Why I Stopped Telling the Same Story

Craig said it straight.

“People need to know you’re in a different place now.”

My first reaction was defensiveness. Nobody likes criticism, even when it comes from someone who has your back completely. Craig and I are honest to a fault with each other — it’s one of the reasons the partnership works — but honest feedback still stings for a minute before it lands.

It landed.

He was right. I knew it before the sting faded. So I got over my feelings and did what was right for the business. For the community. For myself.

I stopped telling the same story.

For a long time, telling the 800 applications story was cathartic. I’d been through something real and painful and humiliating, and putting it into words felt like releasing pressure from a valve. People connected with it. They shared it. They said finally, someone is saying what I’ve been living. That connection was real and it mattered.

But somewhere along the way, catharsis turned into pattern.

I wasn’t releasing the story anymore. I was living inside it. Every post that opened with the rejection, the desperation, the broken system, I was climbing back into that wreckage. Not to help people out of it. To prove I’d been there. Like surviving was the most interesting thing about me.

Like the worst chapter was the whole book.

You know what that does to you over time? It keeps you exactly where you don’t want to be. I was writing about moving forward while standing completely still. The story that made me relatable was the same story keeping me stuck in the same patterns I needed to break.

I needed to pivot to the person I was becoming. Not perform the person I used to be.

You’ve been here long enough to know where I came from. So let me tell you where I actually am.

I wake up at 5am every morning. By 5:05 I’m out the door walking before the Tucson heat makes that a fantasy. Thirty minutes, every weekday, no exceptions. I come back, make coffee, do chair yoga, and by 6am I’m at my desk writing. Not because I have to. Because I built a schedule that protects the things that matter and I stick to it.

I’ve lost 30 pounds. No processed food. No sugar. No oil except olive oil. Vegetables, protein, real food. My blood sugar is the lowest it’s been in years. My body is moving differently. I feel it in the mornings when I walk: less locked up, more fluid, more like someone building something rather than someone barely holding on.

I take weekends completely off. Full stop. No email, no community check-ins, no content. Two years ago I would have called that laziness. Now I call it strategy. The work I do Monday through Friday is sharper because Saturday and Sunday belong to my family and my recovery.

I have a real business partner. Craig Bachman and I built Mindset Communities LLC together. We have a real company, a real community approaching a thousand members, a paid cohort program, a book in development, and a funding strategy in motion. We meet twice a week, divide the work cleanly, and push each other when the other one gets comfortable.

I am an entrepreneur. Not someone who got rejected by the job market. Not someone surviving on hope and desperation. Someone building something real with real people who are building alongside me.

That is a different man than the one who sent 800 applications into the void.

Here’s what I want you to hear, because you’ve been with me long enough to deserve the honest version.

The external things changed because the internal thing changed first.

I didn’t lose 30 pounds and then feel like an entrepreneur. I didn’t build a company and then start taking care of my health. It all happened together, because I made one decision that rippled through everything else.

I decided to stop identifying with what happened to me.

The job market rejecting me was an event. A painful, humiliating, system-revealing event that I will never pretend didn’t matter. But it is not my identity. The moment I stopped treating it like my identity was the moment I had room to become something else.

That’s what a real mindset shift looks like. Not a motivational quote. Not a morning routine someone sold you. A decision, made somewhere quiet inside yourself, that the story you’ve been telling is no longer the story you’re living.

I made that decision. And I’m still making it every day, because old patterns don’t disappear. They just get quieter when you stop feeding them.

You’ve been here for a while. You know where I started. You’ve watched this build in real time: the community, the cohorts, the partnership, the health changes, all of it documented honestly as it happened.

So I’m asking you directly.

What story are you still telling that you’ve already outgrown?

Not the story of what happened to you. That story is true and it deserves to be told. But is it the story you’re still living? Or is it a story you keep climbing back into because it’s familiar, because it gets a reaction, because somewhere it still feels safer than admitting you’ve already changed?

The job market failing you is not your identity.

Neither is your age. Your bank account. Your employment gap. Your diagnosis. Your divorce. Your debt. None of those things are you. They are events in a life that is still being written.

I stopped telling the old story because it wasn’t true anymore.

The new story is harder to tell. It doesn’t have the same immediate resonance. It doesn’t make people say finally, someone gets it the way the pain story does.

But it makes people say I want that.

And that’s the story worth telling.