Kay:

Hello, Questers welcome back. Today is Tuesday. It’s July 20th and this is episode 402. We have a quote for you today that we absolutely love. It’s from a self-help book, author, and designer, and her name is Karen Salmansohn and the quote is just so beautiful. It’s got so many different components, so let’s break it down here. “Hold the vision, drop the excuses, remember your why. Swerve around obstacles, trust the process. Happiness and success will find you.”

Shi:

Boy, there really is so much packed into this quote. So, let’s just jump right into it. We start off with, “Hold the vision.” These first three words here are important to just note because we’re really getting a formula here when we look at the quote in its entirety but hold the vision is where it starts. This is really indicating that piece of one. Know what your vision is. You can’t hold it if it’s just some blurry, vague future desire. A vision is really something that’s got some detail to it, that’s got the emotion behind it and then holding it tells us that it’s really important for us to stick to it, to be steadfast…To come back to it, to focus on it continuously and let the consistency compound there. So, starting off with these three powerful words, “hold the vision,” really says a lot with so little.

Kay:

It really does and then moving into those next three words on top of that. So, we have this vision in her mind of the ideal future or the thing that we want, or the path that we want to walk and then we come into these next three words, “drop the excuses,” which means just stop making the excuses. The best thing about an excuse is that oftentimes they’re good reasons and they’re true and we can make excuses out of basically anything. But when you take full 100% responsibility for the outcome aka that vision coming true, you’re really finding yourself challenging the excuses that come forward and owning your part in it. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take time away for things that are real and valid. It just means own them and don’t let them be excuses for why you aren’t holding the vision or moving toward it.

Shi:

I love that you said Kay that okay, you know, the thing about excuses is they’re valid and that is something that’s important for us to remember and to hear because the advice behind the advice here dropped the excuses is really telling us when you allow yourself to accept an “excuse” or reason or an obstacle or a challenge. When you allow yourself to accept that it doesn’t allow you to think creatively on anything else. It doesn’t allow you to ponder a different solution or a different path. It allows you to say it’s okay to quit, or it’s okay to stop. That brings us to our next three words here in this really powerful quote, which is, “Remember your why.”

Kay:

Remembering your why is such an important component to what it is that you do in the path to success because things get really hard along the way. You might have heard this, or maybe you’re on the path to success right now and finding that things are difficult but usually, it’s probably every six months you have this realization like, “wow, things are a lot harder than I thought,” and it keeps getting harder the further down the path that you go. The more successful you get it does not get easier. The more altitude that you gain on the mountain the harder it is to breathe and the steeper the climb. So, when it gets more difficult, as you gain success down the path, it’s really important to anchor yourself back in the reason that you’re doing this in the first place because if you lose sight of that, you won’t have the internal motivation to go forward.

Shi:

Oh my gosh, there’s so much I want to say on that, but there’s still half the quote to go. So, let’s go to the next three words here, “Swerve around obstacles.” Boy, it’s fun imagery to start with but it’s also great advice because it’s not saying if there are obstacles and it’s not saying potential obstacles, it’s telling you to swerve around obstacles. It is a certainty that there will be obstacles in your path and in your road and there will be opportunity to act quickly and be able to avoid and get around them with the least amount of interruption to your journey as possible. If you are not alert on the road and an obstacle comes up, you will crash into it. Will you manage to still get later on down the road? Hopefully, if it hasn’t been a fatal crash, but probably you will be able to. But if you have reaction time and awareness early enough and fast enough you can respond to that situation, swerve around the obstacle, and continue on your journey much faster.

Kay:

Man. Well, while you’re holding this vision, dropping your excuses, ravaging down the road with your why in hand, and swerving around those obstacles sometimes it can feel like things are taking a little bit longer than you might have anticipated. That’s where these next three words come into play which is to trust the process. Now, the phrase trust the process has definitely taken on a little bit of meme credit these days on the internet because oftentimes you’re told to trust the process and you get to the end and it wasn’t what you anticipated. But the long game process, the infinite game process, the 50-year process of your life is one that is working for your benefit and sometimes leaning into it and trusting. It can be really difficult when things are hard. So, you’re given lots of things to arm yourself with here as you’re going down the road to success in order to be sure that you don’t fall down along the way, or that when the inevitability is that you do fall down that you’re at least leaning on your why and trusting the process because the outcome here on this final sentence is pretty juicy.

Shi:

Karen gives us these five things to do, which then result in the last part of the quote, which is, “happiness and success will find you.” If you do these five things, “Hold the vision, drop the excuses, remember your why. Swerve around obstacles and trust the process, happiness and success will find you.” Not might find you, not probably will find you. It WILL find you if you do those five things here in the quote today.

Kay:

Alrighty, gang, that means we’ve got a little bit of Tuesday Questing for you. If there are five things to cover in this quote today, we want you to take five minutes to reflect on your vision, on the excuses holding you back, on why you got started in the first place around maybe just a quick plan of what you’ll do when you hit around some obstacles and just take a moment to be in yourself because this is the process, baby. Sometimes it takes a daily five-minute quote and quest to get you through so that you can continue to grow. We are so honored to be your guides here on the Mentorship Quest. Are you ready? Say it with me now.

Kay & Shi:

Let’s quest!