I turn 40 in a few weeks. I’ll be celebrating the actual date in Italy, but hoped to celebrate with everyone else early. This week was that birthday and book bash. The people invited were a small handful of folks who were part of my launch crew and pre-ordered The Bounce Back Factor. When my team and I planned the event, I didn’t want it to be some webinar where my goals were all about getting 500 people on or something random. I just wanted to slow down and celebrate with the people who celebrated every step of the way with me. 

Everything felt a little different down to the details like the overview. Normally when I host a webinar, I obsess over the session title and overview. It’s kind of ingrained. When you have done as many half empty concurrent sessions as I have, you know the overview matters. But this time, I just wrote that we’d celebrate. I made no promises. I gave no learning objectives. 

I never looked at the registration number once during that hour. All I did was smile. Looking around that room, I saw so many familiar faces. People who were my very first call after I started Three Ears Media. Customers turned friends. Folks from my mastermind. People I’ve been on panels with and folks I’ve never spoken to before. A handful of new faces, too.

As much as they were there to celebrate with me, I was there to celebrate them. To celebrate community and the kind of people who lift you up for no other reason than because they love you. That’s a special commodity in a world full of competition, a topic I talked about with the group when I read the chapter on compassionate goal setting. 

In that chapter of The Bounce Back Factor, I tell the story of quitting a hike because I chose my path in competition with others instead of doing it just for the love of hiking. Long story short, I ended up 6 feet off the ground then marching back to the van angrily with the temptation to whisper “don’t do it” to every hiker that passed me. 

The moral of the story is that you have to set your goals with compassion for you, not in competition with everyone else. But that’s not how corporate goals work and that’s most certainly not how my goal setting process ever worked. My goals were aggressive guesses - especially once I became an entrepreneur. I didn’t really know if I could achieve them. I just picked an arbitrary number out of my head and rested my value on that thing (kinda like employers do with years of experience they made up). A fraction of a percent short was failure. 

To make myself extra miserable, I scrolled the Internet and compared my accomplishments with every person who was slowing down to celebrate their win. This is what they mean when they say social media is rotting our brains. But it wasn’t just rotting my brain. Writing this book and therapy made me realize it was killing the part of me that just loves watching my friends win. It put me in competition with people I admire thinking that getting what they had was more important than getting what I want. 

Thankfully, I know better now and it gave me permission to see how beautiful this gathering was. How beautiful people can be. Turns out, living your life that way will make you think your whole life is win or lose and that’s just not true. It is also a guarantee you will lose a lot more than you win. Life is so much better when we invite people in. When we show up to slow down and celebrate.

Still haven’t ordered your copy of The Bounce Back Factor? Get it here: TheBounceBackFactorBook.com