Gut Punch
Responding to “Setbacks”
I am sitting in the audience. My wife is next to me. The contest chair walks to the podium and announces, “Our 2025 international speech champion, Jeff Goodrich!!” I walk to the stage as applause erupts. People are lining up to interview me. People are lining up to hire me to speak at the organizations. It is a great moment.
However, this never happened.
It is how I wanted it to happen. It is how I envisioned it would happen.
As I was making my way through the Toastmasters Speech competition, won first place at the district level. I advanced to the quarterfinals. I then had to wait for the email from the chief judge to announce the winners of the quarterfinals. When the email came through, it was quite the gut punch.
Is this a failure?
Is this a setback?
How do I move forward?
Question: When you want to do something, or accomplish something, how many times does it turn out exactly as you imagined it would?
For me, None.
Some thoughts on the subject.
- As the saying goes, do not put all your eggs in one basket. The visualization that I described earlier was one of about 4 scenarios that I had planned for. One of these plans was to not get selected. So, I was disappointed, but prepared.
- Sometimes the universe will give you what you need. Posts, texts and random interactions all seemed to be information that I needed to hear at that moment. Was the universe feeding it to me? Or was I looking for it.
- I purposefully do not like or use the word failure. I just plain do not like it. It brings up too many negative things. There is no such thing as failure. I simply want to be in the game. We have all heard of prominent people who at first, did not succeed and sometimes took years to reach success.
- How do you define success? Are we waiting for some magical metric that tells us we’ve made it? Are we waiting for the world to tell us we are successful? I have my own metrics for success, and they have nothing to do with the world.
- What are your targets? Dreams? Goals? If you do not have something to shoot for. Then none of these ideas I am talking about even mean anything. Make a list of goals. Pursue them.
Life goes on. I will be heading down one of the other paths that I had envisioned.
And you know what? I will enjoy the journey.