I have a friend that  once told me that the worst thing anyone could say to him was that he had a lot of potential. This guy definitely had it all. At the time, he was being courted by the Miami Heat so I couldn’t understand how that was an insult. I later came to understand as I got older and found myself stagnating in life. Being told you have potential is a great thing when you’re young. That same statement takes on quite a different meaning when you mature into an adult because it now means that you’ve failed to live up to it. That’s what my friend meant and that’s the place I found myself. It was December of 2013 and I just walked away from my second major business failure. I was devastated.

Prior to these failures, I had all the indicators that I was going to be a force to be reckoned with. I graduated Magna Cum Laude, did a summer internship at Yale, got my graduate degree paid for by my University, and was quickly promoted to a managerial position in my first job. On paper, starting my own business just made sense. Little did I know that I was doomed to fail and it was all my fault.

Entrepreneurship was way outside my purview. I didn’t know what I was doing and the skills I’d used in the past didn’t apply. I couldn’t just put my head down and work harder. I was drowning and sadly instead of learning to swim, I headed for shore.

It wasn’t until two years into working for someone else that I began to realize what happened. The fact is that deep down I knew my deficits but instead of working on them, I used them against myself. I was unconsciously sabotaging myself because of negative self-talk that I wasn’t fully aware of.

Many of the people I’ve worked with went from one technique to the next looking for that singular factor that would help them reach their goals in relationships, business, or health. The fact is, learning another trick or technique isn’t the first step  to be successful in anything in life. The first step is to remove the unconscious thoughts we harbor that are holding us back. For me, I had to face the fact that I never truly believed I would be successful. I knew I wasn’t satisfied with the status quo but I didn’t think I had it in me to do it on my own. It was in that moment that Henry Ford's quote “whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right” truly sank in.

After that moment I devoted myself to understanding how our brains work and what actually drives our behaviors. I now have a system that enables me to show people how to eliminate the barriers that they were unaware of so that they could:

You are not your past and you can learn how to eliminate your limits to become the future self you hope to be.