How to Turn Major Setbacks into Huge Leaps Forward

01:17 Okay, that's my website control the future debt.tech. Then you're going to do forward slash huge dash leap. So let's dive in straight in now to what we're going to talk about today. There's nothing I ever talk about that I haven't personally been through and I think most coaches and really most therapists and psychologists, if you think about it, medical doctors, we all do what we do out of our life experiences.

So I've had some major setbacks in my life, so I'm going to tell you from experience that mentality from research. I'm going to tell you from all my training being alive, a life coach, we're going to go into all kinds of best practices on what to do and I know some of you, if you're not currently going through a major setback in life, there's been a major setbacks in your life and guess what?

02:11 There will be more. It's just life. And one thing I am always trying to teach you guys is you got to play by the rules of the game of life. You know, and I love law of attraction, but everything's pie in the sky. And if nothing's ever going to happen, that's just not going to happen, right? You're going to have major setbacks and I'm sorry if you're going through something really big and certainly those major setbacks, like loss of a loved one, loss of a marriage, losing your house, losing your job, those are some really big ones and there's some other ones out there, but I'm going to teach you how to turn them into huge leap forward today. And one thing I want to say about major transitions for me personally is if I caused them, like if I wanted a divorce, then it's stressful, but it's not as difficult.

03:09 The things that are the most difficult for me or things I don't want it to happen in my life. Things I didn't choose, I just didn't want to happen. Those are really hard. So we're going to talk about what to do when those things happen. Financial catastrophe is, is another one, and I'm going to give you some specific examples, sitting back and saying, all right, in today's episode, I'm going to teach you five things that are useful in dealing with major setbacks. Number one is how to minimize the grief and anger period that accompanies them. Right? Number two, I'm going to teach you how to give yourself a break when you feel disoriented and not yourself. That's what a major setback feels like, like you're disoriented. Number three, I'm going to give you the tools to get through the time it takes to recover when you feel like it's taking too long, right?

04:03 So I'm going to give you the tools to get through the time it takes to recover when it's feeling like it's taking too long, I'm going to help you remember number for the true role of problems. They're always there to lead you to something better, and so it was a major setback. I want to get you thinking about this major setback that you might be going through and how it's leading you to something better. And then finally, in the last point, I'm going to help you rebuild your life better than it was before. So we're going to go through these really quickly. I'm going to give you the real nuggets in each one of these five, and like I said, there's more information in my notes in my Freebie at control, the future.tech forward slash huge dash leap. Okay? All right. Now, number one, how to minimize the grief and anger period.

04:58 Everyone, everyone in life goes through major setbacks or upheavals and you're going to feel some emotion. If you know my story, you know I felt a lot of really bad feeling emotion and I don't like it and I have so many skills and tools under my belt to not feel depressed or angry or sad, and even with all the tools I have, I still, I still feel bad. I don't like it. It hurts. There's sadness, there's grief, it's part of life, and you're going to feel those things in. The first thing I want you to know about that is it's normal. It's normal to go through that, so don't beat yourself up. If you're feeling bad, okay? You're okay. It's okay. It's normal to feel angry or depressed, but you can minimize it. You don't want to stay in it forever and you want to get on with your life, but the most important piece to this, however bad you feel right now is to know that you are going to feel better.

06:09 You're going to feel better, and you should feel better. I don't care if you caused it yourself. The worst case scenario, you're feeling a lot of guilt or shame over it. You should feel better. You're, it's an you're entitled to feel better. I've got some stories of some people that I've worked with who've done some really awful things in their life and even those most awful things that you can think of that they've caused in their life that have made a major setback in their life like a major like imprisonment, right? They can feel better even in that situation and redeem it the way you have to do it when you're feeling so bad is you want to give yourself time to turn your thoughts, okay? Your mind to a better feeling, thought and emotion. If you want more on how to do this, go listen to my podcast.

07:08 Look at my youtube videos. I give you a lot of tools on how to get your thoughts better so you feel better and better and better. Okay? There's lots of information there on how to do it. So number one in this little first point is you want to give yourself a break that it might take a little time right? And then you want to work on feeling better and better in it. And remember, it's this turning your mind away from the problem and onto a better feeling thought. There's. There's one thing I want to let you know that it's okay if you're feeling really, really bad, you need to distract yourself with whatever works because remember, the more we think about a problem, the sadder or angry we're going to be and sometimes it feels good. You want to thank you, want to be. You want to be mad at the person or you want to be angry and you.

08:08 You need to go through that a little bit, but if you get stuck in that, it's not gonna feel good after a while. So if you can't work on those thoughts and sometimes you can. At first you just want to distract yourself and you're not a failure because your watching too much tv or you're drinking more than you should or whatever. Coping mechanism, eating more, okay? It's, it's for a season and just give yourself a break and just let yourself distract for a little time. Of course, we want to find the healthiest ways to distract. We can, and we're going to talk about that more in a minute. Okay? Remember when I said, give yourself a break when you feel disoriented or not yourself as the next point. This is all about putting, taking the pressure off yourself to feel like you have to fix everything immediately because major setbacks often don't allow for an immediate solution.

09:08 You may not know what to do at first and that's okay. If your world's been ripped it apart, you're going to feel disoriented. You're going to feel like the rug has been pulled out from underneath you. You're going to feel like your breath as has been taken out of your tests like you got punched in the gut. If you think about a major setback, like one of those analogies, like you know, you know, say you when you were a kid and you ran into another kid and you fell on the ground and the first time you got your breath knocked out of you, it took you a minute to catch your breath and a major setbacks going to see. You're going to have to take a minute to catch your breath, so give yourself a break. When you're like, what happened? The lights just got knocked, knocked out, right?

09:51 Be Gentle with yourself and I want you to talk to yourself like you would talk to yourself like you had talked to a friend or a child, right? If it's a child or a friend that you cared about, had a major life setback, you'd be really gentle with them. You'd be really just listen and be their friend. You have to give yourself that first. Okay? Give yourself time to get your bearings and know that everyone feels disoriented after a major setback. What we, I don't know if you're like this, but we tend to want to know what to do. We want to tend to figure out why it happened. We want to know and we want permanence. We we love permanent, especially if something was working for you and it got taken away. That whole concept of impermanence in our lives was one of the hardest concepts for me to ever grasp because especially when I was younger, I got it.

10:55 By having things taken away from me, life is always changing what you want to do as one of the lessons of your major setback, and we're going to talk about learning the lessons in a minute so it feels better is you want to just embrace the beauty of the changes that are happening in you. Some good changes are happening. It's like the serenity prayer which I looked up to make sure I had right for you today and I didn't realize there was a second part to the serenity prayer, so it came to mind because when our life gives us a major setback, so we are having to learn how to accept a lot of things and just sit with it, understand it just accepted. If we can't understand it, just radically accept it just like in the serenity prayer and there's a lot of acceptance going on except the things you cannot change and then the courage to change what you can, but usually the courage to change what you can comes after the acceptance part, right?

12:03 Because if we can accept what's happened, we can't change it because we're going to keep going back and trying to make it as if it didn't happen. Okay? If you've taken a dbt skill class, you've learned radical acceptance and radical acceptance has been one of the most freeing concept of concepts of, uh, my life. You have to radically accept that things change. Some things are out of your control and you just want to give your heart and head time to accept what's happened to you. So I'm gonna read this serenity prayer to you because I want you to hear the second part of it too. Most of us know the first part, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can and wisdom to know the difference. Living One day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, excepting hardships as the pathway to peace, man, if you can get that piece from what I'm saying today, accepting hardships as a pathway to peace.

13:06 You've mastered life. Basically you're enlightened at that point, so I want you to really listen to everything I'm talking about today because accepting hardships is a pathway to peace. Taking as he did the sinful, sinful world as it is not as I would have it, trusting that he will make all things right if I surrender to his will, that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with him forever in the next. You don't have to be a Christian to get the pieces of that that are important for us to learn. Just a little note on this, if you followed me, you know that I've studied many religions, many religions, and there's nuggets from all religions and the serenity prayer was based in Christianity, but there's a lot of good stuff in there. Okay? The next thing I want to talk about that's important is I want to give you the tools to get through the time it takes to recover when you feel like it's taking too long, so I'm going to give you the tools, a few little tools to just give you that peace when you feel like the recovery is taking too long and I recently had a big majors financial setback in my life.

14:25 It wasn't. I couldn't have seen it coming. I trusted someone and they weren't trustworthy. I didn't see it coming and it was a major setback and I'm a go getter. I want to get stuff done and I wanted to solve it all and think I could solve it all. But sometimes we cause more grief by being. I don't want to say not to be optimistic because everything I preach is about being optimistic, but we have to be realistic about that. We can't control the time frame a lot of times about when things are gonna get back to normal or get or get better and we're going to talk some more about that. And remember I just said, you can just distract, you can just distract.

15:20 Distraction is a beautiful tool and it is a skill in and of itself. So remember I talked about, I alluded to a little bit, learning how to be present and this whole concept of impermanence is that we really want to enjoy things while we have them because when they're taken away or when their time in our life is over, ready for the next step, and that's what really is happening. We're ready for the next step. We tend to grieve that we didn't appreciate it. The way not to do this anymore in our lives going forward is to learn how to be present and in really enjoy the moment and have gratitude for the things that we have now. If you didn't do that before, just start now. Okay? So being mindful to the present is a skill that we learn and it makes us feel better, but an equally good skill or an also another good skill is to learn how to distract, to really not be present to that moment that's making us miserable. Does that make sense? Email me, if it doesn't, I'm going to tell you to do something and if you're really suffering when you hear this, you're gonna want to slap my face, but I want you to try to envision the good that may come of this, right? So let's talk about a horrible, horrible tragedy. Um, and I'm, I'm not making light of the suffering. I'm trying to get your mind wrapped around that good can come of every situation.

17:13 One tragedy that you could just think of it as an example would be a Ta, a child that was lost to something in just and how that parent grieves the loss of that child, but they also become an advocate. They also use that to propel them to do something really good in the world. I talked about before and I had in my mind, and I didn't know if I was going to tell you this one story about, I had a um, a classmate. I taught Nami classes to support support people with mental illness. He was actually going through the training to do it with me and this man. And I don't want to like bring you down with this. I want you to see that even in the worst major setbacks in life, beauty can come of it. But it really was a beautiful story.

18:05 This man, he'd had a psychotic break and he killed someone in it. Is this before he knew he had a mental illness and this ban, I remember sitting next to him thinking, if this happened to me, I don't know if I could ever get through it. Do you know how can you get through it? But somehow was support and love and learning these things. He turned it around and he dedicated his life to helping other people not have to go through psychotic breaks to get the mental health care that they needed and deserved before something tragic could happen. And he had a ministry, basically two people who had gone through some really horrible things. So those are two examples of really huge, like worst case, major setbacks and how something beautiful happened from it. And I give them to you because I want you to think of examples of what good might come from this major setback. I do this all the time. Okay, so what good can come of this because everything always works out for you and me, right? So I. I hate time, but time is not your enemy and things are working out for you and if you could just soothe yourself, it's okay. It doesn't have to be solved right now. Time is not my enemy and things are working out for me. Just remember that like that little mantra time is now my enemy and things are working out for me.

19:44 I've talked a lot about in my book in particular that there's a benevolence out there, putting things in motion. There is a benevolence out there. You can call it whatever you want, but that benevolence is putting things in motion, making sense of things for you and repairing it and making it better than it. It never happened and sometimes you, if all else fails, you just go to sleep at night and say, I give it. I give it up to you because I don't know how to figure this out and know that there's some things. Someone, someone's out there making sense of it for you and putting it together better than if it never happened.

20:27 Okay?

20:29 I love this one. I want you to remember that the role of problems in her life and problems seemed small compared to a major setback, but the role of all problems in life is leading you to something better. And my book control the future thought technology for influencers. A key piece of creating our future is problems. So get that book on kindle. If you can afford it, asked me, I'll send it to you. Okay, go team@controlthefuture.tech. I want you to have it. I want you to understand the role of problems and there's a lot in their life is always changing. It is, but there is a beauty to life that problem's always, and I promise you always lead to something better. Even major setbacks they do. We don't want pain. None of us want pain. So if we can learn what the role of pain is, why it's there, it's not. To make you suffer is to lead you to something better. It's going to help you through the transition and give you the answers to what's going on. Right? Okay. Let's see. Okay. I want you to rebuild your life better than it was before and that this is the huge leap forward. I've built up to the huge leap forward from a major, major setback, right? So you're doing all these things to feel better. You're settling in that it's going to take a little time. You're understanding that problem's always create opportunities and something better and now you're going to rebuild your life better than it was before. I've got some really little cool things to help you with this.

22:26 Um, I mentioned earlier that I've studied a lot of religions and when I was really suffering at one point in my life, I was like, why am I suffering? What is the point of suffering? That's a huge question so many people have, like if there's a god, why? Why is there so much suffering? For me, I came across in Kabbalah this little bit about the purpose of suffering is to make you more like God. Now that sounds really esoteric, like what does that mean? But basically it is the concept there and you can put it in into your belief system, but I want you to think about it is if we are put here on this earth to do something beautiful, then all suffering is in this way of thinking is

23:17 us not learning the lesson and that will continue to suffer until we learn the lesson of why we were suffering. And then when we learn the lesson, then we get out of the suffering. So learn the lesson. What is the lesson? What's the lesson that that major setback just taught you? And I know some of you right when I said that it popped into your mind because there's a lesson learned the lesson. If you don't know what it is, you just have to open your arms and say, I don't know. Teach me the lesson and in my situation and I'm going to walk through a couple of things that happened to me like what was the lesson and how did it make me better? Some major, huge setbacks I've had in my life have made me a better person.

24:08 When I, if you look, I just put on my website, um, control the future.tech. There's a little on the tab bpd and I put on that my testimony to Congress in 2008, which really launched my career unbeknownst to me that it would, but I talk about losing my children and I lost relationship with my children and that was by far the most painful thing I've ever been through. But when I said why, why did this happen and how can I become a better person with it? Some really magical things happened. I learned how to become a better mother. I think I'm a really, really good mom now and I took a lot of time to learn everything I needed to learn how to be a better mother. In my case, I learned how to control my emotions, communicate better. I learned what kids need for development, all kinds of things.

25:11 I became a really good mother because of that situation. And the biggest gift of all is when I didn't have my kids in my life and I longed for children. I ended up having my beautiful son hunter. And then my two beautiful twins, I never would have had them if my children would have been there with me. So something beautiful happened and then I got my other kids, my other sweet kids back to. And so I, I got more than I could have imagined. So those are some examples of that. I want you to start thinking about, learn the lesson. What lesson can I learn? How can I grow from this? How can this problem be leading me to my true future? And just follow that. And that's how you start building this new life in. The answers will come when you're feeling like, how can I get through this?

26:09 You're going to get through it. I know you don't believe it, but I promise you you will. And guess what else? You're going to learn more and you're going to become a better person and you're gonna. Have a bigger house. If you lost a house or a better house or a better job or the job that you're supposed to be in or the better husband or wife you will, something better will come of it. I promise in just. I know that might make you mad if you're feeling a lot of grief or anger, but I promise you it will and just remember that. Okay? Okay. One last thing. That's a little tip that's real practical because I've talked about a lot of like hard thinking and feeling and stuff like that. Here's a really practical little thing you can do if you've had a major setback, what is your setback?

27:01 Okay? It's in your mind right now. I'm gonna. Use the example of you just lost a lover. Okay? If you think about, I lost that particular person, it's him and I'll never have that person back. It's almost impossible to get over that. So one little thing you can do, it's a little trick, and it works is what did I lose that that person gave me? So then it takes the focus off of that person who will never have again in it. You can actually start to problem solve. What are the little pieces? So if you've lost a lover, what did you lose? I lost companionship. I lost sex as a intimate partner. I lost a housekeeper. I lost financial provision. I lost someone that made me feel better about myself. Right? That's a big one. So break down if it's a financial, if you lost your job, you want to break down how to replace the pieces of what you've lost and then you can start really starting to tackle it right?

28:04 Just replace those things and then when you start envisioning your new life and where it might go, you just want to. The next step is just to start researching it. It gives you something to do and you just start living at birth up inside you. It will happen. Okay? That's all I want to say for you today. I hope it helped. Like I said, it's a lot. Give yourself some time. Be Gentle with yourself and go get my notes. I'm at control. The future.tech forward slash huge dash leap. If you want more on this, email me if you have questions and if you really want to learn this stuff, you want to join my retrain your brain class and you can find information on that on my site. Control the future.tech forward slash retrain my brain and I hope to see you there. Love you guys. I look forward to good reports to give me the good reports and thanks for sticking around for this new video. Okay, bye everyone. Love you.