Episode 007 Step Into The Arena! Which stories stop you from going all the way?

Thomas Edison said, “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Power serves you best when you know how to use it. Last week we talked about those devastating one liners and weeding them out. This week we’re telling stories about how you really get to have the things you want most. What it means to do what it takes to make something happen. When I was 18 I launched my own little hand-made jewelry business. I strung beautiful handmade beads on leather and I sold to ski resort gift shops. This was well before jewelery making was cool, or Michael’s a had a whole aisle of jewelry making supplies. I was working my way through college, and my entrepreneurial yearnings created this business as a side venture to working at Fred Meyer between college classes. I had 5 or 6 orders from various resorts, but it never got any bigger than that. When I was a stay-at-home mom I launched a fun business of designing personalized candy-bar wrappers for birthdays, weddings, any party or event – I designed the custom wrapper, printed the wrappers and wrapped the candy bars. Shipped them in ice-bagged insulated boxes so the chocolate wouldn’t melt. I put all the money into the software, the design training and the production, but fell short of putting in the marketing dollars needed, so my return on investment was a handful of orders from neighbors and friends, a new-found skill of design, an iMac, a high-end paper cutter and cases of candy bars. A few years ago when my newest hiking guidebook came out – Best Hikes Near Salt Lake City, published by Falcon guides, I put together a gorgeous plan for week-long hiking retreats that involved mountain lodgings, massage, yoga, an in-house cook and daily guided hikes in the Northern mountains of Utah. Same thing happened, all the planning, designing, arranging for providers, and when it came time to persevere through the swamps of finding clients I got bored and wandered onto the next thing caring a sense of failure at not pushing through and taking it all the way. I ended up guiding day hiking trips, but it was nothing like I had pictured. I could have put in the time and effort to market it, for sure, but if I have a wonderful idea and a snazzy product shouldn’t clients come to me? I hated to have to sell people on anything, and so these business “failures” made a tidy little stack in my bookshelf of stories. One of the stories I started telling myself, that was not serving me well, was that if I put time and effort into a new venture that it will all be a waste of time and resources because in the end it will fall flat. I mean it’s happened 3 times. There is this fear monster that pops up when I contemplate doing something that might make a difference, to me or the world, and I am flooded with a fear of failure, a fear of wasted time, and a fear of wasting money on something that in the end won’t launch. Now, like all our stories, there are reasons I have this fear. Namely my past experience. While sometimes our fears seem to pop out of nowhere, they often do originate from some disappointment that we don’t want to relive. But the past doesn’t have to define the future. The other day I was looking through a post that Lewis Howe’s, a popular podcaster and NY Times best-selling author wrote about how he got his book on the NY Times best seller list. It was a tremendous list of hard work, networking, selling, finagling, up-selling and going the extra mile to market his own work. As I read his list of “how he did