Remember this, please. You can never and should never please everybody. Even the status quo is pissing someone off somewhere. Internet trolls have taught us nothing if not this. So Judge your success, not by the reactions of the mediocre who surround you. Judge your success by your own results and how you feel about them.

I wish we talked more about failure. Like everywhere – work, home, friends, with your kids. To build confidence, I say we must embrace it, and the bigger the better! One is because failure suffocates perfectionism, but more so because failure prevents shame. It is a natural human instinct to avoid failure. It’s also natural when we do encounter it, to internalize it. That means we hide it and bury it deep where others won’t find it. But when we don’t air out our failures, we create a deadly equation: Failure + Aloneness = Shame

There’s a super important step in becoming your braver self that nobody talks about. It’s the recognition of when you’re playing small. It’s noticing that fear has come to sit next to you on the bleachers and is running her mouth so you don’t get on the court and play. She’s hard to notice because, in my experience, fear sounds a lot like perfectly logical reasons. Often it feels more like my old friend “busy” sat down. Or even her cousin procrastination. But fear?!