“One day or day one. You decide.”

I have loved this quote…since I heard it while scrolling through my Instagram feed. Apparently, it’s pretty popular, and I just haven’t heard it before…but I digress.

In any case, I love this quote because most people stay in “one day” mode…forever.

“One day, when I have the money, I will do this thing.”

“One day, when I have the relationship I want, then I’ll be happy.”

“One day, when the stars align, then I will finally allow myself to be confident.”

“One day when I lose the weight, I will wear a dress like that.”

“One day, when I have people’s permission, I will travel by myself.”

And “one day” never actually comes.

I have seen people live forever in “one day” instead of transitioning into “day one” mindset…

“I’m not starting one day. It’s not this elusive thing that’s happening in the future. It’s happening right now. This is day one.”

The reason I want to talk about this is because I see people delaying their dreams all the time—delaying the kinds of relationships that they want to have, the kinds of friendships that they want to have, the conversations that they want to have, the promotion they want to go after…the list goes on and on and fucking on.

Why are we delaying these things within ourselves if we want happiness so badly? Let me tell you why…and why we need to stop.

My “One Day” Story

I am not exempt from this—I very much used to be a one-day person. And starting my business—and by starting, I mean actually committing to my business—was a big-time “day one” shift.

At the time I started my business, I was still stripping for the majority of my income. I stripped for the first two or so years of creating my business. And I would always tell myself, “When I have enough money, I will quit.”

For weeks…months…fucking years, I kept telling myself that: “When I have enough money, I will quit.”

And you know what? I never had “enough” money…because what is enough?

I had $10,000 sitting in my bank account. And to someone else, that might be like, “You had all the money in the world. What was holding you back?” And to someone else, they might go, “Oh my God, no. Yeah, that was totally the right decision. I would never quit my job if I only had $10,000.”

“Enough” is relative; there’s no set benchmark. Which meant I never actually would have felt like I had “enough.” And in fairness, at the time I was making $1,500 a month in my business, which was not enough to sustain my lifestyle. That was less than my rent.

So of course I felt like I really needed stripping. And if you looked at it from the outside, I probably did. But God had a different plan for me, because March 2020 rolled around…and everything changed.

I was at work stripping one weekend, and then I wasn’t at work the next weekend, because COVID happened.

No more stripping. This income that had been bringing in $5,000 a week was no longer there. So what did I do?

I made it work.

I turned my “one day” into “day one” reeeal fucking fast, because I had no choice. And you know what? March 2020 was my first ever $10,000 month.

The Fear Response

“Day one” moments don’t just have to happen in business, either.

Maybe it’s your health. Maybe it’s your sex life. Maybe it’s the way you set boundaries. Maybe it’s the conversations that you entertain. Maybe it’s the way that you talk to yourself. Maybe it’s investing in something that you’ve wanted to invest in. Maybe it’s travel. Whatever it is, I want to know: how can you shift your “one day” into a “day one?” 

Now, you might be fucking fired up and inspired already. You might be thinking “Great! Okay. I’m going to go do it.”

But are you, really? Let’s play this out…

Let’s say your “day one” is to invest in one of my programs, for example. You’re on the sales page, you put in all your details, and you go to hit submit, and…you click out as fast as you can, because fuuuck, that was scary.

Or maybe you’re thinking, “Okay, I’m feeling inspired. I’m going to have sex with my husband tonight. I’m so excited.”

You go to the store, you buy the lingerie, you’re looking good, you’ve done your hair, you’ve done your makeup, he gets home from work, and….you panic. You back out. Abort mission, do not pass go, et-fucking-cetera.

Why do we do this? 

Fear.

But you probably knew that already, so…fear of what?

Fear of failure.

I didn’t want my one day to become a day one in my business when it was still a choice because I was so fucking scared that I wouldn’t be able to do it. I had such a severe fear of failure.

I feared that I would look stupid. That I would fall flat on my face. That people would look at me and go, “Uh, Michelle, you were a stripper for eleven years. You think you’re gonna fucking help people have self-worth? Make that make sense. You can’t girl math your way out of that one.”

Whatever their “day one” is, people don’t go all in because of their fear of failure. They’re terrified that they’re going to fuck it up and fail, and then what?

Here’s the secret…

“Then what” is actually not that serious.

Fear of Failure Hurts Worse Than Failure

Fear is normal. I still feel fear. But the truth that I keep coming back to is that if something goes wrong…I trust myself to figure it out. If I “fail,” I trust that I will find a way to recover.

This is where people go wrong, because they don’t trust themselves to hold failure.

This is why people never get what they truly want, because they have such a deep fear of failure that they never give themselves the chance…even when failure might actually be the step you need to take to get to success.

The fear of failure is always, always worse than experiencing failure itself.

Think about it: most of us have been in situations where we’re anticipating that something bad is going to happen. We’re terrified. We’re dreading it. We believe we’re not going to make it through…

And then it happens, and…it isn’t really that bad, actually?

What gives?

We’re left wondering why we got so worked up over nothing. And the answer is that failure just doesn’t activate our nervous systems the same way that the fear of failure does.

The anticipation is what drains your life force. The fear is what sucks your energy.

With fear of failure, we can easily get trapped in thoughts of, “What if I don’t get what I want? What if this person laughs at me? What if I’m rejected? What if I’m abandoned? What if, what if, what if, what if, what if…”

But here’s the thing: you’ve experienced all of those things. So even though you frame it as a fear of the unknown—of what might happen—you’re not afraid of the unknown. You’re afraid of the known.

You wouldn’t have a fear of failure if you had never experienced it before and made a negative association with it. You wouldn’t be afraid of abandonment if you had never experienced abandonment. You would never fear rejection if you had never experienced rejection. So we don’t fear what we don’t know—we fear what we do know.

But you want to know the truly cooked thing? You’re already fucking experiencing those feelings in your head before you’ve even done the “day one” thing.

Before you’ve even started the business or made the investment or had the conversation with your friend or asked your partner for sex, you’re already experiencing failure—because in your mind, you’ve already decided it’s not going to work. Through the fear of failure, you’ve already decided you’ll fail. And whatever you decide is how it will be every time.

If you believe something with enough conviction, it’ll happen. Period.

Fuck Around and Find Out

You need to allow yourself to make mistakes. You need to trade fear of failure for fear of never trying. Otherwise, you’ll never succeed.

That is one of the biggest, biggest things that I have learned about myself. I am here to fuck it up. I am here to make mistakes. I am here to fail. And when you can have that perspective,

all of your “one days” become “day ones.”

There’s no tomorrow. There is only now.

It’s day one. Let’s go.

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