7 Steps to a COME BACK by: Nick Singelis II

We live three times as long these days as we did a few hundred years ago, so let's get one thing straight right up front: you'

ve got a lot more space to fail and to succeed again than you think you do. Flunking out of school, losing a great job, getting divorced, putting on a lot of weight, none of these are really an ending anymore given how long (and ever expanding) the average lifespan is in the 21st Century, so really, you're wasting it if you never make a comeback.

If you never take a shot at something that you might not be good at, if you never make a go at that marriage that might or might not work out, if you never take that job that you're not 100% sure on or attend the college course that you're merely curious about, then what are you doing with your life?

Making a comeback is about taking risks, acknowledging that failure is a possibility, and doing it anyways because so is success. If you're ready to overcome fear, bad habits and self-doubt and take another shot, making a comeback in any area of your life is always very real possibility.

1. Facing What Went Wrong

A good first step to dealing with any personal failure, disappointment or tragedy is to simply put it down in writing. You'll be surprised at just how effective this is in getting right to the root of the problem, of your feelings of doubt, and laying out what it is, exactly, that needs to be dealt with before you can move on. Write down what went wrong and you can start to work on confronting it.

What You Write

Before taking another step, the fact is that what you actually write down might not be the root of the actual problem. Flunking out of college might be what you write down, but did you flunk out of college because you didn't try hard enough, or were you studying subjects that just plain didn't interest you? A divorce may be the problem that you write down, but is the problem that you failed as a wife or husband, or did you and your spouse just not really belong together?

It's important to determine where the problem lies. What you've probably written down is not so much the problem itself but the end result of letting a problem build for far too long. When a septic tank overflows, the problem isn't usually that the septic tank overflowed, but that the homeowner was waiting too long to have it pumped, or that they should have gotten on a sewer system from the start.

The problem is rarely the same thing as the turning point, the conclusion to a situation that wasn't working. The problem isn't usually the breakup or being fired or dropping out, the problem is usually what led you to that point. That's what you need to confront.

2. Determining and Dealing With the Root Problem

You can usually trace what went wrong back to the root problem itself, but it's not always easy. The idea is not to determine what ended that chapter of your life, but to determine what made you unhappy, listless, lazy, what distracted you from your goal, what forced you to change your plans, what was going wrong in your life before what went wrong went wrong.
Say you dropped out of college. Maybe you loved the subject, the studying, the learning process, but you hated the environment. Maybe you loved the environment as well as the subject matter, but you just couldn't find the free time to study as seriously as you needed to.

Asking the Tough Questions

A warning: as you explore this part of your life, you might not always like the answers you come up with, so you need to be ready to think critically, to analyze those answers from a logical, rational perspective, not from an emotional or biased perspective. It's very easy to ask yourself the kind of question that leads to the answer you want to hear.
Maybe you want to blame your weight gain on your family. Maybe you want to blame getting fired on simple bad luck. Even if you can pin it on someone else, on a natural disaster, on random circumstance, there is often a precautionary measure that you could have taken or a relationship you could have ended or social boundaries you could have set, and if there isn't, if you were simply dealt a bad hand, then the problem is already solved, because there's no excuse not to try again.

Reorganizing Your Goals

It's scary to reorganize your goals. It's a type of comeback that involves simply starting over from scratch. Maybe you studied guitar for four years to become a studio musician only to find that there are way too many guitarists in your city already. That four year learning process is a big time investment if you're going to pick up an instrument where you won't have so much competition from other professional musicians, it's daunting.

Fortunately, knowing that you've already failed once, and learned from it, can help to bolster your confidence. Remember that the most important thing is to try again. Don't rush headlong into a new goal without covering your bases, thinking it through and making sure it's what you want to do, but once you've decided, don't let fear make you hesitant: you can't win if you don't play.

3. Making a Plan

We should start this chapter off with a bit of a warning: some people get caught up in the planning stage. The planning stage is where you can keep fiddling with your ideas and plans indefinitely and never actually take action. Don't confuse planning for doing. You may find greater success in your comeback if you plan for it, if you think things through, do a little research and personal soul searching and go from there, but don't get caught up in trying to perfect the plan.

Here's how you keep from getting trapped in the perpetual planning loop: set a timeline to take action, and don't miss it. This will push you to get your ideas together by then, to organize a plan of attack, and to just go ahead and do it.

Where to Start

Once you've determined where you want to go, what you want to do, a good plan always starts with the same question: "What can I do about it?"

If the answer is "nothing" then you don't need a plan, you need a new goal. Most of us will probably never be astronauts. Most of us will probably never run in the Olympics unless we started training as children. Plans are for achievable, realistic goals.

That said, you can probably shoot a little higher than you think, just so long as you can formulate a sensible, realistic plan for getting there. Maybe you can't be an astronaut, but who says you can't get a pilot's license and buy an airplane of your own for around the same price as a new car? Maybe you can't run in the Olympics, but who says you can't find a sport that you can excel at? Who says you can't put in the time and effort to improve your physique? Once you have a real goal, the only question left is how to get there.

Organizing Your Plan

Every life goal seems daunting until you break it up into smaller tasks. Getting your theological degree in Christian Existentialism seems impossible until you chop it up into an itemized plan that looks roughly like this:

• Look into theological scholarship options
• Study at community college
• Write essays on favorite theological subjects and try to get them published, failing that, self-publish online
• Apply to universities

If you focus on one of these at a time, breaking each one down into smaller sections, such as...

• Write essays on favorite theological subjects

1. Read through the works of Kierkegaard
2. Read essays on Kierkegaard
3. Write my own take on the material
4. Submit to theological journals

...then it becomes quite easy to accomplish a step at a time.

The same goes for getting into shape. You start with a plan to research how to get the body you want, and then you make that routine a part of your daily life.

The smaller you can make each step of your plan, the better. When a director makes a movie, they don't film it all at once, they film it one shot at a time. Some of them don't even cover a few dozen shots a day for the thousands of shots that make up a feature length film.

Don't think of your goal as a mountain to climb, but as a series of small hills. Get enough of them together and you've got Mount Everest, but you don't march to the top in one day.

Organize a plan based around your resources, around your abilities, your daily schedule, and most importantly, what you've learned from past experiences.

4. Goals and Priorities

Setting your goals clearly, and keeping your priorities straight, is an important part of the process of staging a comeback even after you've made your plan. A list of priorities is essentially this: what are you willing to sacrifice, and for what?

Take the things that you're not willing to give up on under any circumstances whatsoever, and put those at the top of the list. Take the less important stuff and put that at the bottom.

For most of us, those top priorities are easy to figure out. Chances are you're going to put general security and safety somewhere around the top, as it's very hard to chase a dream from a position of hunger and homelessness. Stability is key to any endeavor, because it's hard to take risks if you don't have a safety net.

If you have children, then it's probably a safe bet that family goes somewhere near the top, as well. Hanging out with friends might be a little lower down the list, but still important.

Determining What Really Matters

This is the real question here: what really matters? Sometimes the answers are scary. If maintaining your current romantic relationship isn't near the top of the list, then you may need to reassess your place in life. If your career isn't near the top of the list, then you probably need a new job.

The question comes down to what you're willing to sacrifice, what you're willing to compromise or outright give up in the name of living the life that you want to live. Obviously, everything isn't going to be perfect all of the time, you need to put more energy into some things than you do into others, so it's very important to make sure that your list of priorities works for you. No two people are going to write the same list, but here's what one might look like, taking an aspiring novelist as an example:

A Sample List of Priorities

• Maintaining steady income
• Finishing a novel
• Maintaining friendships
• Learning to drive
• Catching up on favorite authors
• Getting in shape
• Dating more

As you can see, getting in shape isn't as big a priority for some as it is for others. This is a partial priority list, feel free to write as many or as few priorities as you like. If you only write one priority, then it's quite clear what you need to keep in mind as you pursue your goals. If you have hundreds, then you might need to do some careful arranging and adjust your plans accordingly.

Determining your priorities will help you to stay on track as you follow your plan through. If your partner simply cannot understand how important it is to you that you follow your goal of becoming a veterinarian or getting your pilot's license or whatever it may be, then you need to figure out whether your partner is more important to you than your life and career goals, and if you want to stay in a relationship that holds you back from what you really want to do with your life.

Staying Focused

The most important thing in setting goals, in setting priorities and in writing your plan is staying focused. That's really the whole point of setting out to stage a comeback in the first place. You need to stay focused on what you want, what you truly desire out of life. It does you no good to pursue a goal half-heartedly. There's simply too much competition from other areas of life, from other demands and concerns, so if you can't make a serious commitment to what you want, then you need to reconsider what it is that you want.

Settle on a goal that you can stay focused on, because if you can't, then you need to reconsider what it is that really gets you up in the morning.

5. Talking it Over

We've spent a lot of time talking about how to overcome defeat, failure and loss and take another shot from a logical perspective, but that's only one half of the picture. Nobody ever got back up off the
mat unless they wanted to, and many times the difference between wanting it and not wanting it is whether or not you have a strong group of people in your life who support you.

And that includes you.

Be Your Own Best Friend

Talking things over with friends and family is great for getting an outsider's perspective, but it's hard to find someone who can be as brutally honest with you as you can be with yourself, without either side carrying a grudge.

This is the greatest gift that you can give yourself: self-criticism.

Not a pity party, not "woe is me" wallowing, not beating yourself up or being pessimistic and chalking every one of your failures and disappointments up to what a great big fat loser you are, but looking at mistakes you've made and saying "This is how we can avoid that in the future," looking at bad decisions and saying "We really shouldn't be doing that," looking at jobs we hate, relationships we want to escape and situations we need to get out of and saying "It's time to pull the plug on this."

Your closest friends probably won't tell you when your boyfriend or girlfriend is just plain wrong for you. They probably won't tell you that your job, which earns you a nice $50,000 a year, isn't making you happy, because they don't want to be the one who talked you into quitting a comfortable, safe career. They won't tell you that you need to get a divorce, and it takes a friend far too long to let a friend know that they have a drinking problem, a gambling addiction or some other serious issue to deal with.

The only person who can get away with talking to you like that is you.

Be ruthless, be brutally honest, but don't be pessimistic. Figure out what mistakes you need to avoid making, what situations in your life, right now, need to be dealt with or abandoned entirely, and don't accept any wishy-washy pseudo-commitments from yourself.

Don't just be your own best friend, be your own drill sergeant.

An Outsider's Perspective

Although it's ultimately up to you to determine what advice is worth taking and what advice is not, there's something to be said for an outsider's perspective. Simply put: your friends and family can see things that you cannot. It's all about perspective. If you look at the back of the Mona Lisa, you don't see a painting, you see a white canvas, and you don't know what the heck people are talking about when they tell you that it's a picture of a beautiful woman.

Listen to the wisest people you know, such as parents, older siblings, friends and co-workers who have been through what you're going through, and take their advice into account. Acknowledge that neither of you has the complete picture, that while they can offer tremendous insight by looking in from the outside, they don't know what it looks like from the inside looking out. In other words, take their advice seriously, but take it with a grain of salt, and learn to identify useless advice quickly.

We could fill a whole other book on how to identify useless advice, of course, but it essentially comes down to this: any advice that is provided as some sort of Final Say on the matter, any advice that seems to be saying "This is what you must do," is probably being presented for the sake of the presenter's ego. The best advice is going to be offered to you with humility and respect rather than arrogance.

Forget Blame

Here's an important thing to keep in mind when determining who to trust, what advice to take, and how to formulate your plan and stick to it: don't blame anybody for anything.

Maybe you had to quit college because of a bad relationship. That doesn't mean that it's your fault or your ex-partner's fault, it only means that the time wasn't right, that you were in a situation that didn't allow you to do what you wanted to do. And now, you're out of that relationship, and free to pursue your goals.

If you just can't help but blame someone, anyone for your disappointments, try for a moment and pretend that it was a natural disaster that did this to you. You can be angry over a natural disaster, but you can't be mad at a hurricane. It's just plain silly. Blaming a tornado or an earthquake, wanting to see that earthquake pay for the damage it's done, it just doesn't work.

Your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend, your crummy boss, your lazy college professor, they may not be natural disasters, but harboring anger only holds you back. What you're concerned with right now is how to get where you want to be from where you are right now. Anger can be a fine motivator if you're working in a field that addresses social ills, if you've decided to campaign against corruption on Wall Street and in Washington, but as a motivator towards your life goals, it's rarely helpful. If you're trying to succeed at something only to get revenge on someone who dumped you, say, then you're trying to succeed for the wrong reasons.

6. Making Resolutions

Resolutions are a part of your plan, but rather than being a series of linear steps, a resolution is about kicking a bad habit or starting a positive one.

Identifying Bad Habits

A bad habit is any routine behavior that holds you back. Easier defined than identified, right? Is checking your email ten times a day a good habit or a bad one? Is quitting smoking a priority right now or is it actually helping you through times of stress? Is sleeping in hurting your chances at success, or does it not really matter?

It's hard to identify a bad habit, to tell it apart from a good or benign habit, but identifying a habit that's holding you back is the first step to kicking it. Here's a simple checklist to help you figure out what qualifies a bad habit:

• Something you do compulsively and without joy or purpose
• Something that doesn't benefit you in any practical way
• Something that distracts you from what you'd rather be doing
• Something that has actively cost you, financially, professionally or personally, more than once
• Something that you do on a daily or semi-daily basis

A bad habit could be spending too much time on Facebook, for instance, but then again, if you're self-employed, building relationships and market share on Facebook might be helpful. Sleeping until noon might have cost you a hot date, but if you get your best work done at night, then it might be a trade that you're willing to make.

As you can see, there are few universally bad habits. Most people should probably lay off of drugs and alcohol, and smoking does more harm than good in the long run, but by and large, one person's bad habit may be another person's good habit. It all depends on what your goals are and how you want to achieve them.

Developing Good Habits and Kicking Bad Ones

Bad habits are easy to maintain because they tend to involve immediate reward. A good habit like working out every morning might take weeks before you see any serious results, but when you drink a beer, you immediately feel good. If you decide to start reading a new book every week, it might take months before your critical thinking skills improve, before you need to call on the knowledge you've absorbed, but when you flip on your iPhone and play a round of Angry Birds, you feel great the minute you see those wooden columns topple over.

Developing good habits takes time because very few good habits involve instant gratification. Good habits include saving money, going to bed earlier than you might like to, eating healthier, switching from coffee and soda to water and tea, eating more fiber and going for a walk every single morning.

None of these pay off immediately, they pay off in the long run. You skip the expensive dinner now so that you can put a little money in your savings account later. You limit yourself to a couple hours of playing video games a week so that you have more time to study.

Developing good habits means making a sacrifice, and not everyone is willing to make those sacrifices, and not everyone is willing to do that.

The Replacement Method

What needs to be understood about bad habits is that they're there for good reason. Your brain needs the rewards that you're getting from video games to stay interested in something. Your body needs the comfort of fatty fried food to function properly. You need that extra hour of sleep to have energy for the day.

The trick is to give yourself what you need without giving yourself what you don't need.
An obvious, simple replacement trick is to swap a favorite snack with something healthier. Swapping ice cream for frozen yogurt is a start. The same goes with swapping fried potato chips for a tuna melt or an apple. You get the "kick" of eating a delicious snack without the fat and sugar of less healthy foods, or the guilt, for that matter.

You can take some of your bad habits and literally transform them into good ones. If you have a habit for zoning out on brainless reality TV when you should be studying, find a documentary on your subject and zone out on that, instead. If you can't put down the Xbox controller for more than a few minutes at a time, map your studying progress on a simulated "leaderboard" inspired chart.

The trick is to figure out what part of the bad habit is giving you the "kick" you're chasing when you open another bag of chips or reach for the remote control, and to isolate that and attach it to something positive and helpful. Taking a power nap at lunch instead of sleeping in an hour every morning, replacing video games with a competitive sport, as long as your brain is getting the same jolt of endorphins, it really doesn't care if it comes from beating someone at Call of Duty or beating them at basketball, eating fast-food or eating a lean chicken salad.

Isolate the kick, that endorphin rush that you get, and figure out how to get it in a safe, healthy and productive manner, and you can develop a surprisingly effective series of good habits.

7. Find Your Support Group

Support groups aren't just for people dealing with chemical addiction. If you're trying to develop better reading habits, your book club is your support group. If you're trying to stay in shape, your gym buddies are your support group. If you're trying to ace your finals, your fellow students might be your support group.

Your support group in this sense may include your friends and family, but it extends to people who are on the same path as you are, fellow karate students going for their black belt, fellow cancer survivors recovering from the biggest fight of their life, fellow teenagers hoping they get into the right college.

Giving and Getting

The best way to endear yourself to any support group, to plant a flag, is to give as well as you get.

You're surrounded by people who have some surprising information for you, people who have been there and can help you navigate the twists and turns of overcoming bad eating habits or recovering from an injury or developing better study habits. They have guidance that they can offer you, and you have guidance that you can offer them.

When we give and get within a small community, we don't give thinking "What will I get in return?" and we don't receive thinking "What am I going to owe them?" Rather, people in a support group give as needed and take as offered. Simple as that.

The free exchange of ideas and advice and experience is what ties a support group together. These are your fellow travelers, your navigators and your experienced advisors on the journey that you all share.

Finding your support group is easier for some of us than for others. A health club is a great place to meet people with the same fitness goals as yourself, a library or your school are great places to meet fellow students, and you can't study the martial arts without spending an hour a day with like minded people. Some of us rely on family members to learn how to cope with a breakup or similar loss, while others turn to web forums and personal ads to find others with similar life goals.

While some will have an easier time than others, there are people like you out there, people who have been dealt the same bad hand, people who are reaching for the same stars. Get online, check out the personal ads in your local paper and on want ad websites and find your tribe.

Taking Your Second Shot

If we're going to be completely honest regarding what this book is all about, we've tried to offer some solid, practical and literal advice, we've shown you how to develop a plan of action and how to overcome bad habits, but the truth is that we're mostly here to talk you into doing what you already want to do.

The hardest part about taking another shot is taking another shot. Putting yourself at risk again, taking the chance, once more, that you might falter.

It's scary, and nothing that anybody can do or say can change that.

The alternative to trying again, however, is to do nothing, to coast, to become a recluse, to stick to a bad job, a bad relationship, to keep eating unhealthy food and to simply give up.

There's a slim chance that you will never succeed at what you want to do, or that it might take a lot longer than you'd like, but the alternative to a life spent trying and trying again on the off chance that you might succed is a life spent not trying at all, and if you ask us, that's a pretty easy decision to make.

CONCLUSION

A comeback can be harder to make than your initial victory, that first A+ at college, that first great job, because you had never been dealt a substantial disappointment prior to that big win. Now you know what the sting of defeat tastes like and you may be scared to take another shot.

Do it anyway.

If you take nothing else away from this text, let it be this: you may be scared, but you owe it to yourself to do it anyway, no matter what anyone says, no matter what that nagging little voice in the back of your head is telling you, do it anyway.