Overcoming Fear of Failure: Transform Your Life
Speaking on the theme Fear & Failure at Speaker Slam® in Toronto on May 1, 2018, Luis Serrano took the stage with a five minute story.
Transcript
what would you do today if you no longer feared the consequences of failure imagine if instead of being paralyzed by that fear that you use its energy to move yourself forward and go after the things that you actually wanted how would that change your life how how many more of your dreams would you capture I want to tell you the story of how I learned the life-changing lesson of how to stop fearing failure and how to start dancing with it that was my dance my story starts three years ago which at the time I thought was the peak of my life I had my dream
corporate job at Target Canada I had a six-figure income I always had a beautiful fiance I had a shiny new condo life was great or was it see in a matter of a few months my world came crashing down around me I lost my job around the same time as my father and my brother my relationship crumbled dramatically a few weeks before my wedding even had a friend that passed away my social life suddenly felt mundane and stale what happened was everything I just started feeling worthless and alone I quickly spiraled down into a deep depression so much so that I couldn't even get out
of bed for days and I felt like a failure but my true failure was that up until then I had been prioritizing all the wrong things like money status possessions and what I had done was I had put all my self-worth all my value in these external things things that I couldn't control things that if they left me I would be left with nothing which is what happened and so it was there at rock bottom that I decided that I was going to invest in myself I was going to start focusing on what made me happy and discover what those things are so I hired
a life coach I studied positive psychology and implemented it into my life I got a brand new beautiful playful puppy but best of all I started to reconnect with my passions and hobbies and started to feel like myself again and what I discovered was that life isn't about all these external things that I was chasing it's about who we are as individuals and through my self-work what I discovered of myself was that I wasn't living by certain values that were important to me things like learning being playful and silly and helping other people and so I started instilling these in my day-to-day routine as guideposts
making sure that every single day I was living by these values and one of the biggest manifestations of that was starting my own company I now get to help other people by playing how cool is that you see I saw the Rough Side of failure and I came back stronger and wiser and don't get me wrong that fear still lingers I was afraid to leave my cushy job and start my own business I'm still afraid to not have the impact that I so desire but I still move forward and I do it anyway because I now have a much stronger foundation in myself and my
values who I want to be what I want to stand for right what I uncovered was that the equation to dance with failure to have fun with failure is very simple know who you are and know what you want because as soon as you have both those things then you align them you're in a much better place where things will still go wrong but you can constantly pivot and head towards your goal because there's a million ways to get there especially when you have that Foundation so I urge you all the next time you have that feeling of fear to instead of recoil and to
deny that to stand up grab it by its hand twirl it around and dance with it
Transcript generated from the recording and lightly cleaned. Some names and wording may differ from the spoken speech.