How I beat my inner doubter to become a firefighter weeks from my 39^th birthday and how to overcome yours.

Part 1 of several.

This is it.  Test day.  I have worked hard to prepare for this day, and I am both terrified and excited.   

I am standing in the gym at station 14 where the first elements of the Firefighter entry physical test are in progress.

The room is small.  It’s a gym where the station 14 firefighters work out while on shift.

Although it is a gym, this is not LA fitness. 

There is No treadmill.

No Stairmaster.

No Elliptical.

Just bars, weights and racks.

The benches scattered about the room show their age with white stuffing visible in the cuts and holes of the thin black vinyl padding.

 There is no bench for this test element, though.

For this test there is a bar with weights totaling 85 lbs and a line drawn on the floor, 4 inches from the wall.

It’s quiet.

You can hear the gentle squeak of gym shoes on wood as our...

Yes, that is totally true.

And, if you don't take the chance, if you fail to step out and give it a try, if you play it safe ... then it definitely won't work out. 

Know any of these folks?

• "Stephen King threw away his first novel, Carrie, after it was rejected thirty times.  His wife fished it out of the trash.
• Henry Ford went broke five times and was advised to stay out of the auto industry because he didn't have the money or the know-how.
• Annapolis rejected Dwight Eisenhower.
• USC rejected Steven Spielberg three times.
• Steve Jobs was removed from the company he started.
• Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
• After his role in American Graffiti, Harrison Ford had to go back to carpentry.  Then, Star Wars happened.
• "Unfit for television," Oprah was fired from a reporting job because she was too emotionally invested in her stories.  She eventually became the host of The Oprah Winfrey Show, which aired for twenty-five seasons.
• Meryl...

Ever felt like waiting to take action on a project or goal until you felt more confident or motivated?

We all do this!  

The funny thing is that science tells us that this is exactly the opposite of what we want to do!  

Actually taking the action creates the confidence and the motivation we think we need to move towards success!

Fear of making a mistake or failing to reach a goal keeps us from taking action.  

Of course, when we don't take action towards a goal, we fail to reach it anyway so we create the "failure" by failing to act.

What if you could think of failure in a totally new way?

Steve Chandler (author, speaker and coach) talks about seeing failure as GAME FILM!

What does an athlete do after the game to prepare for the next week or the season? Yep!  The great ones review game film.  Lots of game film.

They don't review game film to see themselves do things well as much to look at when things didn't go well.  They take that information and...