Hey, sister, let me help you out. I think the biggest thing you need to learn here, based of what you said is discipline. And discipline is a hard lesson to learn no matter what stage you are in your life because most of the time it doesn’t feel good. Not in a cuddly way, but it’s like thing I have to do X, y, and Z, for example. You have to be disciplined to make sure you turn your taxes in on time, right? Like that is something that doesn’t feel good. But what I do to pair with learning discipline in these different stages of my life is I create an incentive program for myself. So for example, I am currently enrolled in three universities, but I am a fashion girl at heart. So if I want to buy a designer bag, I have to get a 4.0. That is not something that anybody else set for myself. I just put myself on that incentive program.
Now both of those examples are not surface level. Way for the sake of this conversation, surface level. Now let’s talk about the hardship. How do you stay disciplined throughout the hardship when you feel like a life is crumbling under your feet, when you feel like you just cannot find your way and you tried everything, how do you stay disciplined? Let’s talk about it. So about this time last year, I was going through grief of losing a homegirl, grief of losing my job, losing all this money and trying to find my way. What was that next step? And so, because I had nothing going on at that time, I felt like I applied to every job in the world. I did everything people told me to do. I went to school twice, got my master’s at 22, got the corporate job. Got the notable job, which was teaching, made my way up in that. But it just seem like no matter how disciplined or how much I did everything right, I still got the short end of the stick. And so I had to tune everybody out, even though I know their advice in the congratulations were well intentioned or it had good intentions behind it is I guess what I’m trying to say. But I had to ground myself in. Karisha, what do you want out of this lifetime and now that I’m in the space where I’m doing the things that I dreamed about last year and years before. The discipline doesn’t stop. Something is always going to come up. And that’s the thing that people don’t talk about. Something is always going to come up, meaning your life could be going great now your car got affected or you’re doing everything well in your relationship realm, and now you have this huge final financial hit. How do you stay disciplined when life is life in grounding myself in the understanding that something is always going to come up, whether now or later. That is just how the cookie crumbles, no matter how minor or major the inconvenience is.
But grounding yourself and what do you want out of this lifetime time? And you’re going to have to be disciplined and hold yourself accountable to those goals that you have, no matter how major or minor they may seem.
The second part to this is you have to have a community that’s going to hold you accountable. You only can do so much by yourself. And with this accountability that comes with community, now you’re telling somebody that you trust, No. 1, and that you trust, or people that you trust your goals and they do the same as well. And meet with them, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, every couple months to check and to see what have you accomplished in the past four weeks. How does that align to your yearly intentions or your goals that you set? And also, how can we help you get from point a to point B.
And this is my last piece of advice is learn how to fail fast. Okay, no matter what, who you are looking to for inspire inspiration or who you are drawing inspiration and motivation from, everybody has failed multiple times. And failure does not stop up. No matter how high you climb up the ladder, no matter how many job titles you have, no matter how many degrees you have, failure does not stop.
So with that understanding, learn how to fell fast and pivot fast. It also do it without shame is something that is so crippling that it can stop us in our racks. And we’re just so shameful to open the email, so shameful to look at that account, so shameful to say we don’t have this amount of money.
You have to learn how to not navigate life without shame because shame is one of those emotions that we all feel. But again, acknowledge it and keep you pushing. You cannot sit in shame.