Ep. 128: Courage Casts - Is Life a Test?

What if life isn’t testing you, but teaching you? In this episode, Josh challenges the mindset of constant pressure and replaces it with a more productive approach: treating challenges as experiments. Drawing from real experiences in policing and business, he breaks down how shifting your perspective can reduce stress, improve performance, and help you grow through failure instead of being defined by it. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to the Courage to Lib Podcast. My name is Josh Bitsko and I'm a retired police captain with 24 years of experience out of Las Vegas. Currently, I travel the country and I teach people about courage, resilience, and leadership. You ever feel like life is testing you? I know that's something that I say all the time. Like I had a long week. I'm like, I'm so tired of all the tests this week and how I'm going to be successful, especially owning a business and trying to navigate all of that, trying to navigate how to market, trying to navigate how to what to even charge with different parts of you know what we do with our business. And I saw a quote or or at least a an idea that how you can change your mindset to, you know, life is never testing you, it's more an experiment. How can you get better? How can you learn? How can you improve on what you're doing? Because you are often trying to, rather than focusing on how difficult it is and how good you are, you're focusing on how much you can improve. And I really like that idea because if I look back to where, let's say, like the first time I went to canine and I was trying to find a bad guy hiding with my dog and all the things that I was stressed out about all the way until I improved in my last find where we found someone lying under some plywood where I knew exactly what was going on, or at least was able to figure it out quickly because I'd improved over the course of eight, nine years working a dog. And I think that that is true to so many different parts of life, especially if you can change your perspective. So rather than focusing on the negative, you get to make a choice. You get to make a choice at how you approach the different things that happen in life. How are you approaching whether it is um you're being tested or you're being being given an opportunity to improve? And I often talk about how to capitalize on failure to improve, but this is going into it, knowing there is a chance that you're going to fail. There's a chance that you're going to make a mistake. Um, and because of that, you have the opportunity to improve and to get better and to ultimately, you know, turn into the business owner, police officer, firefighter, whatever it is, turn into the best one you can possibly be. But you can't do that unless you're, you know, experimenting with yourself. Because what I sit here and tell you is going to work, it may be different for you. You have a wholly different experience, a whole different skill set, a different life. Um, so you have to figure out what also works for you. And you can only do that through experimenting as things are happening and things are going on in your life. So, what I ask of you this week is when you feel tested, when you feel down, uh, I really want you to just think of this as this is a grounds, a training ground. It is a a way for you to try things out and get better. Uh, so treat life as an experiment and see if that changes things for you. Thank you for listening today. If you like the podcast, please share it with a friend. Uh, leave a review, subscribe, and I appreciate you spending some time with me today.