistakes that I had made. But I made a choice and decision that I'm never gonna again return back to those places and I'm gonna get back up again and put one foot in front of the other. And that's what I want to encourage you today in is getting back up again and putting one foot in front of the other with tenacity. By taking care of yourself, by forgiving yourself, by loving yourself, by speaking kindly to yourself, by having compassion when you make mistakes, and by believing that you are good enough for all the dreams that are in your heart. It just starts by believing and putting one foot in front of the other in faith to make the impact that you want to have. And many times people are like, well, I don't know if I'm going in the right direction. That's what I love to help people with, with coaching. My one on one coaching that I work with people with is specifically in the area of marketing, sales, social media, copywriting and advertising is what to do, what choices to make, to get their message out there to have an impact with people. I told you about Will Ford. I've worked with him to promote his events, getting thousands of people to events. He has an event that's going on here recently, recently, a new event called 818 the Sign. I'm helping promote that. It's an online event right now with COVID that's going on. I would invite you, if you're listening to this right now, to hop that. Go to 818thesign.org and you can check that out. It's going to really impact you. I'm not an expert on a lot of these topics, but I want to pass on to you some of these lessons that I've learned. And that's why I made this podcast. It starts by establishing trust with yourself, speaking kindly to yourself, believing that you are good enough and putting one foot in front of the other, keeping the promises that you make to yourself. That's how you build tenacity. To get back up again when you fall down. To go after your dreams with boldness. So listen, if you want to coach with me, I'd love to talk with you or just have a conversation for 15 minutes. You can head on over to my website, Jeremiah Krakowski.com and visit. There's a link. It says coaching and then it says a free 15 minute call. Or it's Jeremiah krakowski.com freecall. You can schedule a free 15 minute call with me to talk about this. To talk about your goals, where you're headed and which areas you need help making decisions on and what direction to go. And I can help coach you in that. To walk powerfully and to be empowered to reach your destiny. And if you're somebody that wants to win a free 30 minute coaching session with me, if you've listened all the way to the end of this podcast. By the way, I only ever say this at the end of my podcast because only the people who get this have listened all the way through an episode of my podcast. You can win a free 30 minute coaching session with me by leaving hashtag grow your life. All one word in the comments on my Instagram, on the post that I make on my feed. I pick one winner every single week on Sunday to win a free 30 minute coaching session with me. Listen, I believe in you. I know that it's possible for you to go after your goals, to reach your destiny. It's just about putting one foot in front of the other and walking faithfully. Grow your life everybody. And we'll talk soon.