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the setbacks are part of the path. The setback is part of the journey. The setback is meant to pave you and mold you into who you're supposed to become to be able to fully reap the benefits of who it is that can have the victory at the end,
Welcome to the Make Up Your Mind podcast. I'm your host Jahleane Dolne, and I'm here to help you make up your mind - literally and figuratively. I'm a motivational speaker, content creator, subconscious mindset coach, and the founder of The Postgrad Playbook- the only coaching platform and resource center for post-grads and 20 somethings to release mindset blocks and take action towards their chosen career , no matter how, quote unquote, unconventional that might look.
As an expert recognized by Afrotech, LinkedIn news,, and more, I help you identify what you actually want, release what's keeping you stuck, and have a game plan to take action with clarity, confidence, conviction, and ease. Here we cover all things, paving your own way and how that looks personally and professionally. Get [00:01:00] ready to finally make up your mind.
Let's get started.
Hello. And welcome back to another episode of Make Up Your Mind. It's your host, Jahleane Dolne and I am so excited to be back for another week and we are so back because this is actually our first YouTube episode in a very long time. The technical difficulties were not able to hold us down for too long
and if you enjoy watching on YouTube, we're here now. So whether you're on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, whatever it makes sure you're subscribing and following the shows so that way, you are up to date with all the new updates and every new episode that drops every single Wednesday. Um, there are some updates. The one that I am the most excited to share with you, and really the only one is that we have added a new section to our newsletter called "Hot Opportunities". I come across so many opportunities week over week, and I know that so many of you all are looking for your next cool gig or job opportunity, or just resource to [00:02:00] pivot.
So I've added a section dedicated to that in the newsletter. And it's completely free. All you have to do is sign up. I'll include a link that is in the show notes or in the comments. If you're watching on YouTube and you can sign up and that is sent to your inbox every other week. It's a really good deal
and I also send you a lot of tips and nuggets that I just don't share anywhere else, so that way you can be kept up to date with everything happening in the community. So that's in the comments. Go ahead and dive in.
A few other updates on socials. We are doing a whole 17 part series all about making your post-grad life, less confusing and more fulfilling. And, oh my gosh, the gems that are being dropped in this series, you definitely want to make sure you are staying up to date and keeping tabs when every single video drops, um, I go very into depth and it just weaves into the whole mission of The Postgrad Playbook in a way that is concise and over the course of 17 parts, concise and comprehensive, I would say.
For today's conversation. [00:03:00] It was really on my heart to talk all about what it's like to navigate setbacks, but still make the conscious decision to take meaningful action anyways.
We all know that consistency and showing up, even when you don't feel like it is what separates those who make it versus those who don't. And a lot of times we're having a lot of off days and setbacks can look like a lot of different things. A little bit of backstory. Personally, I remember early in the summer, I was just off my game a little bit.
I wasn't feeling 100% and I was really in sort of like a funk. And it was really hard for me to get out of it, even though I was prioritizing my wellness, I was going outside even I was working really hard on growing The Postgrad Playbook and everything that came with it, but something got me in a little bit of a funk. And then I had the opportunity to go to Essence Fest.
I talked a little bit about it in another episode, but I got the opportunity to go to EssenceFest and that whole trip changed my perspective and completely [00:04:00] reinvigorated me.
Basically what happened was my friend ended up getting a plus one to go on a brand trip and it was completely out of the blue and they are taking her to EssenceFest. So she let me come along and. When I tell you, I had never been to New Orleans before, and I never been to EssenceFest before, but one thing about me is I love going to a big event. And that event was the event of events.
It was so inspiring seeing all the leaders we saw, Serena Williams speak. I saw Amber Riley. I saw my favorite performers. We saw JT, Arin Ray, Keyshia, Cole Musiq SoulChild, everyone- it was just such a fantastic event that it really reminded me that sometimes even when you are in a funk, you need to expose yourself to new experiences, to be able to reinvigorate yourself, to be able to bring joy back into your spirit,
because setbacks can look like a lot of different things. And the first one is internal. I realized that I was 100% completely burnt out.
And the reason was because there was such a [00:05:00] hyper fixation on one thing that I wasn't allowing the joy to seep through. I was just devoid of that external joy. And I think that's something we can all relate to when you're hyper fixated on one thing and everything else sort of falls by the wayside. There are a couple ways to determine if you're burnt out, which is one of the biggest internal setbacks that I think that you can go through.
The first symptoms of feeling like you're burnt out is feeling like you were just 100% exhausted.
Maybe time goes by super, super slow. Maybe you can barely get out of bed. Maybe you don't have the energy to do activities around you. Maybe you feel internally exhausted and you just scroll on TikTok for hours. Exhaustion shows up in so many different ways, but it is one of the clearest signs of burnout and a big indicator that you need to have a course correction.
And with the exhaustion, it leads to some sort of cynicism and leads to a negativity because when you don't feel right in your body at your mind's not going to feel right, it's [00:06:00] not like you could have one feeling really great without the other, unless you just did a really good workout and you have the endorphins, but it typically just doesn't work that way. If you used to literally love doing one thing, or if there used to be a certain aspect of your work or your social life that you used to really love and you just have no joy and there's just no excitement. When you think about doing it anymore, that's the cynicism creeping in, and one of the earliest signs of burnout that you need to nip it in the bud and completely flip your life upside down.
The exhaustion, the cynicism um, it leads to you overall senses of just negativity.
And you can just see it permeate throughout your whole life. Maybe it'll affect your relationships with other people, your friends, your family, your partner, whatever, but it will show up and it will demand to be seen and heard.
So this kind of internal setback, like I was saying affects everything that we do. And it's hard to keep moving forward when you don't feel like things are going your way and you feel burnt out, and maybe you just don't feel like you're in the same phase of life as your [00:07:00] peers are, you see them accomplishing certain things And then you think yourself, why have I not done that yet? And creating that motivation or that discipline to keep going after it is so difficult, especially in these times.
Which brings me to my next point, motivation and discipline. And disciplines trumps motivation every single time.
Motivation is an emotion. It's fleeting. It comes and it goes, but discipline is the willpower and the intention to commit to what you need to do day in and day out, despite what your emotions say.
In atomic habits, James Clear talks about this.
He says something along the lines of, and I'm paraphrasing here is that you fall to the level of your systems day in and day out, every time, whatever your systems are, that is what you will ultimately succumb to.
And a lot of times, if your systems are based off of your motivation, you're never gonna, you're never going to reach the point where it comes time to take the action that you need to be as taking the action is intentional. It's ingrained in you. One thing that I did, or what I [00:08:00] realized is that at the end of the day, sometimes your emotions are irrelevant.
Of course, I'm always very much so like, be in tune with your body, be in tune your emotions. Yeah, but when it comes to getting the things done that you meet to your emotions can be irrelevant, but it's just really focusing on that balance of the joy and the play. And refilling your cup with the things that give you life again with the work and the discipline that you're putting towards your goals.
Another way that the setbacks can look internal is if you're working against yourself and your limiting beliefs in your subconscious mind. We've talked about this before, but you know, your subconscious mind is about 95% of your brain.
And if you aren't able to align your belief system at every single level with your overall goals, you're going to be fighting with yourself every single time. I hear so many times people talking about a fear of success, a fear of failure, a fear of being seen and working on being able to actually be consistent.
And the reason why they're not able to take action is because of these internal setbacks, which is in your subconscious mind. So once again, conquer your [00:09:00] conscious you get over your setbacks. It is the worst feeling in the world to feel like you're taking two steps forward and five steps back because you take a couple steps forward when you're super motivated to get something done, and then you take five steps back when you aren't motivated anymore, your limiting beliefs come in, you start thinking, what if I'm not good enough?
You start having all of these negative thoughts and you're back in that cycle.
One thing that I've learned over the years and through helping other people overcome these limiting beliefs is really understand whose voice is it in my head. When you think about all the reasons why you can't do something most of the times it is probably not your voice. It might be the voice of an old teacher.
It might be the voice of a parent, an old friend, um, an ex partner. It might be the voice of a high school bully. You never know. It's like, where did these insecurities come from? Because the reality is, is that our insecurities are not native to us. When we are born into this world, we're born as the most pure beings
and then over a time [00:10:00] society engrains its expectations and its rules onto us. So we start to conform and we start to mold ourselves and try to fit by society standards, which is obviously human, very human for us because we want to be a part of the pack we want to survive. We don't want to be ostracized. So any time that there is some indication of us being different or not conforming, it's scary.
It is scary and it threatens our survival, especially to our subconscious mind, which its main priority is to keep us safe. So when we're thinking about all these fears, fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being seen. These are fears that are meant to keep us safe, meant to keep us in a box, but through overcoming it through figuring out whose voice it is in the back of your head, that's whispering in your ear, keeping you stuck.
You can overcome it and really look at the examples all around your life of people who are able to have success. They're able to have success and be fine, even if they're seen, even if they fail, but they bounce back. [00:11:00] Nothing is 100% permanent.
They're already going to be so many setbacks, externally, external setbacks and people who you come across along the way who might not want you to get to where you want to go. So you don't need to be adding yourself to that list of hindrances to chart your own path.
The next is navigating external setbacks, which is in my opinion- less difficult. And less difficult than navigating the internal setbacks and the reason why I say it is less difficult is because your internal world really is the most true world to you everything that you believe in your internal world, it permeates into your external world.
So if you have a limiting belief about yourself, maybe you think you're not good enough, you're going to see that reflected back to you and every single experience that you have, thus creating even more setbacks.
But the external setbacks, I think are easier because if what you learned from external setbacks has nothing to root itself in internally, you're going to be fine.
It's just going to brush itself off the shoulder. [00:12:00] So an example of an external negative setback is like rejection. Let's say that you're going after an opportunity. You want to connect with someone something happens and you don't get it. They say, no, you get the rejection email or they just never respond. Or you see that someone else gets the opportunity or is able to connect with that person. That's really hard to deal with, but at the same time, there is an infinite number of opportunities out there.
And when you learn how to deal with rejection, that's the most unstoppable that you become.
The person who's knocked out by one rejection is a person who was never really a contender in the first place. It's the person who's able to keep showing up and get rejected over and over and over again and just wait until they finally get that one yes.
There's a Ted talk I love called I think it is I might be paraphrasing this, but I'm going to link it in the show notes, but it's what I learned from a hundred days of rejection. And basically the speaker goes out and purposely puts himself in situations to be rejected, to be [00:13:00] able to build his own confidence. And he asked for some crazy things, like he asked for a hamburger refill at McDonald's and we all know, they don't give that.
He asked to be a Starbucks greeter. I believe to be paid, to be the person who greets people when they walk into a Starbucks, they also don't pay people for that. Right. So he puts himself in these situations that he knows he's going to be rejected, but through being rejected so many times he becomes desensitized to it and therefore more confident to go after opportunity. So honestly, expose yourself to be vulnerable to those setbacks, expose yourself to be a victim, to these setbacks and a victim in the way that you can almost reclaim that word and see it as a strength for you.
I remember one of the worst setbacks that I felt like I had when I had a mentor relationship and it started off as something that I thought was going to be really good. But when I tell you it ended really unfavorably and really in favorably and it felt like a setback for me, because I [00:14:00] felt like I had lost a really good thing at the end of the day, every single thing that you lose was something that wasn't truly meant for you in the first place. And you aren't really losing if you're just getting rid of things that aren't yours. And it's impossible to get rid of things that are yours period.
I'll say that again cause I think it might come off a little bit confusing off the top, but it is impossible to lose if what you are losing was never meant for you in the beginning. It was never meant for you in the first place. And at the same time, it's impossible to lose. What is truly meant for you.
What's meant for you won't miss you. So when you are navigating these setbacks, the setbacks are part of the path. The setback is part of the journey. The setback is meant to pave you and mold you into who you're supposed to become to be able to fully reap the benefits of who it is that can have the victory at the end, who it is that's able to maintain and keep and grow and multiply and continue to nurture what you build at the end. Because when I think [00:15:00] about my past too, I'm so grateful that I did not get what I have now years ago, because there's no way I would have been able to handle it. Think about who you are right now and think about, who you were five or six years ago. And maybe you've been working on something for a really long time. Uh, for me, I've been working on some of my dreams for that long because they just take some time.
But think about what would happen if you got what you wanted earlier. If the setback never happened. And you just, for example, grew 100,000 followers on social media overnight, or if you finally got that dream job that you wanted. Overnight dream job you wanted like that? You didn't have any adversity at all.
Most times you might not be able to handle it. Who you are now and who you used to be are two completely different people and the setbacks and the journey that you took to get to where you are right now, molded you into someone who would be able to nurture the opportunity and to not fumble the bag.
Remember, even if it feels like other people are moving at a pace that's so much faster [00:16:00] than you the setbacks are your journey. The setbacks are part of the path.
I used to be a runner. And if you've ever ran track, you've definitely heard your coach say this, but you can't look left and right at how fast other people are running. At the end of the day, you're only running against your own clock. You have to stay in your own lane because you can't veer off into someone else's lane. And when you do look left and right, that's when you find that your time slows down, so you can only look straight forward and bolt it to the finish line.
Everyone's path is a little bit different and what someone else is doing will never take away from what you're doing, because it's different at the end of the day. It's different and vice-versa.
If you need a little bit of accountability and feel like this is 100% the season that you are in to navigate setbacks, I have a 30 day reset that is a hundred percent free and it is an accountability tracker.
So you will work on the same things consistently for 30 days to start to mold yourself into who you want to be again. Whether that is getting your joy back after being burnt out. Uh, whether that [00:17:00] is just doing the tasks that you know will make an actual difference in your life, whatever that is, this whole worksheet guides you through, what that looks like for you.
But that is really all that I have for you for today's episode.
Thank you so much for tuning in, make sure that you like subscribe and if you're on Apple, write a review on apple podcasts so that it can grow and we can reach the people who need this most. So thank you so much. And I will see you next Wednesday. Bye.
