“Your mind is everything. All the mess that causes you stress starts in your head. If you’re weak it starts in your head. If you are strong it starts in your head. You make a decision today to be what you wanna be.”- Deion Sanders
What does it mean to you when big names and successful people tell you to grind like never before and to drive ahead towards your individual success without excuses?
How does the message of someone telling you to go out and achieve success, to become wealthy, and to accomplish your dreams sit with you personally at the moment, particularly in this current day and age?
How do you define success?
Do you believe in the power of individuality and your ability to achieve success as an individual that can freely make your own decisions?
What does this vision of success mean to you exactly?
Is it having a million dollars in the bank, or how about $100 million?
What about the attitude that success matters more than anything else and that you, as an individual, are in total control of this, therefore it’s up to you to put in the effort and to walk your own path?
Do you believe all of this to be true?
Do you believe that whatever you define as success is possible?
Look, I’m the last guy on earth to pass judgment on any answer that you might propose to any of these questions. I’m not here to pass judgment at all, but we have lived in an era where there has been no shortage of self-help coaches, business coaches, life coaches, and any other type of coach that you can think of if you really just take a second to pause and look around.
After all, I myself am a lifelong strength and fitness coach.
However, today I want to look at the sentiment of this entire self-help discussion regarding the common messaging that we all hear from all the famous online coaches that flood the internet with the evidence of their successful practices and massive followings.
Even though there are a couple of well known personalities that sparked my idea for this post, keep in mind that this isn’t meant to be a criticism of anyone in particular that is involved with being a coach, or guide so I don’t want you to take it that way.
However, I do want you to carefully examine today’s episode and what I am looking to highlight in today’s message. Afterwards and upon some personal reflection if you do follow some well known life coaches I want you to ask yourself if that person is guilty of what I’m going to be pointing out to you here today. That’s the purpose of today’s episode.
Like I said I’m a coach myself so the intention here is not to be critical of anyone in particular, however I want to point towards a problem that many of these so-called coaches and influencers typically neglect, or fail to point out, within the fabric of the DNA of much of their messaging.
I’ll touch on what that is here a bit later, but first I want to take the time to explore what the entire concept of individuality and personal agency really means in today’s world and the current environment that we are all living in.
Enter Existentialism
The German philosopher Martin Hedegger was born in 1889 and grew up to become one of the leading influential philosophers on existentialism. This philosophy of existentialism involves the thought process that questions existence along with our responsibilities as free and independent beings in the world.
In Hedegger’s book Being and Time he posits that much of society is running away from the idea of death and points out that we essentially deny our own mortality by pretending that we will live forever.
Hedegger believed that as an existentialist that we must confront the reality that one day we will no longer be around because of death and in this way Hedegger was critical of the western world’s view where religion offers the prospect of an afterlife. (Source: New Intrigue)
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