Your circumstances should never dictate how to get the life you want. April Shprintz is here to discuss how to see your circumstances not as rigid framework for your life but as starting points that open up to a vast sea of possibilities.

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The Only Thing You Need To Know To Get The Life You Want

I am so glad you’re here. If you’ve read this show for any amount of time or maybe you want to go back and binge episodes, you’re going to see this quote, “You are not your circumstances. You are your possibilities.” I love that quote. It’s from Seneca. Although when I first heard it, I heard Oprah Winfrey say it and it was as meaningful for me as a kid.

The reason it was so meaningful is at the time, I was living in poverty. My mom was a single parent working two jobs. We often would have days without power. We had people help us with food. It was a situation where some people would think, “That little girl is going to become a statistic.” They would expect things from me like teen pregnancy, never graduating high school, or never amounting to any of the things that I kept saying I wanted to be.

None of those things are bad. You didn’t graduate high school. Maybe high school wasn’t for you. You got pregnant when you were a teenager, it may have been the biggest blessing of your life. People tend to assume that if you’re in a certain set of circumstances, whatever they may be, they know what’s possible for you and what’s going to happen.

I’m here to tell you and I am living proof that is not true. Your circumstances are the starting line. They are the beginning of the race. They are where you begin. They’re where you’re going to reference back to when you get to where you’re going to see how far you’ve come. They are a point in time. They are nothing more. They don’t predict your ability to be successful. They don’t predict or say anything about you as a person. They are a starting point. I want you to remember that.

 

Whether your circumstances are amazing or they’re circumstances that you never thought you’d find yourself in, they’re just one small part. They matter so far less than you as a person and what you believe. Candidly, your possibilities in life, your job, your business, your personal relationships, and your health depend more on your belief and what you believe to be true in your mind and follow through with in your actions than anything else.

 

You may be saying, “That’s super easy for you to say. You’re on the ‘other side’ of it.” That is why you should believe me because I’ve been to a place where people thought that nothing was possible for me. I’ve gotten to the place where I know anything is possible for me. Though I don’t like to focus on things like this, I’ve seen the opposite.

I have had wonderful people in my life who were born with every single advantage in the world. They didn’t do any of the things that they would’ve told you they wanted to do. To me, that only further reinforces that the circumstances that you find yourself in, in the moment that you decide that you want something else, are nothing more but a starting point.

That can be the greatest advantage in the world to you, especially if you know that they don’t predict anything about the future success you’re going to have and you instead focus on what that is. Ignore your circumstances, the naysayers, and what people say is possible for you because they don’t know. No one who has had any measure of real success will say that you can’t do something that they have done.

Find someone who’s done something amazing that you want to do. Tell them you want to do it and see if you can find someone who will say that you can’t because they won’t. The people who have accomplished the things that you want to accomplish will do nothing but support you because they know that anything’s possible. Generally, when people say that you can’t do something, it’s because they’re coming from a place of fear.

Whether it’s a place of fear because they feel like they can’t do it or because they don’t want you to be hurt if you aren’t able to do it. They’re not necessarily bad people. These may be people who love you very much but they fear that you’re going to fall flat on your face and they don’t want that for you so they would rather tell you that you can’t do it.

You will learn a lot from falling flat on your face. It will teach you to adjust, learn your lesson, and move forward. Share on X

They’ll learn a lot from falling flat on your face and that’s not the end. If you fall flat on your face, you adjust, learn the lesson, and go forward. I don’t think there’s a single thing that I’ve achieved that’s super meaningful to me that I haven’t at some point done a faceplant. You do 1 or 2 of those and you’re not afraid of them anymore. It’s not a big deal. The thing that I want you to walk away with is this.

 

At any moment in time, whatever you want to do, whoever you want to be, and whatever you want to have, that is 100% possible for you. It does not matter where you are. Your circumstances are your starting line. You may have a little more difficult of a starting line than someone else but it’s like starting something running uphill. Once you master that hill, you’re going to be stronger and faster than other people when you get to the easier parts, I promise you. You can do anything that you want to do. Here’s to your success.