You're Not Chasing a Promotion. You're Chasing Proof That You're Enough

Well, I could take you all the way back to 1984.

I was 14 years old at the time, and I was at home.

The phone rang, and I answered it.

Hi.

And the woman said, honey, find your mom.

There's been an accident.

My dad was an electrician at U.S. Steel, and he was working on a big electrical panel, and it didn't get tagged right.

So while he was in there, someone turned it on, and boom, it exploded, caught him on fire, third-degree burns, 40% of his body.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, it was pretty bad.

And so he spent the next three months in a Loyola burn unit.

And we moved in with our grandparents, my sister and me.

And we weren't sure that he was even going to make it.

It was a pretty traumatic experience.

And everybody goes through what I call big T and little t traumas.

You know, little T traumas are being embarrassed, not getting picked to be on the team, you know, being humiliated in front of the classroom, you know, and that's where most fear of public speaking is formed.

And so, and then the big T traumas, you know, death, abuses of various kinds, things like that.

So he did make it and he had lots of scars on the outside, but, you know, he was always the kind of guy that would take his shirt off and go for a swim in the summer and didn't care.

And I always thought that was pretty amazing.

But we all develop scars on the inside too.

And we all have these little scars.

And it's not just the experiences that I've learned over 34 years now studying us humans.

It's not just the experiences we go through.

It's the beliefs that form in our unconscious mind about what we think those experiences mean.

And your brain forms those beliefs on its own without your permission.