How to Believe in Yourself When Everyone Tells You “You Can’t” | Cole Brauer – EP 820

What happens when someone tells you that you're too small to do the thing you've been working toward your entire life?

For Cole Brauer, that moment could have been the end of the story. Instead, it became part of the beginning. Cole was told she was too short to compete in the Southern Ocean. She was cut from a major team after traveling across the Atlantic and giving up paid opportunities to pursue the dream. A year later, she was sailing solo around the world.

But what makes Cole's story so compelling isn't simply the achievement. It's everything she had to become along the way.

Cole grew up in a small town on Long Island, moved across the country, changed academic and career directions, lived in a van, taught herself the mechanical, electrical, and rigging systems of a boat, and eventually found a community and a purpose through sailing.

Then came the ultimate test: more than 130 days alone at sea.

She talks openly about the loneliness and anxiety that hit her roughly two weeks into the voyage, when the team and community she had relied on suddenly disappeared. Instead of trying to suppress those feelings, she learned to understand them, participate in nature, take care of her body, and keep moving forward.

Cole also shares why she chose her boat over the possibility of winning when she encountered two massive storms near Cape Horn, why First Light became more than a vessel to her, and how that relationship ultimately became a mirror through which she learned to see herself differently.

In this conversation, we explore:

• What to do when someone else's definition of you becomes a limitation you start believing yourself.
• Why Cole sees rock bottom not simply as failure, but as a place from which you can begin climbing again.
• How purpose can sustain you when money, fame, and recognition aren't enough.
• Why Cole believes our lives aren't predetermined and that we can restart far more times than we think.
• What four months alone at sea taught her about loneliness, anxiety, self-care, and self-trust.
• Why nature became one of Cole's greatest teachers and helped make the unpredictable feel more understandable.
• How she learned to separate emotional reactions from the decisions she needed to make in moments of crisis.
• Why she chose to protect First Light rather than risk the boat for a chance at winning near Cape Horn.
• How gratitude helped her recognize the people who made the journey possible.
• Why the solo journey wasn't the end of Cole's transformation, but the beginning of discovering who she really was.

Cole's story is ultimately a reminder that adaptation isn't always about becoming someone new. Sometimes it's about discovering who you were capable of becoming all along. And sometimes the people who tell you that you can't are simply showing you the limits of their imagination.

As Cole says, when someone tells you there's no way you can do something, sometimes the only answer is: "Yeah, okay. Just watch me."

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