Did you ever prepare so completely for something and then it didn’t happen?

Have you ever trained as an Understudy for a Broadway show only to have the show close before you ever took the stage?

Have you ever over-prepared for an interview for your Dream Job only to have it given to someone else?

Have you ever trained for a Marathon and then twisted your ankle the day before the race?

Have you ever spent years writing a dissertation, only to then place it on the shelf to gather dust?

So fill in your own [blank] here. Can you list all the things you’ve ever done that – you might tell yourself – have lead you no where? The experiences and events that have taken place that usually elicit the extreme eye-roll from you just at the thought of it? Or red-faced anger. Or uncontrollable tears. Or heaving depression.

I’ll guaranty you, if we were all in a room together, we could all share some doozies! And for most people, just the thought of these past events can steal your Mojo right out from under you. Literally. I’ve seen people (myself included … I’m never exempt, if you haven’t noticed!) literally plunge from their solid, happy, confident self into this pile of goo when just the thought of the past experience enters their mind.

So how do you get your Mojo back without changing a thing? It’s easy. Well, it’s hard. No, it’s just … challenging.

Since you can’t change a thing that happened in the past, the only choice is not to change anything.

The trick is this: You just shift your perspective and snuggle up to it in a new way.

So, you were the Understudy for that Broadway show and it folded before you even set foot on stage on the Great White Way. You’ve always held a lot of resentment about this, because let’s face it, you worked your buns off to get there! You spent hours and hours and hours in rehearsal. And for what? You could say absolutely nothing.

OR you could see how that was such a profound gift you were given. You had a “trial run” without any of the harsh criticism (the show did close early, after all!). You learned what it takes to work on Broadway. If you played your cards right, you made some great friends and professional connections that can last a lifetime; and also help you get your next acting job! People pay big bucks for that kind of training! You? You got paid to get that kind of training.

Sometimes simply engaging full-throttle in the preparation – of whatever it is you want to do – is the purpose of doing it. Yet often we over-focus on the end-result and discount everything else along the way. While I’d agree that we’re often much more successful over-all when we start with the end in mind, if that end result doesn’t happen in black-and-white, we’re angry, disappointed, or feel like failures. When in fact, the process was the real result.

One added example. I trained and prepared for months to participate in an event designed to get myself and my book national publicity. While I got some good publicity out of it, if my drop-dead goal for the event would have been to be signed on the spot as a guest on the Today Show, I could say that it was a miserable failure.

Yet I’ll tell you this: What I gained from all that preparation and from participating in that event wasn’t getting a roster of interviews on National Media. It’s power was in connecting with like-minded people, networking, and learning a lot about the industry.

And more than anything else? It was worth the price of admission to laser-focus my message and build my confidence level to the point where I felt fearless after going through that event.

So if I looked at it “the old way,” I might curse the promoters of the event and gripe about what a waste of money it was, because I didn’t achieve oodles of high-powered bookings. Yet if I don’t allow “the old way” of thinking to steal my Mojo, I’d say that participating in the event was absolutely priceless in ways I can’t even understand quite yet.

Which of your personal experiences pops up when you think about it?

So the message is clear: The only one who’s stolen your Mojo is YOU.

Grab it back right now!

Tell the story again, from a new angle.

You’ll be amazed at how good it feels to have your Mojo back.