This 4th grader has more intestinal fortitude than many adults I know. She is a great example of what we all do before taking the leap.

We try to talk ourselves into it. We obsess, we interrogate, we obsess some more.

We feel our nerves, sometimes we shy away from the edge, and we generally believe we’re not capable.

Then, with the encouragement of a guide, a mentor, a friend, someone around us, we give it a go.

When we come to the bottom of our 20 meter jump, we realize that it was the anxiety at the top of the hill that made it feel so crazy. We confidently say that a 60 meter jump is nothing now. We can do it because we’ve got experience with the smaller jump.

But that first jump… it’s a doozy!

When it comes to making a commitment, we hem and haw quite a bit, don’t we? But once we make the commitment, once we jump, all we can do is surrender to the process. Try not to “snowplow” on our way through the jump. Keep it straight. Essentially stay committed to the course.

When we come out on the other side, we’re whoopin’ and hollerin’ and generally thrilled with our result. We don’t bemoan our form, or how poorly we did something. We DID it, for crying out loud. That’s enough cause for celebration right now.

But a decision alone is not enough. Did you hear her at the beginning? “I’ll do it… here goes something.. I guess…. I’m gonna jump…”

Did you hear that small voice of her friend at the top of the hill? “The longer you wait, you’ll be more scared.”

Finally not only does she decide to jump. She commits to it. She actually jumps. She leaves the comfort of knowing the person she was before the jump, leaves her “old testament” and literally leaps into her new testament. This is what Queen Latifah calls a “life stopping moment” where life as we knew it ceases to be. It STOPS. Because we’ve begun something new.

“World changing ideas are born out of evolution. Breathing life into those ideas is what becomes the revolution.” - Simon Sinek

When I was a teenager, I read Jump and The Net Will Appear by Robin Crow. Not a traditional book for young readers, but I was obsessed with reading anything I could get my hands on related to the music industry. Robin’s story is now one that resonates deeply in my heart because of the parallels our stories share. At 40, Robin was facing the end of nearly everything, when he was inspired to step into his new testament. At his home in Nashville he built Dark Horse Recording into the premiere recording studio that many music legends now call their home away from home. He’s since gone on to author best selling books, multiple albums, and has become a sought after speaker – all since the age of 40.

Who says you’re too old to pursue your dreams?

But you can’t keep standing at the top of the hill talking yourself into your dreams. You’ve got to jump.

Robin parlayed his commitment to his new testament into a wildly successful venture that now includes an institute to train leaders and music professionals as well as business minds across the globe. Not bad for his new testament.

Is it all rosy? No. And we’ll go there tomorrow. Today, though, make the commitment to actually jump. And act. Jump into your new testament and surrender to the process. Let the net appear, and enjoy the ride.

A while back Andrea Patten asked me to proof her “Inner Critic to Inner Ally” program and offer my feedback. I proofed it and offered some suggestions, and left it at that. A couple of weeks ago, she was talking to me about some of the great results her clients were getting, so I asked if I could review the entire program and see if it might be something useful to my subscribers.

I had started working through it, and got stuck on an emotional block for me. It stemmed around describing my Inner Critic, and quite frankly, I had spent many years trying to shut it up. The last thing I wanted to do was spend time putting energy into describing what I believed was the very thing holding me back in life.

Then, my coach posed a question last week that vexed me. “Really, Lisa. What if it REALLY didn’t matter what other people thought?”

And finally, my eldest son, who for the past 25 months has been living at Ohio Wilderness Boys Camp, graduated yesterday. We’ve known for a few weeks now that it was coming, but the actual event was far more gratifying than I ever imagined.

A few days before graduation, because I was feeling particularly excited and pretty invincible, and decided to sit down with Andrea’s program. In all fairness to Andrea, I was worrying about nothing. Her activities to that point had been easy to follow, painless and took me less than a few hours to complete. This particular exercise had me stuck not because of her, but because of my relationship with my own inner critic.

I’ve got friends who’ve talked about their inner critic before. They always sound so ugly, so menacing. So mean spirited. I really didn’t want to start fantasizing about something so dreadful.

But as I worked through Andrea’s exercise, it wasn’t painful. It was beyond incredibly helpful to finally put a face and name to the voice in my head. The voice that wasn’t really there to make my life as miserable as I was making it out to be.

In short, I stopped making my Inner Critic my scapegoat, and fell in love with her.

Well, sort of.

Because I discovered that so much of my life is what it is now because of my Inner Critic – both the good and the bad.

In fact, let me introduce you to what may very well be my new BFF:

I call her “The Devil Inside Me”. She looks much like my mom on her wedding day, yet has this magical ability to shape shift into whatever will most validate her point at the time she’s talking to me. She talks to me about forward motion – having to “keep moving” and “not slowing down” lest someone pass me up.

In short all of this “doing” that I’ve been up to for years is a direct result of The Devil Inside Me. All this doing that people keep saying is so impressive has been a function of her, preventing me from getting too attached to any singular moment of celebration in my life.

• She kept me from celebrating my admission to college (because I was supposed to get in there, duh!)
• She kept me from celebrating the birth of both my boys (because I had work to do, and needed to get back to it, doggone it)
• She kept me from celebrating my first profitable month in business (because there were other people that were doing a lot more than I was, and I was not going to pass them if I took time out to celebrate)

I didn’t recognize how much of my life was passing me by because of her. But it’s not her fault. In fact, it’s because of her that I was able to do and achieve so much in the last few months, let alone the last few years.

• The Devil Inside Me has learned how to keep the carrot and stick working in my life and business. I’m grateful for that.
• The Devil Inside Me has kept me on task to finish up all the training for parents so that I would be ready when my son came home from camp. I’m grateful for that.
• The Devil Inside Me has kept me from dwelling on many hurts that have been a natural part of life. She says “there’s no time to cry, we’ve got things to do.” And that’s kept me sane during some pretty tough stuff. I’m grateful for that.

And now that I know her more intimately – who she really is, and why she’s really here – I can be grateful for her, and even a little in love with her. She’s not only become a friend, she’s become my own Inner Ally: a powerful helpmeet to partner with me through thick and thin.

The Devil Inside Me serves a powerful purpose in my life.  I see that now. And as a result, I am more confident. I see things more clearly, with less judgment. I’m thinking harder about what really matters to me. And on Sunday, as I watched my son standing in front of his peers, delivering his first speech, he brought it all home for me:

“Don’t waste time. Follow the Chiefs, they’ll get you where you want to go, through thick, thin, and in between.”

The “Chiefs” are the leaders of camp. They are the counselors, supervisors and directors that lead these boys every single day. They live in community with them, helping them become thoughtful young men. In those words, it became clear to me that The Devil Inside Me has been like one of those boys. Exerting influence over me instead of the other way around. I am the Chief. God is my Chief. My Inner Critic needs to follow the Chiefs, not the other way around.

My boy taught me a lot about investing time and energy in nurturing his true self, becoming the person God has called him to be in the world, and quieting the voices that were leading him down the wrong path in life.

This weekend, was as much my graduation day as it was my son’s.

So me and my Inner Critic are mending fences, setting boundaries and healing our broken relationship. Building a life and a business based on love requires self-love as much as anything else. That is my prayer for you.

I told Andrea about the camp, and how blessed I feel to have had a program like that for my son, and how her program was similar in many ways for me. She and I are thrilled to tell you more about this program as an act of love. This being Valentine’s Week and all, she’s graciously opened up her program to my readers and is giving half the profits from every course sold through this link to my son’s camp. I would gladly pay three to four times what she’s asking for this program because it’s already done so much for me. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next few weeks (and I’ll report out if y’all are interested).

So if you want to show yourself some love this week, and do a good deed as well, check out Andrea’s program. I can’t say enough good things about it, and since I’m not making a dime off of telling you about it, I hope you understand the sincerity of that statement.

Above all, love yourself this week. You’re the only you that you’ve got.

So easy, in fact, that it’s exactly what I did.

After a spectacular 2010, I truly believed I had things “down pat” in my business, and positioned myself in 2011 to have at I thought would be my best year in business. I went into 2011 with very high hopes.

Those hopes were quickly and frantically dashed on the rocks as the mid-point of 2011 approached. I spent the second half of the year cleaning up the debris, trying to keep my sanity and my business together.

Don’t get me wrong. Some VERY good things came out of 2011. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Worked with an incredibly smart, best-selling author who I now count as a friend
• Built a new blog, launched an incredibly fun blog series
• Created a profitable business division in less than 60 days
• Planned a three-site overhaul for the end of 2011 (and executed pretty well, I think)
• Launched two new programs at Direct Sales Classroom
• Sold out my group coaching program in less than three weeks
• Inspired to write a business parable (that’s almost finished!)

But there were some pretty painful events as well:

• Laid off my assistant of 2+ years
• Dissolved a business division after attempting a failed live event
• Total revenues down by approximately 35%
• My son STILL didn’t graduate from camp
• Took a 90% hit on our house when we relocated in September
• Invested thousands of dollars in training that only served to help me figure out what I DIDN’T want to do

So I went to the quarterly intensive that my new coach set up in Minnesota, my tail was kind of tucked between my legs. My head was down, and I just wanted to stop feeling so lousy about myself.

I mean, after all, I had a lot to celebrate despite my failures. Yet, I wasn’t feeling it. I wasn’t accomplishing what I thought I should be doing, I wasn’t where I wanted to be, where I thought I “should” be, and I wasn’t seeing anyway to change that feeling.

I shared my fear. I was able to release a lot of “stuff” on that weekend. But I had another epiphany about the reality of failure. Two of them actually. It came up as someone else was sitting in “the chair” during the event. I heard these words, and it released a flood for me:

“Failure is not permanent. It is temporary. Failure is not a reflection of who I am.”

I am not a failure. I had a failure. There is a difference.

I had a series of failures. They are temporary, not permanent, and it does not make ME a failure. It only means that the effort I expended failed to achieve the desired result.

That doesn’t make ME a failure. It makes it a failed attempt.

And the attempt is temporary. Because I can always try again, with new tools, strategies, and knowledge.

And “knowing is half the battle”, right?

When I heard those words, I stopped breathing. In those words, redemption, peace, and understanding.

Yeah, I probably “should” have seen it or known it before, but sometimes you just need to see things from a different perspective before they sink in.

The biggest lesson for me is that letting go takes practice. We spend a lot of time picking up the rock we’ve put down. We have to practice letting go. Reminding ourselves that we don’t own the failure – and that the failure doesn’t own us.

It doesn’t define us. It never could. How does any one moment of our lives define us completely? It can’t. It’s just not possible.

So remind yourself that your so-called “failures” don’t own you.

You know what else? Your failures matter.

The guy who’s got it easy doesn’t have a clue about how to be an overcomer. Those failures don’t define us, but they do define our character. How do you rise after you fall? How do you re-frame, learn, and adapt for greater success in the future?

That’s what makes failure so valuable.

It’s not the end, not even close – unless you decide it is.