"I Felt Like a FAILURE at 41" - How to FIND YOUR PATH When You Feel LOST | Mel Robbins EP 631

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11Remember what we said earlier? You cannot control your feelings that rise up, but you can always control how you think and what you do. So 2009, I was unemployed. I had had all these career changes, and I got into the media business, again, by mistake. I had a coaching business, and Inc. Magazine was writing an article about coaches, and they featured me in it, and CNBC called. that led to me doing some stuff with CNBC and I spent a year still coaching people and then doing some stuff for CNBC and then Fox called and they were interested in having me host a television show now you got to understand I'm from North Muskegon Michigan I mean the media business Fox LA the closest thing I had ever seen to a celebrity Lewis was the Muskegon lumberjacks It was the farm team, right?

1:00Right. For the Pittsburgh Penguins. Yeah, the AA team. Yeah, my dad was the hometown doc for the hockey team there. Right, right, right. So I thought, wow, my life's about to change. I'm about to be a celebrity. Wow, we're going to solve all. This is amazing, you know. So I was originally going to be hosting a show for Fox where we were making over small businesses. Nice. Yeah, pretty cool, right? We show up. We do extreme home makeover for the office. Everybody's happy. We all know that doesn't solve business problems, but it makes for a nice television show. By the time I get to LA, they've changed the format.

1:36It's now called Someone's Gotta Go, and I'm going to be firing people on national television from real jobs. Wow. Uh-huh. That sounds fun. Horrible. Oh, my gosh. Plus, we haven't told the offices that this is what we're doing. Oh, my gosh. So you show up in Act One, and you've got everybody all like this because they think they're going to get new IKEA furniture and a paint job, and this is going to be the best thing in the world for their small business. Now, meanwhile, I'm a fourth generation small business owner. So that's like my people. Grew up at a kitchen table with farmers and, you know, my mom at a retail store and my other grandparents were bakers.

2:08And so when it comes to like the heart and soul and what's so important when you launch your own business and how personal it is, I mean, this was like gut wrenching. So I show up the first act, you kick out the owner of the company who then freaks out. Then all the employees freak out. Act number two, we announce that somebody is getting fired. And then that's the bad news. The good news is that I'm not picking. We're going to have you vote somebody out. So it's Survivor in an office place. Oh, my goodness. When I learn all this, I have a panic attack, even though I'm on Zoloft. And I call the guy that got me the gig and say, you've got to get me out of this.

2:42Like, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. And he said, well, I'm sorry, but they've already cast the entire show. And you're out there for five weeks. And you don't have a choice. They're going to sue you. and I said then fine get me some Xanax because I don't think I can get through this thing like this is awful luckily um we taped two episodes and legal tabled it but here was the problem I was attached to the show and I only got paid if the show was shooting and being an entrepreneur I also kind of put yes put all my energy into this shut down the coaching thing also kind of negotiated a deal that was a sort of a back-end deal thinking I'm a you know entrepreneur always thinking about got to have a piece of the action yes yeah that was a dumb move um and i was in a contract for a year while they figured out what to do i just felt like i had made a huge mistake and i felt really embarrassed and i didn't know at the age of 41 what i should be doing with my life and while it's neat that i had jumped careers so many times i started to feel like somebody that actually wasn't successful at all because i didn't have a career track i had a bunch of jumps from one thing to another.

3:50Now looking back, it makes perfect sense, but standing in the middle of the mess, it just felt like everything was caving in. Probably just like when you were sleeping on your couch, feeling injured and like everything I thought that was about to happen isn't happening now. Meanwhile, my husband had opened up a restaurant business. It had been his dream. He worked in high tech and came home one day after getting laid off and said, I'm never going to get on a plane and do a PowerPoint presentation for a company. I don't care about her own. And I said, great, what's your plan? And he said, I'm going to open a pizza restaurant.

4:16And I looked at him and I said, listen, buddy, inspiration is for strangers. You get your ass back to that job and you pay the mortgage and you forget this dream. You're not going to do this. Well, because change is scary. So we fought and he won. And the first one was a real home run. He opened a pizza store. Oh, he did. Yeah. 40 seats right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. He and his best friend. And they won best of Boston. It was incredible. What do you do when everything? Did they make money, though? They did on the first one. So what do you do when everything's working? Let's do another one.

4:50Let's go all chips in. Let's put in the home equity line. Let's put in the kids' college savings. Let's get friends and family. Because you're so excited, you think it's going to work. So you go big, big, big. Well, the second one did not work at all. And it did not work at all so badly that when it was finally closed, it was close to an$800 ,000 loss. And it meant our entire home equity line, kids' college savings, everything went right down with it. That was right when I lost the Fox show. So I'm unemployed. The liens start hitting the house. The phone starts ringing all the time and it's collections calls.

5:25I remember two things from that period of my life that were really painful. And one was having to call the town and tell them that we could not afford the$175 for our sixth grader to play soccer. So we needed to pull her out. and I remember there being times because I was so afraid to look at the checking account that I would stand at the grocery store and items would scan and I could just feel that wave of anxiety rising thinking I don't I don't think the check card's going to go through and so I would stand there I always had an excuse and it was to look at the person and go oh that's strange it just worked at the gas station like the easiest thing to do is to tell the truth but I was so filled with shame.

6:06So I started to develop this habit of hitting the snooze button because what would happen is the alarm would go off in the morning. And the first thing I would think about is all the problems that we had and how awfully things had gone off the tracks. You didn't want to deal with them. No. And I, and I also didn't know, I didn't think I could. And this goes back to the feelings. Like you think that you need to feel confident or courageous in order to get started. You don't. You actually just have to start. And that's the riddle of life. That lying in bed, hoping that you wake up some morning motivated to change.

6:45That's not the answer. You actually have to learn how to push yourself. You have to learn how to leverage the power of your decisions. And you've got to learn how to take action when you don't feel like it.

7:03Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving the daily motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

7:59Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.