It’s my 58th birthday today. And I want to reflect on how vastly different my life is today versus just a few years ago.

When I turned 52, I was still living in Bethesda, Maryland. Exactly six months before, I had lost my job. I was thinking about both becoming a full time coach and moving across the country. I had a coach of my own, but no paying clients. We had looked at houses in Carbondale, a mountain town near Aspen. but were struggling to find something in our price range. My severance was about to run out.

Yes, there was a lot of uncertainty.

Six years later, we are settled in Carbondale, I have a full time executive coaching practice, I am making more money than I did at my corporate job, and my business is still growing and evolving.

A lot of people ask me how I did that.

In a very real sense, the answer is because I had to.

I consciously chose to move to an area where there was no fallback. There were times where we thought we might have to give up the house and move to an area where there were jobs that were more like my old one.

To say that I was feeling like a failure at that point is an understatement. It was bleak.

What kept me going? The determination to succeed no matter what. And there was more to do than I ever thought when I started.

I had a TON of conversations to completely reeducate my network. I had to figure out what coaching was, how I was going to do it, whom I was going to help.

I had to develop my craft as a coach. I had to develop the confidence that I could help people. I had to get over my fear of saying things that someone might not like, that might even provoke them, in the name of serving them.

I wrote hundreds if not thousands of blog and LinkedIn posts. I posted videos. I got transparent with my struggles and my insights along the way. I constantly looked for things that made me uncomfortable and did them.

Most of the conversations I had went nowhere. Most of the proposals that I made were not accepted. The vast majority of emails I sent went unanswered.

But I kept going. I kept learning. I chose to think of those things not as failures, but as information. I evolved. I stretched. I grew.

And slowly but steadily the business grew.

Every situation presented a choice—to quit or to adapt. I chose the latter, over and over again.

I chose to learn from the failures and keep going. And that has made the difference.

I was listening to a podcast interview yesterday about how entrepreneurs often do better than established companies because they are willing to try over and over again in the face of failure.

That definitely rang true for me

I’m assuming this isn’t your birthday (though I do have one old Hewitt friend who shares my birthday).

But whenever you hit a particularly important milestone, ask yourself—

Where have you failed and then given up?

And where have you learned and kept moving forward?

Is the idea that there is something getting in your way.

Will you need to do things? Maybe a lot of them?

Yes.

Will you get it right the first time?

Probably not.

But the idea that this is somehow an obstacle, rather than part of the process, is entirely made up.

Every struggle you have is simply the difference between what is happening and what you would prefer to be happening.

Once you see that, everything gets a lot easier. Even if nothing else changes.

I was speaking with a founder this morning who is having trouble growing. He has been very successful to this point, but has hit a revenue level that is seemingly difficult to break through.

I see this all the time.

Typically, it’s at the point where the founder can no longer do everything themselves.

There are two ways of getting past this, and one of them works.

The first is to say you are going to “delegate” to the new functional heads that you bring in, but what that really means is that you are going to insist that they do things just like you did.

And that isn’t delegation at all.

You maintain some semblance of control, but your micromanaging doesn’t free you up to think about the bigger picture issues around direction and strategy.

The second is to hire people who know more about each of those areas than you do—

Finance
Sales
Marketing
Product

Point them in a direction. And let them run.

Less control, yes. But more growth than you ever thought possible.

We all have areas of our lives which we must claim as our domain.

Perhaps it is within relationships or our families. Perhaps within our companies.

Areas in which we are, in which we must be, in charge.

And yet I find so many people resist this.

As a pleaser from way back, I am especially sensitive to how people instinctively give up their power. In fact, I just spent a good thirty minutes talking with a client about this yesterday—about how his fear of upsetting people was preventing his company from reaching its potential.

This fear went back to very specific memories in childhood. In ways he had not considered but made perfect sense when he saw them.

So much of my own recent journey has been about reclaiming boundaries, both for myself and others. So much so that it seemed like a revelation when I saw I could simply state what I wanted, to create the boundaries that I needed, without fear of how another person might take it.

I now care for my mother, my wife, my children, and my clients in ways that were simply not possible a few months ago. Not only nurturing them but supporting and inspiring them as well.

It seems like most people have a tendency in this area. They over express as tyrant, or they under express by abdicating their throne.

Which are you? If you have a fear of being the tyrant, the chance is that more often than not your are actually abdicating your throne rather than claiming it.

Likewise, if you have a fear of being seen as a wimp, you are much more likely to show up as a tyrant.

People suffer when you do not claim this energy in a healthy way.

Where do you see suffering in your domain? And how would showing up in a more grounded, present way to claim your throne make things better for everyone?