250. Failure, Comparison, and The Bitter B Trap

You're not failing. But I'd bet good money you walk around feeling like you are.

I’m not talking about the obvious kind of failure… a flopped launch or a missed goal… today we’re talking about the quieter kind of failure:

A low-grade hum of "I should be further along by now."
The spiral that starts the second something doesn't go the way you planned.
The way you measure your right-now self against the highlight reel of your past self AND the fantasy version of your future self, simultaneously, which means no matter what you do, present-tense you is always losing.

This episode digs into:
–  why driven, high-achieving leaders are the most susceptible to this pattern
–  how the questions you ask yourself after something goes wrong are either pulling you up or drowning you
– the one question I've used for fifteen years to get out of any hard season, in business, in health, in parenting.
— a hard look at whether or not your messaging is attracting the very person you don’t want to work with

By the end of this, you'll know exactly what's keeping you stuck in the feeling of failure, and have a simple shift to start moving out of it today.

EPISODE LINKS & RESOURCES:

📚 Failing Forward by John Maxwell, available wherever books are sold

🎧 Hint of Hustle episode 152: Make this Shift With Your Language to Operate Like 7 Figure CEO (aka ask better questions) 

MORE FROM ME:

📧 NEWSLETTER: Get notified about future episodes plus weekly fire in your inbox each Friday, DM me the word "NEWSLETTER" on Instagram.

✨ Follow me on Instagram @theheathersager

🤝 Let’s work together. Explore options and start the conversation at heathersager.com.

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Transcript

Heather (00:11)

Well, hey friend and welcome back to another episode of Hint of Hustle. It's your host Heather Sager and I am thrilled for today's conversation. I hope you are too. I am, I'm sitting at my desk on Saturday morning knowing that I need to get this episode out. I just got done at the gym a couple hours ago and I have lots of thoughts on my mind. So we're gonna keep today's episode mildly brief. I laugh because.

If you know me, you know I am not a brief person. I am a long-winded, help you think differently, enjoy the process. I am not a person of few words, but we are going to keep today fairly short because I want to get you thinking and more specifically rethinking about your relationship with failure, relationship with hard work, your relationship with

quitting when things get difficult, your relationship with the natural tendencies and behaviors you've had previously up until this moment. And I really want you thinking about not only what it's gonna take for you to get to where you want to go, but more importantly, I want you to make a decision today around who you're gonna be the next time you face hard challenges.

whether it's failure, whether it's just something sucking and it being really fricking tough, whether it's a task that's really annoying or really tedious or honestly too fricking simple. If you have a tendency to start something and quit, or if you have a tendency to start something and it just kind of fizzles out, which is also quitting, this episode is you. Is you, this episode is for you.

This episode is also for me because I'll be honest with you, I have a tendency to do this in a lot of different areas of my life. I mean, don't get me wrong, am tenacious as all hell that when I have a goal and I decide to make it happen, I do it. But if I am not, this is probably you too, if I'm not full ass committed to something, if I haven't actually decided that I'm going to get the result that I'm after, that I'm going to fulfill whatever thing I'm set out to,

I give myself an out. And let's just talk about some examples of this. I talk a lot about health on this show, right? Not that I'm a health expert. I'm just a, I'm a healthy person. I identify as a healthy person. Do I always make the best healthy choices? No. ⁓ Last night I had Trader Joe's ice cream with my boys. ⁓ Side note, butter cookie.

swirl ice cream from Trader Joe's. It's like those biscoff cookies that you get on the airplane but turned into cookie butter and then put into ice cream. It's most freaking delicious. that's a side note. But overall healthy, right? I think about how I feel. I'm always asking questions around what does my body need. I try to prioritize moving my body, strength training. And granted, I've gone through seasons where I have not been so great at moving my body and taking care of my body. But I definitely fall back into seasons where I'm like, hell yes.

This is the thing, this is like the only thing I am taking with me through my entire life. I need to take care of it. It's how I experience life. And I look ahead, side tangent here, I look ahead at some of the older people in my life, whether it's my dad, I haven't really shared this publicly, but my dad is going through some really significant health issues. If you've been around, you know that my mom passed away of cancer when I was a teenager. She was just shy of 50 years old. She died two and a half weeks before her 50th birthday.

after battling cancer on and off for about four years. So that was my mom. My dad, who's always been a really healthy person, the last six, seven years, his health has really been drastically declining, especially around 2020, things started happening. We've had to call an ambulance multiple times to his house for him to go to the hospital. He was doing a lot of, taking a lot of falls, just getting unhealthy. He'd packed on some weight. My dad's a tall guy, he's six foot six. He's always been...

fairly thin, but he's put on weight, he's falling, all these things are happening. And we just found out within the last year, year and a half that he was diagnosed with a very significant brain condition where his brain is deteriorating at this rate, it's really fast. ⁓ And his brain and his body are no longer, like the connection isn't firing off. So his brain might be like, hey, leg, step forward. And his legs like, fuck you brain, we're not moving anywhere. And so he'll think it, but it doesn't actually happen.

which is just a little annoying when you're trying to pick up your foot, but when it's like tasks around balance or walking up and down stairs or things like swallowing food or breathing, the mind and body with this specific condition that it has, I can't remember the exact name of it, but it's called like P, I don't remember. It's very significant. It's very, very rare. And when someone's diagnosed with it, the prognosis is...

from the time diagnosis, they probably have no more than seven years left in their life, makes me really, whoo, because he's been fighting this for a while. Anyways, all that to say, my body and health, looking ahead and looking at my dad and some other older people in my life who are not taking great care of their bodies, it really makes me think differently. And even still, right, this is not a health episode, but I think, I think if you're listening to this, you're really going to resonate with this because so many of us

we okay, let me let me pull the dots together here. So many of us compartmentalize different areas of our life where we place one area of our life at center stage. So if you have been anything like me, you're an ambitious hustler, right? We're trying not to hustle. Hence the whole show of hint of hustle, we want to work our asses off, but we also don't want it to overcome our lives. But if you're if you're like me, your professional success has taken center stage in your life for a long time.

And even now, like for me, when I think about, I thinking about this, talking to my son this morning, him and I were playing cards. And I noticed as we're playing cards, I was teaching him how to play speed. And then that was a little too difficult. So we moved on to play Uno. But as we were playing, I noticed that my mind was wandering to business. I was thinking about, ooh, I need to record this podcast episode or next week I need to work on X, Y, and Z. And my brain defaults to business. Even when I'm...

only working 13 or so hours a week. My brain, when I'm not working, still goes to business. Business, even in this phase where I'm declaring my health and my family and sourdough or whatever else, those are the priorities. I am wired for my business and professional success to take center stage. I'm sharing this with you because I think you're a little bit like me that this tendency tends to happen too. And the byproduct of this.

is that other areas of our life, our relationships, our health, our environment, like think about your home, where you live, ⁓ your yard, ⁓ how stuffed your closet is, what your pantry looks like. These are all environmental things, what your desk looks like. My desk is really freaking messy right now as I'm looking around and I see a pile of paper, I pile of gift cards that I got.

years ago, there's also some used tissues on the desk, which is super disgusting, but whatever. Like, I'm not I'm not a neat freak person. I'm not a dirty person, but I'm not a neat freak person. But I'm sharing this with you because we have different aspects of our lives and summed up together our environment, our health, our relationships, our attitude, our mindset, our mental health. ⁓ Yes, our professional success and our and our wealth or lack thereof. All those things come together and they're part of who we are.

But what happens is we become so attached to one facet of our world that the others just fall away. And by fall away, they're still there, but they're not getting the time and attention required to get the results that we want. So health is the example that I'm using here. I'm having to shove health front and center in my life to maintain the routines that I want to maintain to have the healthy body and healthy mind.

a healthy gut, healthy brain that is going to like last for me. I don't want my body falling apart in 10 years or in 20 years or 30, 40 years like, or hell if I make it another 50 years, I want a body that's going to, that I'm going to enjoy being in. And I bring this up because I've talked about this openly around how I've done 75 hard, which side note will link to the episode here. I've talked about it multiple times in the show. I've done these intense

⁓ mental toughness challenges, I go through phases where I was training for a marathon, I now am very active in this local HIIT gym. I go through these cycles and seasons where I hint of hustle my health. I make that like it's this intense focus for a time period and then it fades into a routine. And a lot of times that routine sticks. So for the last year and a half, my health routines have stuck really well, especially with me joining the local health gym.

⁓ but there have been seasons in my life, I think back 10 years ago, 15 years ago, where I would hint of hustle it meaning prioritize it for a short amount of time to get the specific result that I want. And then it would dissipate and fall away. And like, whether that was my healthy eating, whether that was moving my body, what would happen is other things would become center stage business specifically, ⁓ or

A lot of those I was making babies. literally growing a baby and birthing a baby and taking care of a baby took center stage in my life and rightfully so. But what would happen is other priorities that I said were priorities, we're not getting the focus. Bringing all back this to the topic today is failure. I think a lot of times when we reflect in the rear-view mirror and we think about where we are right now and maybe

Maybe we're not as far ahead as we'd want to be. Maybe this is business related. Maybe it's health related. Maybe it's relationship related, right? Those are really three big areas. When I think about these things, I think we often complain I'm not as far along as I think I thought I would be or that I want to be. But I really think what we're berating ourselves for is frustration around we're actually not as far along as we think we once were.

Let me clarify that for you. So if I am in a season where I'm taking really good care of my health, but then it's no longer the top priority, so it slips back a little bit, we backslide. Maybe I put on a little bit of weight, my mobility is not so great. ⁓ Maybe I'm not making the best food choices, so I'm not feeling so great when I wake up in the morning. What's interesting is I could get on myself and be like, and I have done this actually multiple times. This is what drove my current health obsession over the last two years. But I'm just like, ⁓

why the fuck did I stop the good habits that I'd had? Why did I get out of my routine? I berate myself for like backsliding and then I'm comparing myself to past me that was performing well. You see what I'm saying here? Do you ever compare your current self to your past self? Like there's this, I don't know, they talk about a lot in movies and books where it's like,

we look back at our whatever glory years of high school, not for me, that was not glory years, whatever. But like college or I think like in my early 20s, I'm like, I was hot as all hell. I could go out clubbing. I was running for Miss America. Like there was some fun shit happening. Like, man, I'm never gonna have the like, I used to complain about my body all the time in my 20s. And I look back and I'm like, ⁓

I should have appreciated, I should have enjoyed it. And right now we're like, but I should also enjoy it now. But we use the rear view mirror as the measurement stick. And what's funny though is we think in that way, but then we simultaneously think about looking ahead and saying, but I'm not where I want to be. And it's this really weird dichotomy between berating ourselves for not being as good as we used to be in an area.

and simultaneously not being good enough to the future version of ourselves that we have placed as the precedent, but we're not there either. Leaving us to just feel like right now we're failing. We're in a constant state of failing. We're not living up to our future expectations. We are not living up to our past ⁓ experiences and whether or not they're true, like, or...

It's a delusional or a mantis sized memory. You know what I'm saying here? Like even like looking back in my twenties, even though I was super freaking fit, my gut was so unhealthy. TMI, but I think as a woman listening, you're probably gonna resonate with this. You know how like a lot of women have a lot of issues taking a shit? Like you'll go like four or five days sometimes without taking a shit. Like why, like poop for a man.

They're like on the toilet three times a day. It's like clockwork and they hide in the bathroom for 45 minutes at a time. Like, I don't know what it is about men and they're like clockwork shitting. But for women, we have so many issues with our gut. And I think you're probably laughing as you're listening to this, like, yeah, she's talking about taking a shit on the podcast, but welcome. If you're new around here, we talk about all the things. But for me, like...

we don't talk enough about gut health, we don't talk enough about mental health, we don't talk enough about the how we feel in our bodies. And I think that's one of the most empowering things being a woman in your 40s is you start thinking about how you feel, not how you look. And so looking back, when I say this delusional, romanticized memory of I was fit as fuck in my 20s, I was preliminary swimsuit winner at Miss Washington, like itty bitty bikini on stage, I had a six pack, I was banging.

I was way, way scrawny, but super fucking strong. But inside, it was not sustainable. Inside, I probably hadn't taken a shit in a week. Inside, I was probably like not getting the nutrients that my body needed. But I don't think about those things until I'm rambling in this moment here right with you. What I think about was, God damn, I was so fit in my 20s.

And I romanticize that comparison. Now, you know the saying, comparison is the biggest thief of joy. And when we compare ourselves to future expectations, right, we're always, when we look at the future, for the most part, we romanticize the future around someday we'll be X, which is we want it to be better to where we are right now, right? Even if we do the doomsday, like what if X, Y, and Z happens? Like I do doomsday things all the time. Like I have this constant state of,

all of my family is going to die in a car accident and a police officer is going to show up on my front porch and I'm just going to lose everything and my gosh, does my husband have life insurance and I go into this doomsday thing like a movie. Or the other one that I have is I watch way too much of the show Blacklist or Scandal and I envision all of these men with giant guns and black masks on like ninja suits are all surrounding my house and they're going to storm my house and I don't know what they're going to do but I have this

I watch way too much television apparently. Anyway, doomsday things, right? These delusional thoughts that we have, we can separate those. But typically when we think about our future, typically we think about where we want to be in three years, five years, hell even six months from now, it's better. We envision a better state, right? So we always are measuring ourselves against future paired with comparing ourselves to the past. In both of these situations, comparison. And comparison even to ourselves, past and future,

is stealing our freaking joy, our joy in the moment, our appreciation in the moment, our gratitude for being here right now in every aspect of our life, our health, our relationships, our business, our wealth. We're not living enough in the moment. And when we are, the living that we're doing in the moment is dwelling on the comparison. Are you following me? I'm...

rambling on this even like a very excessively right now in this moment because I need you to hear me. I need you to really think about how much time you spend dwelling in the past versus daydreaming about the future. Now the reason I bring this up is I connecting back to what I want to talk about today is our relationship with failure. Is if we're constantly comparing ourselves to past success and future dreams

we constantly live in the state of feeling like a failure. So then what happens is when we try to do something hard, whether it's in our business, let's say we decide, we get really excited about a new idea we have for a product, whether it's a coaching program, some new offer, right? We get really excited, we do our best to try to package it up, and then we put it out in the world, right? Maybe we run a launch, maybe we just send an email to our list, sharing our enthusiasm about it. We are so freaking fired up excited. And...

doesn't go over the way that we want. And then what happens is we come back thinking, well, shit, that didn't work. Ugh, why did I do this? Oh, why did I do this again? We start comparing to the past. Maybe there's a time before we got really excited and you launched something or you shared something and maybe you hadn't put in a lot of work or detail to it. So we start shaming and blaming ourselves for, I should have done X, Y, and Z before I did this. Or why like,

Why is my audience not, I should have spent more time building my audience. I should have done a launch runway. I should have prepared them more. I should have looking at all these past things, tying it to past experiences and starting to point all this blame on ourselves and our actions or lack thereof. What starts happening is we start, I want you to think about this for a second. there is a, imagine there's like a line.

like a horizontal line and there's above the line and below the line. Okay, you got that in your head. Just imagine a horizontal line going across like a sheet of paper in front of you above the line and below the line below the line is this is going to sound a little bit woo here, but below the line is negative energy. And these are things negative energy pulls you out of being your best self. Positive energy, expansive energy pulls you in to showing up as your

Now we can talk all day long about what I mean by best self, but I'll explain it to you just like I explained to my kids. Simply put, how would you act if you were showing up the best version of you? Right? Not the like, like, ⁓ you don't have to like delusionally come up with a version of you that doesn't exist, like a dream version of you. No, I'm saying the best version of you right now, the best of you, if you were to show up, how would you act? That's what I mean by best you. It's pulling the best you out in a moment.

And so when I say operating is your best you, positive energy brings your best you out, negative energy conceals your best you and brings kind of catty, bitchy, negative version of you. And we all have that version, right? What I want you to think about is where you place your thoughts, where you start asking questions, it's going to either push you below the surface where you drown in the bitchy, bitter you, or

It's going to pull you up above the surface and create oxygen and expansiveness that's going to allow you to show up as better you. What's the difference between? It's where we direct our thoughts and the questions we ask ourselves. So let me go back into this example I was giving you around business. Let's say you launch something and you start saying, shit, it didn't work. ⁓ I should have done X, Y, and Z. Those, I should have done statements that you're making to yourself.

Is it taking you above the line or below the line? Hell yeah, it's taking you below the line. It's drowning you in negativity because what good is gonna come from the statement as I should have done X, Y, and Z? Nothing. All it's going to do is like, I want you to imagine someone grabbing the back of your head and shoving your head in a bathtub below the surface. It is pulling all the oxygen out and it is just shoving your face down in the shit. It's shoving your face down in that bitter, bitchy version of you. No good is gonna come out of that.

you are looking at failure as fuck. It's gonna drown the shit out of you. When you look at it from that perspective, of course, it's gonna take a hell of a long time for you to get out of it because your energy, your thinking is just gonna go further and further and further down. Is this making sense? Right, so what starts happening was when we start saying shit like, I should have done X or, ⁓ why did I do this again? Or any kind of line of thinking that is pulling you down.

down under there, nothing good is going to come from that. What you have to learn to do is how do we pull up and go to the expansive above and the positive. So this is where we start turning from failure into like movement forward. Failure is a beautiful opportunity for us to learn. And it's only through learning can we develop mastery and get to success. In fact, I want to read you this quote here.

John Maxwell has an incredible book around this. I've read this multiple times. actually pulled me to say I want to read it again this week. Failing Forward. It's name of the book. I definitely highly recommend it. It's a quick read. But here's a quote from his book. He says, nothing worth achieving comes easily. The only way to fail forward and achieve your dreams is to cultivate tenacity and persistence.

These qualities can be learned partly by developing the habit of following through on your commitments when you don't feel like it. So this example that I use when I say that we failed right on a launch and offer flops, it's really easy to compartmentalize that and have our little pity party about it, but then close the door on it and say, I'm never going to think about it again. Another way we can do it is to ask an expansive questions and saying, well, what worked with this? What do I like about this?

How could I make this better? How could I make this land? What is it about this offer that I know speaks to my audience? Is there a piece of this I can pull from? What can I learn from this? Or my favorite question, pause, put this down in a freaking notes app on your phone right now. I want you to pause this and write this down right after I tell you. What opportunity does this create? This is the single most expansive question that you can ask yourself anytime shit goes wrong. What?

opportunity does this create? This single question has stuck with me for the last 15 years and has pulled me out many a shitty moments because it forces your brain to start looking upward above the line. It won't allow you to drag down. What opportunity does this create? Even in the crappiest moments of your day, let's say your seven year old is throwing a giant tantrum again, screaming, hate you. You're the worst mom ever.

what opportunities does create? Well, opportunity for you to practice self-regulation, opportunity for you to practice patience, opportunity for your child to learn that mama's not gonna react when you say shit like that, opportunity for you to practice some of the parenting techniques that you've been reading about. don't know, like you can come up with probably a list of things. What opportunity does this create? If you want to start

living in a way that is expansive, that is above that line, which by the way, that's where things get fun. That's where you start making progress, right? It doesn't mean that it's not going to be hard, but when you're above the line in positive energy, and I know what I know what I'm saying here, you might be rolling your eyes and being like, all right, brah, brah, Heather, but positive energy, it just feels better. And it helps you achieve your goals faster.

It doesn't mean that things aren't hard, but when you're in positive energy, when you're asking questions that are empowering, right? So thinking about questions around, did I do X, Y, and Z? Why would anyone listen to me? Like those kinds of questions, I want you to start paying attention to the questions that you ask yourself, the statements you ask yourself when shit goes wrong and categorize it. Is this a bitter bitchy question?

Or is this an expansive open question? Is this making me feel good about the future or is this making me feel cruddy about what's happening? That's a pretty good gauge, right? Like you don't have to be an adult to figure this out. I teach this stuff to my children. Does it feel good or does it feel bad? If it feels bad, stop doing it. Ask a different question. That question can be as simple as what opportunities does this create? Because until you start reflecting and challenging the experiences that you have,

and start allowing yourself to ask these questions to then have your brain come up with ideas, that's how you start learning from your actions. Because here's the interesting thing is most of you in business right now, or even like in your health or in your life, in your relationships, you want things to get better, but you don't know what to do to make it better. Or you might know what to do to make it better, but then you try it and it doesn't work the first time.

and just like a five or seven year old throwing a tantrum, you don't like it when shit doesn't go your way. So you do your adult version of a tantrum. And that typically comes out with the bitchy bitterness personality, right? And what happens is we start blaming our past, we start blaming our external things.

⁓ people aren't like go to back to last week's episode. People aren't trusting right now. The market has shifted. The economy is crap. Trumpety Trump Trump, whatever else comes to mind. Like everybody is going to bitch. If you start blaming shit on the external. Bitter bitchy mode. Get out of bitter bitchy mode. And I'm not saying that some of those things are or are not true. The reality is it doesn't fucking matter whether or not they're true. The question, like if you just keep.

focusing on them, you're going to stay in bitter bitchy land. I hope this really sticks. Bitter bitchy land. want you to remember this like time and time again. Bitter bitchy land. We don't want to go there anymore. We want expansive, empowering land. That's where we're going here. So you know the idea like, you know, the expression they say about men all the time. Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy? Do you want to be right? Or do you want to be happy? It's kind of like that right here. Right? Do you want to be right? As in do you want to continue to allow yourself to ⁓ blame the past?

blame the market, blame or complain around bad coaches or bad investments or blah, blah, blah. And I didn't do that because I just see a lot of shit in my threads feed around people bashing coaches or mentors or whatever that they work with. Those things might be true, but do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Do you want to be right or do you want to be successful? That's kind of the name of the game here. So you got to choose which camp you're going to play in. You're either

going to complain and blame, or you're gonna go chase your goals. But the people who are smashing it, the people who are like, let's say in health, like when I look around at the gym and I see the women at the gym who are lifting and like, they're so fit, like doing burpees and doing pull-ups and doing all these things, I'm like, I wanna be where they are. Like I wanna be able to do push-ups and pull-ups and I want to like, I have some health goals that I wanna do, I wanna run a marathon and I just have these ideas, but they don't spend time.

bitching about the burpees. do the burpees and they and not only do they do them, they enjoy them and they try to smash their own records versus when I started in the gym, I was like, I can't get off the floor. I'm slower than everyone else. my gosh, this is terrible. You can focus on that or you can change your attitude around it. Same situation, different attitude. So the same thing happens in business. You'll notice the people who are killing it in business, they are not wasting their breath in the bitter and the bitchy.

They're not wasting their energy or their time thinking about what's not working. Those are questions that will suffocate you into the all hail under the surface. You don't have time for that shit. You have big goals and especially in my world, you're not trying to work all the hours all the time. You don't have time for that negative shit that you keep bringing into your life and into your business. You don't have time for it. Let this be the day where you say, don't got time for that shit.

What you have time for is the energy and the focus that is going to take you to where you want to go. So I want you thinking about this. in your relationships right now are you being the bitter bitch? Where are you complaining about other people, complaining about the environment, complaining about the situation? Where are you complaining and draining your entire existence? Where are you actually adding to the mucky pileup? Even if someone else in a relationship, it involves someone else, even if they are equally contributing, but where are you bringing the baggage?

And what would it look like for you to do something differently? What opportunities does this moment create? Relationships, health, where are you giving away your energy to other people or trying to reliving in victim mode around your circumstances? my life is too busy. I can't take a walk. Does a walk need to be an hour? No, go around the block for 10 minutes. Can you march in your kitchen? Can you do some pushups? Can you listen to this right now? What the hell are you doing right now? Can you pull over?

Can you do like some high knees or some jumping jacks? You can do something you're just choosing not to. Stop trying to get it perfect. Stop trying to have this measure of this ideal in the future around how it needs to look like and start doing something now. Change your reality now. Live above the surface, expansive, empowering. That person, they do shit now even if it's not perfect. Even if it's not big, they take tiny steps. Yes? Who's the person that you're gonna show up in your health when it comes to your business?

Where are you draining and complaining about all the stuff you have to do? Are you complaining about your clients? Are you complaining about being resentful for your customers and clients or where you're spending your time? And whose fault is that? If you're getting sick of the kind of clients that you work with, if you're annoyed because they're complaining and they're not doing the work, I ask you to ask yourself what opportunities this creates. Hold up the mirror.

where are you reflecting these exact same qualities that are pissing you off about your existing audience or clients? Let me say that again, hold up the mirror. Where are you exemplifying the exact qualities and behaviors that you are bitching about with your, about your own clients and audience? I bring that example up specifically because this is a topic that comes a lot up on the messaging calls I do with people. I do these intensives called spotlight sessions. So it's 90 minutes.

where we take your business messaging and we go through and dissect it and determine is the position of your message actually attracting the right kind of person and is it aligned to your offers? We help you shut like your messaging so it works much more powerfully, whether it's in a talk or just in your overall marketing. And one of the most consistent things that I have fixed over the last 12 months with businesses is they were specifically attracting the client that they don't want to attract and they couldn't even see it. And it's because how they were talking

was attracting that whiner, drainer, complainer because quite frankly, they were showing up as a whiner, drainer, complainer. Pot, meat, kettle, right? I want you to start thinking about where are you consciously or unconsciously being that bitter bitch in your business, in your life, in your health, in your relationships, where are you suffocating your own success?

It's time for you to start looking at that struggle and or failure and or challenge and start looking at that as a beautiful opportunity for you to bust through the surface and start becoming more expansive and empowering. This means you need to start asking better questions of yourself. Side note, we will put in the show notes. I have a really good episode. It's quite a few years old, but it's a really, really, really good episode around how to ask better questions.

It's not about asking questions of others. It's about how to ask your own brain better questions so that you can come up with better answers and then take better actions. So we will link to that episode in the show notes. That'd be a really good follow-up for this because the difference between that below the surface and above the surface is you getting better at pointing your thinking above the surface. I mentioned a little bit this and if this is interesting to you and you want to do some activities around this, like hit me up on Instagram and let me know what questions are coming up for you, but also

Where are you getting stuck when I'm talking about things? If you have a curiosity or a question or would like me to ramble on a little bit more about something specifically, shoot me up on Instagram because that'll give me some ideas for some future episodes. But where you direct your mind, what you spend your time thinking about, and then what you talk about, which leads to what you do, that is what creates your momentum for success. And if you don't like the trajectory you're on or you don't like where you're at right now,

I really want you to start asking yourself some tough questions. Where am I not taking responsibility in my life and business and health? Where am I placing blame on others? Where am I complaining? If I were being brutally honest with my time, how much of my mental space and verbal space am I giving to the negative, that bitter bitch?

versus if I had to put a percentage on it, what percentage of my words that I'm using are below the surface versus above the surface? What percentage of my thinking is below the surface versus above the surface? These are questions I want you to start asking yourself and I want you to this carefully because you notice here, it's a little bit of a meta quality that once you start challenging this, if you start noticing that a lot of your thinking is below the surface, what you might do

Remember how we started by talking about how we compare ourselves to who we want to be versus how we used to be. And then we start like challenging and getting frustrated about where we are in the moment. So if you start noticing that a lot of your stuff is below the surface and then you find yourself comparing to either I don't want to be that way or I used to not be that way, catch yourself because comparison is a thief of joy. If you focus on the gap,

between where you are and where you used to be or the gap between where you are and where you want to be, that gap is gonna keep you under the surface in the bitter bitchy category. We wanna go above the surface. So asking empowering questions, what opportunities does create? What can I learn from this? How can I show up moving like forward? How can this become a story that I one day share with others? What can I bring forward?

The name of John Maxwell's book is failing forward. And I want you to keep that methodology with you that I ID or I guess that visual with you failing forward when you're in a challenge or you're in under like underwater. How do we move forward? Moving forward being direct questions about our next steps about the future? How can we pull from the past to learn into the future? So what am I gonna what am I gonna do differently? How am going to carry this forward? How could I change my relationship with that thing?

Let's see if it comes with health. What's one good action I can take today that leads me closer to who I want to be tomorrow? How can I make one healthy choice today? If I didn't make a healthy choice last hour, what can I do now in front of me? Focusing on the present and thinking about building into that future version of you is one tiny decision at a time. Your relationship with things getting hard, your relationship with quote unquote failing, your relationship

with struggle is a direct reflection of where you're at with your success. And if you don't like it when things get hard or you don't like failing or you don't like it when it's taking longer than you expected it to, the more that you resist, what's that phrase? The more you resist, the more it persists. I really want you thinking about how can we embrace the hard? How can we

embrace the lessons that come with the challenging seasons? How can we be more introspective and less focused on what others are doing or what others should be doing or what somebody told us we should be doing? How can we start really taking more ownership of our own thoughts and our own outlook? And I strongly believe that the more that you become curious about this, you will start seeing a strong shift.

in how you feel about your business, about your health, about your life. Okay, this was longer than I anticipated as we laughed at the beginning. I can't do anything short, so I thought this was gonna be 20 minutes, but here we are close to 40. So with that, I give you a lot to think about today, right? Whether or not you come back to this or if you're on Apple, you can go to the transcript of this episode or go over the show notes are and we'll list some of those questions of reflection I asked today. But I really wanna hear how this lands with you. So as always,

Give me a shout out on Instagram at the Heather Sager. Tell me how this landed. Tell me honestly, where are you spending your time thinking? What are you challenged of? What do you want to hear me talk about more? What questions or curiosities are coming up? Shoot me a message. And as I mentioned last week, if you want more of this fire in your inbox every single week, you want me to help you think better and stay above the surface, the best place you got to be is on my newsletter. So shoot me the word newsletter on Instagram DMs.

at The Heather Sager and I'll get you added to our list if you're not already on there. I send a note every Friday where I share a story from my life or business from that week and I turn it into a business lesson to help you think bigger or show up more boldly and live a more, just a more joyful life as you run your business and build your business. So it's been a pleasure. Keep it up my little hint of hustler. I got to think about what I'm going to call you, how I'm going to close out this. I need like a sign off for this podcast, but for now we'll just say.

See you next week, Bye.