The Unbreakable Success Podcast: Episode 25

We're all constantly going through life changes. What we seldom notice is that all of the changes we make in our business and life really boil down to changes in the stories that we believe about ourselves and our circumstances.

Why?

Because the stories we believe determine the actions we take — and the actions we take (or don't take) lead to our self-created results.

Your stories are powerful, and you and I have a lot of them. Let's learn how to leverage this to our advantage by ‘checking in' on the stories we've been telling ourselves…

Full Transcript:

You're listening to The Unbreakable Success Podcast, episode 25.

Hey everybody, welcome back to The Unbreakable Success Podcast. This is Aaron Keith Hawkins and as always, I sincerely appreciate you taking time out of your day to spend some time with me. Today's episode, we're going to talk about three questions that can change a story of stress into a story of success. Now, I always tell people one of the most important lessons we can learn in business and life is that we have to be very, very careful about what we tell ourself because most of the time we have absolutely … We just don't recognize how absolutely convincing we are. The words that we use are ourselves are so convincing. Why? Because whatever we repeat over and over again, eventually we're going to believe it. We've all been through life changes.

We've all been through different seasons during our lifetimes and I'm willing to bet that if you think back and reflect, there's probably been a time when something has changed drastically for you. When I say changed, it was a change that you made that altered the course of your life in one way, shape, or form. For example, you may have stopped smoking or you might've ended a relationship or started a new relationship. You might've moved to a new location or lost a whole bunch of weight or changed careers. At some point, you made a decision that altered your storyline. It altered the course of your life. While happens to all of us, what most of us don't realize is that the very simple explanation about how we go about making these changes is that we change our story about the subject.

For example, if you're one of those people that have stopped smoking, I guarantee you that your story about smoking as a topic is totally different now than it was when you were smoking. You had a different story that you were telling yourself about smoking. If you ended a relationship by your choice, then you got a different story now about that relationship than you did while that relationship was just going on and running its own course. At some point, you made a decision. The reason that we make those decisions is that at some point and this usually happens very unconsciously, meaning we don't even realize that we're doing it. At some point, we change the story because we decide that the old story is no longer serving us.

Because it's not serving us, we need to change the story on that topic. Now, this is a really good thing, but here's the only problem. Most of the time people do this on autopilot. We don't even realize that it's happening, so instead we just do it in circumstances that are … We do it in ways that are socially acceptable or culturally expected. It just happens when things get to a certain point, but that creates an opportunity for us to leverage this understanding of story. Because once we recognize that changing our story can change the course of our life, we can leverage that information. Instead of just going on autopilot and letting these things happen when they will, if we decide to grab a hold and decide when we're going to make these changes, then guess what, this becomes a really powerful tool.

I'll give an example. Most of us, including me, either have or have had something in our lives or in our business that's really challenging, that ultimately is just stressful. Remember, all stress is a response to a real or an imagined threat. To use my self as an example, before I started this podcast, I had a story that I kept telling myself and I had been telling myself for decades. As simple as it sounds, I had a story about my voice. I absolutely couldn't stand it. I later found out that this is just a really common thing, but I couldn't stand hearing the sound of my voice, which was weird because I did a lot of teaching for a very long time. Teaching to a live audience and recording a podcast and having it played back and edited in front of you, etc., it really made me … Just the thought of it, made me cringe.

It actually created a lot of hesitation for me before I started to show. I didn't want to start some podcast and have people listening to my horrific voice. That's the story I was telling myself. I didn't want to subject people to this sound and I certainly didn't want to hear it myself. That brings me to question number one on this topic. As I said, this episode's about three questions that can change our story of stress to a story of success.

Question #1: Is your story empowering or is it dis-empowering?

See, because my nonsensical story about my voice was just a self created threat. There's no actual danger in the sound of my voice. Whether you happen to like my voice of or not, either way it's fine, but there's no danger involved. I created that stress myself by creating this story about how horrible it was. Once I sat down and paused and actually asked myself this question “Is this story empowering or disempowering?”, the only truthful answer was that obviously it was disempowering story, which obviously meant I had to change that. Because if you're holding on to a story that's disempowering, it's not serving you. If it's not serving you, it's certainly not going to bring you success.

For me in this circumstance, I just had to change my story from this belief that my voice was so horrible to the realization that my voice, if I use it appropriately, it creates an opportunity for other people. My voice can be an opportunity. Because if I share something that somebody else can use, it's going to benefit them and any dumb little ego that I may have about how I sound or how I don't sound is irrelevant. Once I decided that my voice was no longer a threat and instead was an opportunity, then guess what happened? Yeah, you guessed it. A short while later, I had a new and noteworthy show no iTunes. Let's jump to question number two about any story that's currently causing stress and how to change it to a story of success.

Question #2: Does your story describe YOUR responsibility or is it assigning responsibility (or blame) to someone or something else?

Now, let me use myself as an example again. Many, many years ago, I was a young police officer, but I had enough years on the job that I was eligible to be promoted and part of the process was you had to take an exam through the state and you went through an interview process and either you got promoted or you didn't. Long story short, there was three separate occasions back to back to back where I was hoping to get my first promotion and I didn't.

When this initially happened, when I got passed over these three times in a row, there's something I completely failed to do and that was to look in the mirror and acknowledge that I was totally responsible for my own outcomes. Because the truth of the matter is regardless of how I felt I stacked up against my competition and regardless of how much I felt I was or wasn't good enough to do the job, the truth is I hadn't done absolutely everything I could have to make myself unignorable. I was good at my job, but I wasn't as good as I could have. I studied for this promotion, but I didn't study as much I could have. I was placing a lot of blame on this person not being fair or the odds being stacked against me or fate intervening and just life not being fair.

I think we've all been around enough to have plenty of circumstances where we've played the blame game. I had my own stories about how fair or unfair my lack of professional advancement was, but something very interesting happened when I changed my story. When I decided that if and when I was ever going to rise through the ranks, it was going to be completely, 100%, on me, so I changed my story. The next time around when that opportunity came was coming up again, I had already been in the process of demanding more of myself than anyone else could've demanded from me. I decided finally to completely own my situation. Once I had shifted that story, in a very short amount of years, my rank skyrocketed and it's not because I was something special or I was so great.

It was simply because I refused to blame anyone else at that point. I decided it didn't matter who else was around, who else was making decisions, I was going to take complete responsibility for what happened to me professionally. Because if at any time we're taking anything less than 100% responsibility, then we're literally creating stress. We're creating an external threat.

There's a brilliant business coach and business trainer in Australia, his name is Kerwin Rae, and he calls it “extreme” responsibility, the act of completely owning it, no matter what happens, good, bad, or indifferent. No matter who else that somebody could reasonably blame doesn't matter. Whatever happens, its on you. You just have to own it.

When that happens, it changes the game because you stop worrying about what everybody else is doing and instead deciding what you can do about it. Question number two is simply are you taking 100% or as Kerwin Rae calls it “extreme” responsibility in your story? Because I guarantee you if you're not, change that story, take the responsibility, own it, and your circumstances will begin to change.

Question #3: Is it a story of growth?

Is that story you're telling yourself, and this could be a story about your relationship, this can be a story about your career, about your fitness. Is it a story of growth? Because if you're not telling yourself a story of progress, then guess what? It's unlikely that you're going to make any. Here's the thing, psychology and research tells us that when we make progress on whatever our goals are that we wind up increasing what's called our subjective wellbeing. Essentially, we wind up feeling happier and more satisfied with ourself whenever we find ourself making progress.

If your story you're telling yourself isn't about progress, then you're not going to be able to enjoy that subjective wellbeing that comes from making the progress, so change your story to one that inherently causes you to look for and create opportunities to grow, to learn, to expand, to become essentially a better version of yourself.

What'll happen is it'll become a perpetual cycle of success because by growing you'll feel better. When you're feeling better, you're going to be more likely to, number one, you're going to automatically start creating stories that are empowering. You're going to automatically want to take complete responsibility and you're going to want to automatically grow because it will feel good do so and it becomes a perpetual cycle. Let's pause for a minute. Ask yourself what is a story right now? What is something that's going that's stressing you? What is the actual story that you're telling yourself about it? When you listen to your internal monologue or external monologue when you're talking to other people about it, is your story one that is empowering you? If it's not, change your story.

Is your story taking complete and extreme responsibility for the situation or is there some blame involved? If there is some blame involved, end it because ultimately the only person we're in control of is ourselves.

Third, and probably most important of all, is the story a story of growth? Because if we're discussing our challenges without discussing the opportunities for growth to get us through those challenges, then we're missing the mark. We're missing the biggest opportunity.

If we're discussing challenges without discussing opportunities for growth, then we're missing the mark. Click To Tweet

Make sure the stories that are challenging you include, in the very DNA of those stories, a description of the opportunities and the ways in which you are going to grow by learning, by experimenting, by being curious, and quite frankly by taking full advantage of how brilliant you already are.

Those are the three simple questions. Is your story empowering or is it disempowering? Is your story claiming 100% responsibility or is it tossing some blame out there somewhere? Is your story a story of growth? Wherever you find stress, wherever you find challenge in your life, I invite you to bounce these questions off of that story and I guarantee you your circumstances will, they must change.

Let's make sure this isn't the end of our story on this topic. Come on over to aaronkeithhawkins.com/25 and leave your comments, your thoughts, your questions and I'll be glad to talk you. I promise I'll respond and support you in any way I can because quite frankly your thoughts are very important to me. By the way, if you're listening to this podcast, then there's a good chance you're probably somebody who believes that making constant improvements in your business or your life is part of who you are.

If that feels like you, I want to invite you to join me in The Unbreakable Success Challenge. Over the course of five days, you'll get free actionable training that'll help you improve your understanding of motivation and understanding of influence and overcoming distractions and a lot more perspective. If that sounds like a win for you, just visit me right now at unbreakablechallenge.com to get started absolutely free. This is Aaron Keith Hawkins. I can't wait to have the opportunity to talk with you again. Until next time, make sure you take care of yourself. Please take care of each other and make sure you're creating the best life of your life.

Resources from The Unbreakable Success Podcast Episode 25:

Kerwin Rae, Business Growth Solutions for Small to Medium Businesses: KerwinRae.com

The Unbreakable Success Challenge (My free 5 Day Training and Challenge Series): UnbreakableChallenge.com