Tales from a life of battling pain—physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. I’ve faced it all. Now, my purpose is to turn my experience into a roadmap to healing for others.
The speaker opens with a relaxed morning scene and explains that the video will address perception and the pain tied to the fear of failure. This quick intro establishes tone and what viewers can expect.
The speaker describes his hockey ambitions, a career-ending injury, and the deep sense of failure and depression that followed. This personal story provides emotional context for the video's message about meaning and perception.
He shows and explains a wrist tattoo symbolizing perception, which helped him reinterpret his experience as resilience rather than failure. The segment demonstrates a practical mental cue used to change meaning and self-judgment.
The speaker reflects on how identities can feel permanent but can also be released and appreciated as part of growth. He connects past roles—hockey player and entrepreneur—to newfound purpose in wellness and learning from setbacks.
This chapter reframes failures as decisions that provide information for future choices and emphasizes that risk is necessary for growth. He encourages nimbleness in decision-making and introduces building routines to support progress.
The speaker suggests small daily actions, ‘ripping the band-aid off,’ and not letting fear of failure hold you back. He closes with a motivational reminder to control your perception, take risks, and continue personal development.
Good morning, cadre. I got the sun shining in my eyes right now and it feels glorious. I love sitting outside in the morning. Any time of the day just makes me feel better being out in nature. So one little easy thing you can do to improve your mental health and overall well-being. But today I'm going to talk about perception and the pain related to the fear of failure. Last week I talked a little bit about my hockey journey and how that created a depression in my life. And when I, with my hockey career, I was a good hockey player, I achieved my goal of I didn't achieve my goal because I didn't play it, but I was recruited by Boston University to play hockey there.
And it was my dream. And when my third ACL surgery took me out and essentially ended my career, I viewed that as me being a failure, that I didn't make it. And it really made me feel like shit. There's no better way to put that. No better way to sugarcoat how I felt. I felt like shit. And it took me in a downward spiral for a long time, years. And one of the little tricks that helped pull me out of that depression was I got this tattoo. Oh, it's going to be tough. I got the, oh yeah, it's real tough.
Do this right here. So you can see this little guy, right? That symbol, that's a symbol for perception. And I wanted to put it right on my wrist leading up to my heart so that I could see it and tell myself that no, I'm not a failure. What I did was incredible. Most people would have just given up and not tried to battle back after a third ACL surgery, the second in a matter of a year. And I really beat myself up for it, but with this little trick where I could look down on my wrist and say, hey, I am the decider of the meaning of an outcome.
I decide that. I didn't fail because I didn't get to go play college hockey. I just had to open my eyes to see what the true meaning was. And for a long time, I was really upset that I didn't get to be a hockey player or pursue my athletic dreams. But as I look back over time and I appreciate all the great things that I was able to do after my career as a hockey player, I'm grateful for where I'm at now and grateful for what I'm contributing in life because I feel that there is a chance I would have kind of been forever stuck in the identity of a hockey player had I continued to pursue it.
When you're in something long enough, you can get caught up in maybe the false reality that is your identity, that's who you are for the rest of your life. But we're all meant to grow, we're all meant to change, we're all meant to evolve. And the identity that you hold for a while, it might die, but you can still appreciate it. And I still appreciate my career as a hockey player, everything that I accomplished. And over the two decades, more than two decades since I played hockey, I've gone through multiple transformations.
And I credit the tough time of navigating the identity of a hockey player And now here I am. This is Josh Letty. Hockey player was part of an identity. Entrepreneur essentially became my new identity. Life's a beach was an identity for 20 years, 22 years. And I always wrestled with, gosh, should I move on from this business? Is it a failure of mine to not hold on to it for the rest of my life? Or is it empowering to recognize the beauty of what I created with this business and let someone else take the reins on it going forward?
Give them, I can give someone else a new identity as a business owner and I can evolve from this entrepreneur that I was for 20 years to be the next type of entrepreneur that I'm going to be and that's to focus on wellness. To take all of the knowledge that I learned that could be considered failure and use it as tools to learn and to help people grow. So if my failed attempts at life depending on what you think of failure as. And I set high goals for myself. But I look back now and nothing that I did was ever a failure.
It was a series of decisions and a series of actions that led to outcomes that I had to just process and understand and learn from and pivot, right? Make decisions based on that information. Because when something doesn't go your way, that could be a painful thing. And as I always say, pain is information. And what you do with that information is really important. So that's where I wanted to kind of again focus on that perception, because you are the one who decides how to perceive what has happened to you.
You can't get caught up in the trap of letting your thoughts about what other people think of you determine how you are, how you act, how you feel. So be the beholder of your own perception. So when it comes to failure, failure usually involves some sort of risk, right? We're doing something, we're trying something. And risk is what helps us grow. And say you're in a routine and you're kind of stuck and you're not able to break through and you know what you should do, but you're having a tough time doing it.
Well, take a risk to just switch one thing up out of your routine, one thing that you should be doing, add that to your routine and risk the benefits that could come out of that. one thing that I'm doing right now that involves risk is I moved on from life's beach business, I moved on from my brewery business. So that's a pretty risky thing. I had a pretty consistent life for a decade and now I'm taking the risk to do what is truly passionate for me. And I had some plans. I'm putting together a series of events on the heels of the Refresh Wellness Movement Festival.
I'm launching my own brand. I'm going to be putting myself out there. big risk, also big reward. And even if this does fail, I just got to make another decision based on the information I receive. And you always have to just kind of be nimble enough to make those decisions. So that's why it's important to develop a good routine. You know, wake up in the morning, maybe do a couple things you don't want to do. That's usually a sign of progress is, gosh, I know I should maybe do those dishes or I know I should sit down and journal or maybe I should make a couple phone calls.
Let's just do it. rip the band-aid off. And I can assure you when you start doing a couple, like one thing after another that you don't want to do, it's going to start to feel pretty good to eliminate those tasks from from your list. So if there's anything that I would like you to take home today, it's just don't let the fear of failure hold you back. And if there is a failure or the perception of failure is a result of your actions, take it as a learning step. Don't take it as a setback. So that's what I got here for today.
You are the controller of your perception. What happens to you should be perceived through your eyes, not received through the thoughts of others. So go out there, take a good risk, do something you don't want to do, and start chipping away. at the progress of life, the progress of development, the progress of personal growth. Because there's always an improved you just waiting to jump out of the cake that is a risky decision or something you know you should do but you don't want to. Hope you're all well.
Hope you're gonna get outside and enjoy this incredible sunny September day. And we'll talk to you soon. Cheers Cadre.
