Not having the knowledge just makes you teachable, not stupid. Not being in shape just makes you moldable, not lazy. Not having the experience just makes you eager, not ignorant. Flip the script and force yourself to see the positive where you’ve only seen negative. What are the advantages of not knowing, not understanding, not conquering, not having, not achieving your goals yet? The yet matters. The yet reminds us that we have a whole week, month, life ahead of us to become who we were made to be.
You are enough. Today. As you are. Stop beating yourself up for being on the beginning side of yet, no matter what age you are. Yet is your potential. Yet is a promise. Yet is what keeps you moving forward. Yet is a gift, and you are enough to get to the other side of it.
For me, getting past this limiting belief in myself as an entrepreneur came with acknowledging all the things I had done instead of focusing on the things I hadn’t. There’s a great exercise for this I learned years ago that I think might be helpful for you if you’re doubting whether you can do something. Write a letter to yourself, from yourself. More specifically, write from your tenacity, from the part of you that never gave up, from the exact opposite place of your fear. Write from your self-assurance. Write from your heart and your gut and the piece of you who always gets what she sets her mind to.
When I ask women to do this at our conference, there’s always this moment of confusion. “But I haven’t done anything,” they tell me. “I don’t have anything to write down.”
Sis, the problem isn’t that you aren’t accomplished; the problem is that you don’t give yourself any credit for the things you have done. You need to write a letter from your truth to extinguish the lies about who you really are. So if you worry that you’re overweight and out of shape, then write a letter to yourself about all the times in your life when your body was incredible. Did you play sports as a child? Did you carry a baby inside yourself? Did you grow another human life? Those arms that are too squishy and untoned? How many times have those arms offered love and comfort to other people? How often have those arms helped you care for your family or do your job or create your art? You think your dream is too big, too impossible? Write down all the times you did things nobody thought you could.
I’m going to share with you the very first letter I wrote to myself, and I’ll tell you right now that the original letter included a lot of cussing because A) I honestly never planned on anyone reading it, B) sometimes a well-placed f-bomb can fire me up, and C) I love Jesus, but I cuss a little. For today’s purposes I’ve toned it way down and removed the words that might have this book banned in several countries. The original letter still sits inside the spiral-bound notebook I wrote it in that day. I don’t have a date on it, but I know I wrote it in the middle of my struggles with my worst insecurities about whether I was smart enough to grow my business. I wrote to me from my persistence.
Dear Rachel,
I am your persistence, and this is what I want you to know about me. I am a badass. I was born in pain and fear, and I fought my way out. I graduated early. I moved to a new city. I got a job I was too young to have, and then another, and then another. I built a company that shouldn’t have worked and then another after that. I wrote five books. I’ll write even more. I took on foster care and raising five kids. I do stuff that nobody else can do in less time than anyone can believe. I am self-aware. I work hard on myself. I face the hard stuff again and again and again. I don’t give up, not ever. Your fear may be powerful, but there is no defining force greater in your life than me, your persistence. You have thirty-three years to serve as an example of that!
This exercise was so powerful for me at the time because I truly didn’t give myself credit for all the things I had done. I needed to remind myself of the truth. I may not have had a formal education, but I did all those things I listed, and I continue to do those things. That is what I want you to do today. That is what I want you to do this weekend, and in three months I want you to do it again. Then three months after that, I want you to do it again. Every time that fear of not enough shows up for you in whatever stupid way it tends to, I want you to remind yourself of the truth. Not the opinion.
For most of us, women especially, we hold on to some little nugget, some little lie, some limiting belief that we’ve had since childhood. We’ve believed it for so long, we don’t even question it anymore. We heard something when we were younger and our feelings were tender. Someone said something, someone spoke into your insecurity about yourself, so you’ve spent a lifetime questioning yourself and accepting what they said as truth. The crazy thing is, it’s not true. It’s an opinion.
1+1=2 is fact.
Gravity exists here on earth. Fact.
Water can extinguish fire. Fact.
You being “enough” of anything? Opinion. Someone else’s opinion, or maybe your own, but either way, it is not grounded in any actual reality other than the weight you give it. So how much of your life are you living—or rather, not living—because you’ve been treating an opinion as a truth?
Here’s what’s so crazy about the idea of enough. Whatever your issues with not believing you are enough, that is the opinion someone else gave you, whether intentional or not, and you have accepted it and made it a doctrine in your life.
We never boil it down like that. We never really think, Oh, I don’t feel like I’m enough, because the media told me so, because my aunt said something to me once, because a girl in eighth grade commented on this and that became my reality. Have you ever thought about how ludicrous it is to be living your life, to be making choices to hold yourself back from your goals, to not try things, to not put yourself out there because of something some random person said to you once upon a time? Whether it came from a voice of authority or a chick on the internet, if you’re hesitating because of someone else telling you that you are not enough, you’re still living your life and making choices for yourself, and, subsequently, your family, based on someone else’s opinion.
Other people don’t get to tell you what you can have!
Someone else doesn’t get to tell you who you can be!
The world doesn’t get to decide what you get to try.
You are the only one who can make that decision.
Here’s the flip side of that. You’ve got to stop blaming your problems on the world. You can’t be like, “Well, I got teased my entire adolescence, so now I’m insecure.” Or, “My parents did these things to me, so now I can’t cope.”
I’m not belittling the trauma we hold from our childhoods. It’s so incredibly harmful to walk through trauma, particularly at a time in life when we’re so malleable to other people’s opinions. But here’s the deal. High school’s over. Junior high was a long time ago. You are not a little girl anymore, and you cannot keep living your life with a seventh grader’s mentality, no matter how painful seventh grade was. You have to decide right now that you’re going to take hold of your life, and you are going to let all of that other crap fall away because it doesn’t matter. Because whoever said the thing to you, your mom or your sister or the mean girl or the mean boy in high school or whoever it was, they don’t get an opinion on your life. They’re not in the ring. They’re not in the game. They’re not the one taking the punches. That’s you.
It’s a simultaneous thing. You can’t live your life for their opinions, and you also can’t keep blaming them. You need to embrace your path. You need to accept that whatever happened did happen and choose to be mindful of the steps that you’ve got to take now to heal and get past those things. You cannot keep living in the excuses of something that happened fifteen or twenty years ago. Because, seriously, how is that working for you?