Break Your Bullsh*t Box

By Amber Fuhriman

We all have untapped potential...

...that we keep in a box of doubt.

Is your inner voice holding you back?

Amber Fuhriman is an accomplished success architect, attorney, author and speaker. She has been practicing law in Las Vegas for the pas

• Language: English
• Publisher: Success Development Solutions
• Release date: Aug 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798988889519

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS A BULLSH*T BOX?

I believe we all have a box in our minds where we store our bullshit.

It’s where we pile all of the excuses that we are more than willing to access at a moment’s notice when we need a reminder that we are not good enough, not strong enough, don’t deserve it, and fill in the blank for whatever excuses have worked for you.

I also believe we all have a compartmentalization box where we put all of the trauma we’ve experienced in our lives but are not ready to deal with—all of the things we think bring shame, guilt, and hurt. And all too often, we are reluctant to open this box because we believe that enough of something else will make it all go away.

The way we treat those two boxes needs to be swapped if we want to reach our full potential and have the life, business, and relationships we dream of. Our compartmentalization box should be opened often and with an understanding that the things that are in it don’t define our character or worth. In fact, the things in our compartmentalization box are often the unique experiences that allow us to connect with others on a level that fosters lasting impact. Our bullshit box, on the other hand, should remain closed. Locked and unopenable, the excuses we put in it are inaccessible until we are ready to break the box, destroy the excuses, and step into the courage it takes to live life on our terms.

But that swap sometimes takes time, and it is a process that is never truly complete. In this book, I want to share my journey in hopes that it will help you in yours.

MY STORY

Sometimes we have to get a little lost to find out where we’re supposed to be.

I’ve gone back and forth on where to start writing this book. And if I’m being completely honest, there were a number of times I started, ripped it up, and started over, then deleted the documents and told myself it wasn’t worth writing. Only to decide I had a story to tell, reach out to my book writing coach and editor for support, and then sit down and start writing again. It was evident that I didn’t have a direction.

Until the moment that l did.

I know now that I never would have found the place I wanted to be without all the times I thought I didn’t have a direction.

I recently heard Matt Damon in an interview discussing his partnership with Ben Affleck and the writing of the movie Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant (Castle Rock Entertainment, 1997). Matt Damon said that one of the most powerful things Ben ever said to him was that for the partnership to work, he needed to know that Matt would judge him based on how good his good ideas were, not on how bad his bad ideas were. This hit me really, really hard.

I have spent the majority of my life magnifying my failures and diminishing my accomplishments in an attempt to stay small.

To reach true success, we must be willing to judge ourselves based on how good our good ideas are instead of how bad our bad ideas are. We need to have the freedom to have bad ideas. Because as Matt Damon said, Bad ideas eventually turn into good ones with enough iterations.

Matt Damon’s statement is a pretty good description of how this book came to be. But more importantly, I think that statement is a metaphor for the creation of the amazing life I get to live and the wonderful person I’m now proud to be. And if you’re being honest about your journey, it’s probably a pretty good description of how your life has been designed so far.

If you’re reading this book because you’re happy with where your life is and want to grow to have more of what you have now, I can promise you that the idea of having bad ideas that turned into good ones with enough iterations hits home for you. And if you happen to be among the many people reading this book because you’re looking for a way to create what you thought you’d already worked so hard to build, then know that you are only one, two, or maybe three iterations away from that good idea.

As we dig into this book, it would make sense to start at the very beginning. But I don’t think that’s where the version of who I am today was born. My current version was born in a hotel room in Reno on a day when I felt truly alone for the first time in my short 33 years of life experiences. It’s shocking that it took that long for me to fall apart, and maybe that’s a testimonial to the significant support system that has surrounded me my entire life—a support system that I often tried painfully hard to convince myself didn’t exist. Either way, no support system could have helped when in March 2016, I found myself hyperventilating in the corner of a hotel room in Reno, Nevada.

Yep, this seems like the natural place to begin this journey.

We will get into where it started, what my childhood taught me, and how it shaped me later. I will share those stories in hopes that you will learn your own lessons through my highs and lows; that you will be able to shortcut your success by learning from my failures.

Meanwhile, March of 2016 seems like the most natural place to start because I know for sure that it’s the moment my understanding of the world fundamentally changed. I’d been living my life up to that point under the mistaken and ridiculous belief that the world would magically get better because I was good at school and had a successful career—that my life would magically improve the moment I accomplished enough stuff.

When I say it out loud, it sounds so crazy, right? Of course, the world doesn’t get better because you’re good at school. But that’s what we are taught. Go to school, get a college education, and get a good job. No one mentions that college teaches you nothing about landing a job, just as law school taught me nothing about being a lawyer. Law school taught me how to pass the bar exam. That’s it! I learned the rest through many experiences and lessons, some of which I’ll talk about in this book.

This emotional breakdown has had a lot of names over the last five years, depending on the stage of healing and growth that I found myself in. I used to call it my rock bottom. The problem with believing you have hit rock bottom is that just when you think things can’t get any worse, the universe says, Hold my beer, and shows us how good we had it when we thought it was bad. I’ve referred to it as a mental break—the worst weekend of my life—the time I realized I was broken.

These statements were true to who I was when I said them. Looking back now, it was the moment I decided to finally take control of my life.

Now, I’d love to sit here and tell you that while I was curled up in a ball in the corner of a hotel room, trying to convince myself to breathe, I had a crystal ball into the future and knew that I could make a change and create the life I have today. But that would be total bullshit. It was, however, the moment I chose to quit hiding from my past, acknowledge that I was not okay, and take the first step to get the help I so desperately needed. The small steps that came after that added up to noticeable changes. That moment was seven years ago as of this book’s writing. Have you ever wondered how time can fly and seem to stand still at the same time? Sometimes, that moment feels like a lifetime ago. And sometimes, it feels as if it was just yesterday.

Every single journey starts with a single step, and I took mine in March 2016.

By then, I’d been a practicing attorney in Las Vegas for about four years. I’d made it. Seriously, I’d MADE it. I’d reached that successful moment I’d spent my whole life chasing. I remember having conversations with my grandma (man, I miss her) about how someday I was going to make $100,000 a year, and all my problems would disappear. Through a series of events we will dig into later, I decided that law school was the only way to make that happen. Let’s be real; I failed college biology twice and barely passed it once; clearly, becoming a doctor was out of the question! And, honestly, it probably had something to do with my dad. Almost everything I do in my life has something to do with my dad. (More on that later.)

During the four years I’d been an attorney, and the previous two years, when I was a law student working as an attorney, I had some amazing experiences under my belt. I’d created a good reputation for myself and worked for one of the largest criminal defense firms in Las Vegas. Most importantly, I’d just filed my taxes for the year ending 2015, and I had finally hit that six-figure income for the first time in my life.

Then I just had to wait.

Any moment, those magical fairies would show up to carry away my treasure chest of emotional trauma. The place where I’d stored the worst moments in my life that, to some extent, I refused to consciously deal with. In this treasure chest from hell were some of the most impactful periods of my life that I refused to acknowledge or deal with. My cousin’s suicide when I was nine, my uncle’s suicide when I was 14, my dad’s death when I was 18, the dozens of funerals I went to as a kid, failed dreams, broken promises, my marriage, and my divorce, failed relationships, I could go on and on. I took all of my emotions around these things and locked them away deep inside the little box in my head. Once that was gone, I would have that perfect life I’d worked so hard to create.

Wait. Wait. Wait! Did you just say that’s not the way life works? Of course, it’s not. That’s ridiculous! And yet, it’s exactly what I thought would happen.

As part of my job, I was sent up to Reno, Nevada, for a week’s worth of court appearances. Reno was about eight hours from where I lived at the time. (This will be important to know later.) I’d been dating someone for about a year and a half, and things were going well. The fact that I thought things were going well is just another indication of how much we all lie to ourselves and how much I’d created this alternate version of reality. While in Reno, we got into an argument.

Now, I know what I’m about to tell you isn’t normal—or shouldn’t be—it is by far one of the most vulnerable things I will put in this book. In the past, when we got into an argument, and he didn’t want to talk to me, I would emotionally manipulate him into having a conversation without realizing that’s what I was doing. This is another realization I made much later. I would drive to his house and wait outside for him to answer the door (if he was lucky).

As embarrassing as it is to admit, what it really comes down to is that I was so insecure, and had so little self-worth, that the only way I could feel in control of my life was to create chaos and fix it.

But how do you fix something when you are eight hours away? Phones have this amazing thing called do not disturb, block, or ignore. Whatever you choose to call it, the result is the same. If someone doesn’t want to answer their phone, there is nothing you can do about it. For the first time in my life, all of the methods I’d learned to cope with my insecurities and control a situation, or more importantly, the people in it, were out of my control. I was left to my own devices, which resulted in one of the worst weeks of my life.

For four days, I couldn’t eat. I knew I needed to, and I would sit down and pick at my food. As I write this, I see the images of sitting at that café, picking at a salad, while trying not to cry in public. But when I couldn’t stop myself from crying, I just hoped no one would notice. Everyone noticed. I tried to preoccupy my time with a slot machine. That failed miserably. I couldn’t sleep. I lay in my room, curled up in a ball, and cried.

There was only one time throughout this entire episode that I was able to focus on something else. You may be thinking how amazing it was that I could find something to focus on, but that in itself was the first problem. Remember, I was in Reno for court appearances. And if there’s one thing in my life I’ve always been able to do; it is to compartmentalize my feelings so I can get a job done. I would pull myself together, go to court, accomplish what I needed to accomplish, come back to the hotel, and fall apart.

There is so much about this story that just hurts me to my soul whenever I relive it. But there’s also beauty in it.

When we truly look around and open ourselves up, we can see that the universe is conspiring with us, not against us. I’d been on the verge of going to therapy for years and had consistently been able to bullshit myself into thinking that I was fine and that my emotional mood swings were normal. This experience was the moment I realized that I had a fucked-up version of normal. The beautiful part about this moment is that things finally got bad enough for me to realize I needed help.

I finally acknowledged that going up and down like that was not normal. I knew it was not normal to hyperventilate and shake in a hotel room, looking at my phone constantly and wondering when he would call. I’d see a text message come through and, for just a minute, feel like the world was right again because he was calling, just to realize it wasn’t him. And then, to comprehend how fucked-up it was that a text message from someone could pull me out of a funk that was so big I hadn’t eaten in four days.

In moments like that, we can’t see the full picture. One of my favorite sayings is from Les Brown. You can’t see the picture when you’re in the frame. Man, isn’t that the truth? Although my friends and family had been telling me for years that I should seek help and talk to someone about the trauma I’d experienced and the problems I had forming healthy relationships, I’d refused. Until that weekend.

For the first time in my life, I made an appointment with a therapist. I can remember being on the phone with different therapists, and my biggest fear was that someone was going to meet me, see how messed up I really was, and think the only resolution was medication. Isn’t it amazing how we make up the endings of conversations before they happen and decide how they will go?

I found a therapist I liked and scheduled the appointment for the week I returned to Las Vegas. I remember landing in Vegas, getting picked up at the airport, and thinking; I don’t need therapy; I’m fine! It was just a bad week! It’s so crazy how life works because as soon as I landed in Las Vegas and felt some sense of normalcy, I felt the urge to cancel my appointment. Thank God someone convinced me not to do that.

Going to that appointment was the first step into the rest of my life.

I know that sounds dramatic, but it’s real. I made a choice that day to make sure that things were different moving forward than they’d been in the past. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing at the time. I didn’t understand the magnitude of the moment until years later. That weekend in Reno became even more influential in my life when I did.

My friends and I have a saying we will text or yell at each other when we see something that punches us in our gut and hits our soul with truth. We call it a #2x4. We use this when something we have needed to learn for a long time whacks us upside the head. Normally this comes in the form of a meme because all transformational things come in the form of memes in the 21st century. This was my first #2x4 moment. The universe, God, spirit, whatever you want to call it, will only give you so many gentle nudges before it whacks up upside the head with a #2x4 and forces you to listen. This may seem extreme to some of you; I guess that’s the metaphor that hits home when you grow up watching your dad build houses and see people lose battles with inanimate objects on a daily basis.

My experiences over the last seven years, some I will share in this book, others I’ve shared on my podcast, and some in both places, have taught me many things. One overarching theme runs through every lesson I’ve learned.

When you tie your success and fulfillment to an external result, the most dangerous thing that can happen is that you just might hit it.

Because when you do, the world you thought you were living in can crumble around you, and you have to figure out how to function in a reality you don’t understand.

The other side of that coin is when you don’t hit your external moment—that external definition of success you created in your mind. Your I’ll be happy when moment. Instead, you spend your entire life chasing it, never getting to live the life you were meant to because you’re too focused on what life will be like after you achieve the thing. You know, those pots of gold at the end of a rainbow we were told about as a kid. Yeah, they aren’t just for fairy tales. Tying your success and fulfillment to an external result is the same as tying your happiness and self-worth to a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

The harder you try to get to it, the further away it feels. Just when you think you can see it, you realize it’s an illusion. It doesn’t exist. Where do you go now?

I used to think I wanted to share my