How To Achieve Greatness When You’ve Hit Rock Bottom

Entrepreneurship is an emotional roller coaster with highs and lows occurring almost every single day. Some of you might have experienced a “rock bottom” moment where you were broke, jobless or maybe even homeless. What would you do if you found yourself in this situation? What steps would you take to dig yourself out?

This is precisely the situation that Lewis Howes, a New York Times Best Selling Author, found himself in a few years ago. Howes used to be a professional football player and all of his hopes and dreams were crushed when he broke his wrist and had to sit out for a year and a half to recover. Broke, unemployed and sleeping on his sister’s couch, Howes hit rock bottom and realized he had no other skills in life. Faced with the powerful need to survive, Howes turned to entrepreneurship to figure out how to put food on the table.

Here are three pieces of advice from someone who’s been there and back on how to dig yourself out of the hole when you’ve hit rock bottom:

Start with a vision

Every January most of us go through the routine of setting New Year’s Resolutions, or micro life goals that we want to accomplish in the coming year. Whether it is losing a certain amount of weight or making a certain amount of progress in professional, personal or spiritual life, goal-setting always requires a clear vision for how to be successful. Howes has interviewed over 400 high achievers on his School of Greatness podcast. The most common theme he noticed across all the peak performers he spoke with was a precise and clear vision of exactly what they wanted to achieve in life.

“Maria Sharapova when she was a kid playing tennis, she was like, ‘I want to be number one in the world one day, and I want to be one of the greatest of all time.’ She knew for 15 years while training, what her vision was. She wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be fun to play tennis, and I’ll randomly hit number one because I just like to play.’ She had a clear personal vision. Same thing with all the greatest athletes. Same thing with Tony Robbins. A lot of people that I meet, they’re not clear on what they want. They’re scattered in their ideas, they don’t have a clear purposeful focus vision.”

Invest in long-term relationships

We’ve all heard the saying “Your network is your net worth” and Howes can vouch for this first hand. In this day and age of the modern Internet it is easy for us to sit behind a computer and interact with people via email, social media or even chatting online. Think about the last time you actually picked up the phone and intentionally called someone just to check in or catch up? For me, it’s been years. Whenever I think of a friend or a contact I automatically default to email or Whatsapp/Facebook messenger. But remember when it comes to professional networking, nothing cements a relationship like a face-to-face meeting.

“For me, personal relationships are the most powerful thing. If I lost everything in my business right now, I know I could build it back up based on the relationships of the last decade that I’ve been building, where I could create something new or find a partner or find an investor or whatever I need to do. I could do it through my relationships,” continues Howes.

Essentially what he is saying is no matter how smart you are, if you are not able to connect with human beings on a basic level and show them you care, then no one will care about all the things you can do or information you can provide. In the context of entrepreneurship this translates into building trust with your audience, asking them what their biggest challenges or needs are and then helping them find a solution.

Find a coach

The last piece of advice from Howes is to find a coach. A coach can come in many different forms whether it is reading books, following influencers or actually hiring a professional coach to keep you accountable. Find someone who can guide you and give you feedback and steer you in the right direction. A trusted party that you can learn from, expand your network with and celebrate your growth.

“As an athlete, I always had coaches. There was never one season where I said, ‘You know what coach, I’m good, I got it this year, I’ll do all the training myself, I’ll do all the team prep, like I’m good.’ So why go about life or business without a coach. It’s exhausting, it’s not easy,” concludes Howes.

This article originally appeared in Forbes, by Forbes contributor Jay Kim. You can access the original article here.