All The Answers Are Hidden Inside You. Four Steps For Releasing Them

Posted on April 24, 2024 by Bob Graham, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

I shouldn’t be here.

I’m not a ——-

I don’t really know what each of you does.

Oh, and I should be dead.

Or so I was told. In December 1996.

Do the math? That’s almost 27 years ago.

Spoiler alert: the doctor and cardiologist were wrong.

Why I am here before you today has a lot to do with me finding the answer to a life and death question inside myself.

And that’s what I am going to talk about with you today.

Let me tell you another story. Oh, and because I know you are worried, everyone in it lives.

Recently, a friend of mine faced a difficult decision.

Like most of us would, she asked for input and suggestions from friends and family.

You’ve probably been in the same situation regarding a job, a relationship, moving or whatever.

Like most of us, she weighed each choice and its potential effects on her life.

As she told me about this big decision she had to make, she stopped talking for what seemed like forever.

I thought she was going to ask for my opinion. And frankly, I was torn.

After what seemed like forever, she told me, “I realized I had to decide for myself.”

My friend’s eight-word sentence crystalized what I had been thinking about for years.

Let me give you another scenario.

Imagine struggling more and more to do simple things like cutting the grass, climbing steps, playing the annual Thanksgiving weekend flag football game with your friends. You feel more and more out of breath with each step.

Imagine finally admitting to yourself that you need to go to the hospital.

And you know what’s coming.

For as long as possible, weeks, months, maybe even years, you put off the inevitable.

You have no choice. You can’t go on this way.

It’s time to face facts.

I was 29 when this happened to me. I was married, a journalist working day and night, enjoying my life, someone who thought everything was ahead of me.

A different everything was coming.

Within 48 hours of being admitted to the hospital, the doctor told me exactly what I had predicted as we drove to the hospital.

I had cancer. A rare form that had seriously damaged my heart valves, leading to two open-heart surgeries in two years, lots of cancer surgeries and treatments, and a changed life.

Spoiler Alert: It didn’t kill me.

I tell you that story not for sympathy or pity.

I tell you because I firmly believe that we all are faced with challenges in our lives and as I am about to show you, the pathway to overcome them lies within each of us.

I will go a step farther to say that we are all Renegades, yes, Renegades.

Play with that word in your head for a few minutes. We will come back to it.

Your big challenge may be a toxic relationship with a relative or friend, maybe it’s a bad work situation, perhaps its addiction or disease. Maybe it’s depression or anxiety or agoraphobia or something else.

One thing I have learned since being diagnosed with cancer is that everyone has struggles, and most of them are well hidden.

And while cancer might seem like a big one, it’s not any different for the person struggling through it than all of the other ones I listed above.

I believe each of us is only given what we can handle.

For instance, I have a friend who is a gifted pediatrician. Her 16-year-old daughter died suddenly of a heart issues when only her husband was home.

Would it have been different if her mother, a doctor, had been there?

We’ll never know. She could wallow in her self pity and grief. She doesn’t.

Her answer to that horribly difficult question is to go back to her job, treating children, including my niece and nephew, who adore her.

She recently told me that she had become more compassionate and her patients’ parents reap the benefits.

The answer to that question for her was to somehow — and not easily — help others.

Another friend has cerebral palsy, and has had to walk with an assistive device for most of his life. He jokingly calls himself a gimp.

I met him when he was in high school. Few people in my life exuded more taw power than he did by just coming to school each day.

Why was he given such a difficult challenge?

We will never know, yet he discovered an answer.

He has turned a life of being different, of not being able to play sorts, of being looked at into a motivational speech.

He found his answer inside himself.

To share his path with others so they can learn from his struggles.

Okay, back to how and why I am still here to share this with you.

At the hospital, the doctor and the younger internist actually told me three separate times that I had cancer.

They didn’t think I believed them because my response was always the same.

“What are we going to do about it?”

I expected them to have the answers, and while they had some, I see more than 25 years later that most of the answers, even to something like cancer, come from within us.

Allow me to explain.

Chemotherapy is putting poison in you, hoping it rids you of the bad without taking too much of the good. Think about that. I did. A lot.

It made me really see my life age health in a new way.

I became an expert on my cancer. I would join patient Yahoo Groups (the forerunner to Facebook and Instagram), devour medical literature on the topic at medical libraries, then online; and try to manage my care.

Ultimately, I became my best doctor. I care the most. I know the most about myself. And I know what feels right.

To be clear, I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. Look at me. I am not McDreamy. But I digress.

At one point, I caught wind of a treatment in New York that seemed to have good results for people in my situation. I did my homework, and somehow convinced my doctor in Maryland to not just sign off, but to tell the insurance company it was medically necessary for me to undergo this treatment in New York, where it would be more expensive.

Since making that decision to have doctors attempt an unusual way of closing off the blood to tumors in and around my liver, my doctor has repeatedly told me what a great decision it was.

Think about that.

The medical expert, a guy who has spent his whole career dealing with cancers and their patients, told me a non-doctor that I made a good choice.

Did I mention that he was a Johns Hopkins doctor? The best of the best. The type that never admit to things like that.

I might gather opinions or do research. Ultimately, I choose my path.

The woman I mentioned at the beginning said it so succinctly and matter-of-fact that I had to consider it.

“I realized I had to decide for myself.”

We all choose our path. We are being drawn, dragged or driven driven in one direction or another. Even if we don’t make a choice and let inertia drive us (no, inertia is not the forerunner to Uber or Lyft), our choice not to choose is a choice.

We can do what everyone has always done. Or we can carve our own unique pathway to success.

Renegades, as my friend Tom Brush and I came to discover as the pandemic started, are those people committed to carving their own unique pathway to success.

We Renegades use the knowledge, experience and perspectives we develop, as well as other information we gather from others, to make a decision that feels real in that moment.

I have coached a lot of business leaders, owners and managers, and in almost every case, the solution to whatever problem I was coaching them on came from within them.

I may have asked the question to spark the answer popping up, but it wasn’t me.

Think about that. We are talking thousands of hours of coaching. I don’t solve problems. I help people figure out how they can solve their own problems.

There’s a huge difference.

For a long time I didn’t see the reality of the situation.

But now, again and again, I see how I always had the answers to my own hardest questions.

The trick is accessing those answers.

You might be saying, “If I had all the answers inside my brain, I’d have figured it out by now. I spent weeks and months analyzing it and nothing came up. You’re plain wrong.”

I understand that thought. I had it for many years as I struggled alone to figure out so many things that looking back now I realize could have been solved so much more easily — if I had asked for help.

A couple of realities stand in our way:
We may not commit our full attention to it.
Most of us are so wrapped up in our own stuff that we cannot see the proverbial forest through the trees.
And we don’t want to be wrong.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather do nothing than make a bad decision.

I have to fight myself to take action when the risk of being wrong is greatest.

My clients often fall into the same trap.

I have come up with a few strategies to access that decision living inside us, waiting to be freed.

One, separate the action to take from the results.

What do I mean?

Figuring out what action to take separates cause and effect. We worry most about the effects of our choices.

None of us can control the results. Did you hear me? You cannot control the results.

I cannot control if you are listening or if this presentation resonates.

I can control what I say, how I say it, how I use ny voice and humor. And I can draw in prior experiences to inform what I do.

All that is within my control.

Those are actions. Separate from results.

When we focus on actions, not results, we often figure out what to do.

Second trick. Don’t try to figure it all out. Just work to determine the next step.

Even if it’s a super simple step.

It doesn’t matter. Just make a move.

Once you get unstuck or past overwhelm with that first step, new ones will magically appear.

It’s the first one that stops us. It can paralyze is for a long time. You know what I mean, right?

Third, accept that even if that step or steps fail to lead to the success you wanted, you are getting closer to it.

Every step you take provides new knowledge, experience and perspective to better inform future steps.

My doctor sent several other patients to New York for the procedure he argued against because it worked so well for me.

He had new knowledge, experience and perspective to better inform future patients.

If it can shift a hardened John’s Hopkins doctor, it can certainly help you.

Right?

Okay, let me give you a bonus tip. It’s kind of hard to grab hold of right away, but it’s a game changer.

Ready?

Celebrate the actions you take.

We usually celebrate results — if they are good. We beat ourselves up if the results aren’t good.

Sound familiar?

What my friend Tom and I have found is that celebrating actions sets us up to take more actions.

We each celebrate something every morning on our Facebook broadcast.

It might be a compliment someone gave him, a great meeting, the completion of a proposal, a new client, a great presentation, anything.

It doesn’t matter.

Why is it so important?

We know gratitude is important. Celebrations are another way to show gratitude.

Plus, and this is really important, it puts us in a positive frame of mind. That positive mind is more inclined to find and take action.

Let me recap: separate actions from results— take action; focus on the next step only; recognize that every step gets you closer to your goal; and celebrate each step you take.

Armed with these four tools, you can probably solve any problem.

Here’s the truth: You each have the power to carve your own path. It’s inside you waiting to be released.