Discomfort over Regret details my mental health journey as an entrepreneur and father.
It outlines the steps I took to overcome the issues that were breaking me.
The hope is that this outline can add value to those also facing the stress, anxiety, and mental health concerns that come with entrepreneurship.
This website is the journey I took after failing to maintain 3 startups, a marriage, and anxiety that was peaking to the point where I couldn’t communicate without feeling frustration & anger.
I have nothing to sell. There’s no religious, faith, or new age angle. Just the concepts, methods, and philosophies I found and the order they helped me understand myself and those around me better.
I offer these – my puzzle pieces – in a simple, linear way so you can dive deeper afterwards. They’re here for you to read through and hopefully, you can add some of them to your own puzzle.
This is Discomfort Over Regret.
One of the most frustrating pieces of asking for help is that those trying to help us generally don’t know where to start either.
This isn’t a shot at professional counselling — the only affordable means for many, including myself. But there are so many methods, paths, and ideas out there that it can become overwhelming, like a spinning compass — and I absolutely was overwhelmed.
However, looking in the mirror gave me the direction I needed, it all came down to me, and something I came across called The Locus of Control.
That first piece was the toughest part, that no bullshit kind of personal responsibility it wanted me to adopt. But getting through that was the beginning for me, allowed me to stop bullshitting myself so I could understand and accept all the other pieces I would eventually came across.
This was a hard question even though it seemed obvious.
Sure, we all want to become better people, stop being anxious, enjoy the simple things. But to truly understand what it was I wanted, I had to be honest about what I had lost, how I got here, and the role I played.
So you need to ask yourself this question and sit with it. Consider the past, where you are now, and how you want things to change.
For myself, I wanted to become a better man, which meant I had to admit that up until that point, I really hadn’t been.
I could be better.
These are the methods of self-discovery, the pieces, that I came across, read, discussed, and found worked for me. Their order is something that really helped me understand and reinforce the next.
Before you dive in though, read the rest of this page first.
Locus of Control
Locus of control is a psychological concept that refers to how strongly people believe they have control over the situations and experiences that affect their lives.
The Principles
These are the tools that I used to keep myself in check. Over time, they became easier to implement, discuss, and depend on.
Limiting Beliefs
This is the centre piece, the foundation to everything in my journey. This is what helped me understand everything that comes afterwards.
Limiting Beliefs are the why behind how you react to scenarios.
The Timeline
The heaviest piece of the puzzle, a visual timeline of your major life events with limiting and empowering beliefs added to each to better understand your why.
The Great Filter
I keep this in my back pocket and run my problems in real-time through them now, it’s one of my greatest ‘in the moment’ tools and it simply works like this.
When a problem shows itself, you do not need to answer to it immediately. You can say, ‘Let me think about it’ or ’I don’t know right now’.
Once I’ve given myself that strength, of taking that timeline into my own hands, I ask myself the following questions to help me solve the problem.
Self Worth
This is something I noticed that I had an issue with, it was as if I expected other people to notice my achievements and tell me instead of me recognizing my own.
It’s valid to want to be appreciated, but it wasn’t healthy for me to expect it to come from anyone but myself. Yeah, that whole, ‘Love Yourself’ soundbite, has a whole mechanism behind it, but it starts with you.
This website is the journey I took after failing to maintain 3 startups, a marriage, and anxiety that was peaking to the point where I couldn’t communicate without feeling frustration & anger. I have nothing to sell. There’s no religious, faith, or new age angle. Just the concepts, methods, and philosophies I found and the order they helped me understand myself and those around me better.
I offer these – my puzzle pieces – in a simple, linear way so you can dive deeper afterwards. They’re here for you to read through and hopefully, you can add some of them to your own puzzle.
This is Discomfort Over Regret.
Locus of Control
The Principles
Limiting Beliefs
The Timeline
The Great Filter
Self Worth
The hardest part of my journey was finding which direction to face, where to start.
Every website and every counsellor seemed to start in the middle as they tried to find a root, something to grab hold of and work through to reveal the other pieces because let’s face it, we don’t know where to start either.
Having gone down that route didn’t solve the greater issue, a consistent problem that wasn’t going away — me. I needed to solve me and I wanted to work through my problems so I could become a better man, so I could take control away from my anxiety and anger.
The pieces I found worked for me, I worked on them every day until they uncovered another ugly piece that I needed to face. but the one piece that everything else was built on, and I can’t stress this enough, the one thing that started it all, was personal responsibility and something called the Locus of Control.
This was a hard question even though it seemed obvious.
Sure, we all want to become better people, stop being anxious, enjoy the simple things. But to truly understand what it was I wanted, I had to be honest about what I had lost, how I got here, and the role I played.
So you need to ask yourself this question and sit with it. Consider the past, where you are now, and how you want things to change.
For myself, I wanted to become a better man, which meant I had to admit that up until that point, I really hadn’t been. I could be better.
The workbook you can download below and throughout this site are the pieces I found on my journey. Each piece of the puzzle is rooted in personality psychology, I’ve only placed them in an order that helped me understand the complexity of facing myself.
Each piece helped me understand the next, allowed me to open the next door.
The goal here isn’t to have you follow my journey to the letter, it’s to help you find your own pieces by using mine as examples.
The order of my journey played a big part in understanding each piece that came afterwards. I’m also very visual, so creating an order helped me understand how each piece fit into the greater puzzle — literally why I call this whole thing a puzzle.
I’ve made it easy to follow with the next step at the bottom of each page.
Here’s the first piece I learned. I’ve added questions to help dig deeper.
Discomfort over Regret is a mental health outline focused on those who face the stress, anxiety, and mental health issues that come with entrepreneurship.
Discomfort over Regret is a mental health outline focused on those who face the stress, anxiety, and mental health issues that come with entrepreneurship.