I Don’t Need Your Apology for My Setback. I Was Never Meant to Trust the Branch.
By Meredith Calloway, Chief Growth Officer
This piece was originally published in The Inner Gym, Meredith’s newsletter on mental fitness for entrepreneurs.
“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.”
I recently saw a LinkedIn post from a woman whose entire team had just been laid off at a well-respected Fortune 100 company. She was looking for leads on her next opportunity. A handful of the comments offered real direction. Most offered something else that, to me, was giving pity: “I’m so sorry you’re going through this.”
Maybe it’s harsh to call those comments pity. I get it; I’ve left similar comments myself. When someone is going through something unwanted, it’s hard to know what to say. You don’t want to say nothing. So you say something that looks supportive but, energetically, is disempowering.
If I’m honest, I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of those comments lately. Like many other businesses, GTN has been through a series of setbacks over the past few months. As a co-founder of GTN, it’s hit me hard and, at times, felt personal. And I have heard “I’m so sorry you’re going through this” more times than I can count.
If you were one of those people, thank you. I mean that.
This isn’t about calling out anyone who was trying to show support; it’s about illuminating the path of moving through a setback in a way that empowers you instead of paralyzing you. That’s the inner work. Most people don’t realize that every unwanted experience is an invitation to do it. It’s how you build the mental muscles that unveil your wings. When you’ve discovered and developed your wings (because you’ve done the inner work) and the branch breaks, you don’t panic. You know how to fly to the next one.
Your wings are the well-developed mental muscles of trust, curiosity, compassion, and self-love. Without those muscles, a major setback feels like it’s happening to you instead of for you. You doubt, judge, fear, and play small. You look for validation in things you can’t control. Often there’s shame, a sense that you did something wrong, and you want to give up or hide.
So you try to control everything around you so it never happens again. You go into overdrive. You become a super doer, trying your best to action your way out. You become like the fly on the inside of the window, desperately trying to free itself from its entrapment by smacking into the clear glass again and again and again. What you need in that moment is for someone to illuminate to you that four feet across the room is a wide-open door to freedom, ready to liberate you with ease.
I found my wings many years ago, and I had no idea how much they would free me from everything that came after. That doesn’t mean I don’t experience setbacks. I do. But the payoff for developing my wings all those years ago is that I know how to fly to the next branch instead of crashing into the ground. I see so many people where I once was: unaware of their wings, do-ing their way through life.
Every setback carries gifts. The biggest is the chance to build the muscles that free you from the prison you built in your own mind.
So where do you start? Here are three steps.
1. Surrender
“What you resist persists.” Until you release your resistance to what happened, it will keep showing up. You may feel like you don’t know how to surrender. You do. You just haven’t practiced it much, so it feels hard. That’s OK.
Surrender is the act of making peace with where you are. This is happening for you, not to you.
How? You are never clearer on what you want than when you are living what you don’t want. That clarity is new. And even if you had it before, you’ve now added momentum to that desire. That is more powerful than you know.
Trust that the Universe has your back. This too shall pass. All is well.
Practicing surrender builds the mental muscle of trust. And trust is what frees you from your attachment to the outcome.
2. Shift your perspective
Like surrender, this can feel hard at first. Shifting your perspective builds the inner muscles of curiosity and compassion that may have atrophied. Without these mental muscles, you will judge. You will judge the situation as bad. You will judge people in the situation as doing something to you. You will judge yourself. You will feel like a victim, which gives away all your power.
My favorite tool for the mental exercise of shifting your perspective is the bow and arrow analogy. The bow’s purpose is to launch the arrow forward. But the only way to do that is to pull it backward. The further back you pull, the further it flies. And once it’s pulled back as far as it will go, there’s only one thing left to do.
Let go.
You don’t push the arrow. You don’t force it. You release it, and the momentum from the pull carries it forward.
So consider this. What if this setback is happening for you because you asked to play a bigger game?
Setbacks are the conception point of your hopes and dreams. You can’t realize a dream you never planted. In your setback, you’ve planted some beautiful seeds. But if all your attention stays on the setback that planted them, they won’t sprout.
Find a way to celebrate the seeds of desire, of something more for you. The comeback is always bigger than the setback. You just have to let go to realize it. Practicing perspective shifts builds your curiosity and compassion muscles. Those are what put you in receiving mode for your hopes and dreams.
3. Self-soothe
The reason why we want anything in life is because of how we’ll feel when we have it.
If you’re a travel advisor who wants a steady pipeline of high-net-worth clients who value, trust, adore you and have 5-figure budgets for multiple trips per year, what you’re really after is how you’ll feel when you have attracted them. You’ll feel valuable, helpful, impactful, fulfilled, prosperous, abundant, light, joyful, happy, energized, free, successful, empowered, lit up, and ready to take on the world. Give yourself permission to marinate in those feelings for a few minutes. Just go there without regard to the “how” or “when.”
You can’t take every action step to build that pipeline of high net-worth clients in the next few minutes. But you can feel the way you want to feel when you have them, in the next few minutes. That’s the inner work.
Your thoughts create your energetic output. When you practice thinking about how you’ll feel once you have what you want, without worrying about the how or the when, you change that output. You change your tuner. You start attracting what you want instead of more of what you’ve got.
The more you practice, the better you get. You stop trying to control people and things outside yourself (which you couldn’t control anyway). You let every person in your life off the hook for how you feel.
That’s how you build your self-love muscle.
So the next time someone you care about hits a setback, maybe skip the apology. Try something like, “You’re experiencing the breakdown before the breakthrough. I can’t wait to see what this makes room for.”
And the next time the branch breaks under you, remember these 3 steps. It’s time to unveil your wings. You were never meant to trust the branch.
If this one resonated, there’s more where it came from. Subscribe to The Inner Gym, Meredith’s newsletter on the mindset work that helps entrepreneurs get unstuck and take better-aligned action.