Give, Grow & Be Grateful

In today’s episode, I’m going to discuss the importance of where we put our focus. I’m going to share some tactics that work for me to change my focus, and then we’re going to finish by, of course, giving you a micro action to help you improve your focus going forward and maybe distract some of the negative or self-doubting thoughts that sometimes pop in your head.

I want to start with a little story I once heard, and pardon if the details are totally different than what it is out there somewhere, I’m not sure, but I remember hearing this story and thinking it was such a great analogy for the power of focus. There was this gentleman. He’d never been skydiving before, and he wanted to go skydiving. He was like mid-30s, heading up there, and was a little scared, of course, but he was trying to overcome his fear of heights and all this kind of stuff, and he wanted to do it through skydiving, so take this big leap.

They were giving him the lesson, and as they were going up, they were explaining to him, and they were showing him a map of where he was going to jump over. He’s looking at this map and saying, “Okay, so I’m going to jump up here,” and he has this target area that they want him to land over in this area. The instructor says, “Well, whatever you do, don’t go towards the lake over here because you’ll end up in the lake, and it’s dangerous, and you could drown. Just don’t go towards the lake.” That’s what he told him.

He’s like, “All right.” He kept telling himself, “Don’t go towards the lake. Don’t go towards the lake. Don’t go towards the lake. Don’t go towards the lake.” He’s like, “All right.” He gets up there, and he gets to the side of the plane, and he is scared, and more than he’s probably ever been in his life, but he takes the leap, and he jumps out of the plane. He said he looks down, and he feels this sense of joy feeling that he took the leap. He’s like, “Oh.” He’s like, “This is amazing. I’m flying through the air,” and he reminds himself. He’s like, “Okay, now, don’t go towards the lake.”

He looks and tries to find the lake. He looks, and he sees the lake. He’s like, “Okay. Don’t go towards the lake. Don’t go towards the lane.” He’s looking at the, continues to look at the lake, and he feels like moving closer towards the lake. He starts getting scared. He’s like, “Okay, I can’t go towards the lake. I can’t … ” All he keeps focusing on is what he doesn’t want to happen, but of course as he continues to focus on the lake, ultimately, where does he end up? He ends up in the lake.

Now, he was fine, and he ended up skydiving again, all that kind of stuff. He didn’t drown. Everything was okay, and he enjoys skydiving to this day, so all is well, but he learned an important lesson from this. Focusing on what you don’t want to do or what you don’t want to happen is a sure way to make that happen. Focusing on what you don’t want to do or what you don’t want to happen is a sure way to make that happen.

For anyone who has kids, when you tell them, “Don’t touch that,” all they hear in their mind is “touch that.” All they’re focusing on is “touch that,” so it’s important the language that we use when we’re thinking about where we put our focus. If we tell ourselves … If we’re focusing on achieving a goal, and I’m a, you know, Olympic doing the pole vault or something like that, then whatever I’m saying is, “Whatever I want to do, just don’t hurt yourself or don’t go too far,” or whatever it is, that’s not going to turn that off, but you really want to focus on seeing it in your mind, focusing on what you want to happen and doing that.

Had he been focusing on the target when he first jumped out … That’s one of the things he learned later is okay, and part of that was the instructor telling him, “Don’t focus on this,” which that’s a little thing as an instructor if you’re working with someone to use the right language so that they can really focus on the things that they want to move towards, not the things they want to avoid because focusing on the things you want to avoid, you’re going to end up there.

When we focus on something, it determines where we’re directing our thoughts, our attention, and our energy, so ultimately, it determines our path. You’ve probably heard this saying, when someone’s really focused, they have blinders on. They do that for horseracing and things like that so that the horses only have that focus of where they’re moving towards, not all the other things on the side because they’d start getting distracted, they’re not going to run as fast, but when they’re focused on moving forward, that’s where they’re going to go.

One of the things that’s important to understand is how our vision and focus work together. For some people, they don’t necessarily have something compelling enough to focus on. They don’t have a vision that will motivate them to put the blinders on to move towards what the singular kind of focus and determination towards that goal. It’s important that you have this crystal-clear vision of how you want to experience life.

I try to look at it more as living each day as opposed to an ultimate destination, but I have both those in my vision as far as part of my vision is everyday living is just how I live life, but for some people, the vision is “ultimately, I want to end up at this point,” their goal. Well, if that’s not very compelling for them, if they’re saying, “Well, some day, when I’m 60, I want to retire and live on social security income.” That’s not a super compelling vision, so something that actually lights the fire inside you that you’re passionate about that really is going to motivate you because it’s going to take a lot of time. You’re going to spend a lot of time and energy on it, and when you have that passion towards that, it’s actually enjoyable. You’re feeling good about doing, then you’re actually moving towards that.

I’m going to give you some different tactics that I use that work for me and things that I’ve learned, I guess, throughout my life that allow me to change my focus. Now, the first one is I was mentioning before is first having a clear vision that I can focus on. It’s one of the things that I always realign with, and every day as I go through, and I talked about, in the previous episode I talked about the priming that you do is having a vision of where you’re going to go in your life.

Each morning, I’m focusing on that, realigning on how I’m living my life, where my goals are going, and seeing that happen and feeling the joy that I get every day from just living my life like that, and ultimately, achieving some of the things that I want to achieve in my life and how good that feels, so focusing on those things, not negative, like, “Well, what if that doesn’t happen? What if you make a mistake? What if someone … ” You get embarrassed, and you make this big … I’ve done that already. I learned that things like that may still happen at some point, but I’m not going to sit there and focus on it. I’m not going to let them stop me from going out there and doing what I can do to improve the world to make it a little bit better.

One of the things that happens, and I’m going to give you this as a micro action today as well, but one of the things that happens in your mind is, I’ll say, one of the things I heard recently, it was at the Tony Robbins event that I liked was basically saying that think of it as the mind, not your mind, and saying that there’s these thoughts that are million-year-old thoughts that kind of float in and out of, if you think of waves, like radio waves and lifeline and all this kind of stuff, there’s all these thoughts that are floating around. They’re these thoughts of self-doubt and these negative thoughts that just float into the mind. It’s part of almost that reptilian brain feeling where it’s like the problem, “What if this happens?” or, “You sure?” kind of self-doubting feeling, like you don’t want to get hurt, all those little things that continually pop in the mind.

One of the things that you can do is if you’re seeing that happen, there’s a couple of different either visualization techniques or anchors that you can do to deal with those type of things. Some of them are both visual and auditory, kinesthetic, and different things that you can do to trigger yourself to get back into a good state, to stop focusing on some of the negative things, and to realign your focus somewhere positive.

It’s important to understand that to master the mind takes a lot of work and a fair amount of trying things that might be outside your comfort zone. It’s that old saying, the definition of crazy is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You have to get out of your comfort zone a little bit and to deal with some of these things.

For some people, it may be very easy. For you, you might be saying, “I never have self-doubt thoughts,” but for me, I know they still pop in, worries still pop in, and self-doubt still pops in. I’m not saying to ignore those, but I’m saying there’s times when you know that it’s not a beneficial thing you really need to address. Really, when you’re … If it’s putting you in that anxiety-negative state, you’re not going to effectively deal with the problem anyways.

One of the things I’m going to have you do as a micro action, next time you have one of those fearful or self-doubting thoughts that float into your mind, I want you to try this exercise here at least once. First, I want you to visualize the thought physically floating across in front of your mind. Then I want you to start making it look silly. You can add long floppy ears to it, give it a big smile or a big butt, whatever you want, whatever makes you laugh where you start changing your state, you start laughing at it a little bit. The more boisterous, the more funny and the more you actually laugh, the better. You’re going to start visualizing this thought looking sillier and sillier and adding things to it.

There’s different things that I do that are just small part of that, but if you do the whole thing, I feel pretty confident that it’ll help you get past that focus and start to focus on something that you actually want to move towards. You can focus on what you’re grateful for, and then obviously, if you have a vision that you have already created, which you should have at least a basic vision, if you listened to some of previous episodes, of where you want to go, then you want to turn and realign your focus on where you’re going.

Today, I just want to make it really simple and quick, kind of drive home the purpose for you as far as what you focus on is what you find and make sure that you’re focusing on the things that you want to find in your life. Thank you again for being on this journey with me, and make sure you have a wonderful day.

You’re downtown late at night, you’ve just said goodbye to someone after a great first date. When you’re walking to your car, you somehow find yourself walking down a dark alley alone. You hear footsteps behind you, your heart starts racing. The footsteps are getting closer. That fight or flight feeling that you’re having is part of our innate programming in the reptilian part of the human brain. It’s one of the reasons that we’ve survived as a species so long, so why is it so detrimental to us?

First let me address what is the reptilian brain? I’ve always been fascinated with human psychology and just how our brain works as a whole and there’s three main layers of the brain. The reptilian part of the brain being the oldest, which is responsible for basic survival instincts. Our limbic system, or the limbic part of the brain, is responsible for emotions and then the neo-cortex which is more thinking. The brain stem is one of the oldest and smallest regions of the human brain and it evolved long ago. One of the reasons people refer to it as reptilian brain is it actually is very similar to the current, present day brains of reptiles. So this part of our brain controls vital body functions such as heart rate, breathing, balance, as well as our fight or flight responses. The limbic brain actually first evolved in mammals and it records a lot of our memories and behaviors that were either positive or negative, so it’s responsible in large part for our emotions. Whereas the neo-cortex is responsible for much more of the critical thinking and the development of human language, imagination and abstract thought and our consciousness as we call it.

So one of the things … I’ve been in marketing for many years, so we’ve referred to the reptilian brain quite often. It’s one of the reasons you see a lot of ads and content that targets fear, or sex, or scarcity, things like that, because we have our base survival instincts that we often refer to these as the four F’s. So the four F’s are fight, flight, food, and fornication. Fight, flight, food and fornication. Those are the base survival instincts that we have. If you go way back in time where we’re foraging for food and hunting for animals and things like that and we hear someone, footsteps, behind us, that additional adrenaline, that heart pumping, was there to help us survive those, to make us aware that there’s fear and we should be fearful and maybe give us a little more energy if we need to run and, “Do I need to run or do I need to fight?” Those are the base survival instincts there but then I also need to eat food to survive and then of course to keep the species alive you need to fornicate.

So those are a lot of the reasons and when you talk about … hear marketers talking about, they’re really thing to get into some of our base thinking that a lot of the times, we don’t necessarily like to talk about but those are some of the base thought processes that go on for us. It is what it is. So obviously it’s been useful, it’s kept us alive for a long time. As a species it helped us continue and it’s responsible for keeping us alive in multiple ways, one is via the base survival instincts. Making sure we procreated and eat food and the other is … one of the reasons is why we stay alive when we go to sleep. We don’t have to keep thinking to keep our heart rate going or breathing. The reptilian brain is the natural process of heart rate and breathing and things like that is all controlled under that reptilian brain, so it’s just your overall survival. So, but why is it detrimental?

So a lot of the times … So if you think about it, it’s actually a large part of the reason that we as humans tend to look for the negative and it tends to impact us and we remember it much more vividly than the positive. And if you … It’s one of those things that you think common knowledge, but if you’re not sure, look online, you can get all the information on it. Naturally as people, we pay more attention to what may cause us pain or take more from us. Or cause … or fear, things like that. So it’s why you see the news all the time. In the news, they’ve tried to do the positive news in some ways, they’ve tried to do different things, but then their ratings drop. So it’s unfortunate, but they’re doing what is actually getting them attention and what gets them attention is unfortunately all of the death … You know, when they say, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The death, the destruction, the fear is unfortunately what you see on the news all the time.

I remember I was at 24 Hour Fitness, walking on the treadmill and I’m seeing multiple TVs with all these different headlines and it’s all, you know, “Death, Fear, Destruction.” You know, “Could this be the end of the world?” It’s just … It’s insane. So that feeds into it, when we’re seeing all that information, that feeds into the negative outlook that can happen with that standpoint. So if you combine that though, if you combine the reptilian brain with our pre-frontal cortex, which our … Our pre-frontal cortex is responsible in large part for forecasting the future. So if you take that and this fear part of the reptilian brain, you have all these possible “what if” scenarios running through your head of, “Oh my gosh, what if this goes wrong?” Or, “What if this goes wrong?” And you can just sit there and get so much anxiety and so much unhappiness because you spend all this time focusing on all these negative potential outcomes that may never happen, that probably will never happen.

We can easily … There’s never a shortage of things that can go wrong, we can always come up with things that potentially can go wrong. But that’s part of why the reptilian brain, you have to consciously combat that. So you might have some friends that are Negative Nellies, and that can just be part of the human condition as a whole because we often look at those things, and we look and you hear statements all the time like, “Oh that’s just my life, that’s the way it is, it just seems to happen to me.” And it’s unfortunate but they’re just reinforcing, often, some of the negative things. So you have to actually combat some of our innate programming. You have to kind of understand that that’s there and then combat that in ways that will actually kinda balance it. You know and hopefully balance … turn the tables to more of the positive side.

One of my next episodes I’ll be doing soon is called, “What you focus on is what you find.” And unfortunately, it’s a fact of life that when you focus on … It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy, a lot of the times. If you think something bad is going to happen and you continue to focus on that, then you end up in that direction and I’ll go more into that in that episode, but it’s important to understand for this area, one of the reasons why it’s so important to not allow your brain to only focus on all the things that could go wrong. It’s okay to address and look at … You know, “Yeah, this potentially could go wrong. That’s a possibility. But let me also look at all the things that could go right.”

So that’s one of the ways that you can combat the detrimental aspects ’cause your brain goes through all these “what if” scenarios. “What if this happens? What if this happens, what if we get in a car accident? What if that person decides they’re gonna steal all our money? What if they go out of business? What if this happens? What…” And you can “what if” yourself right out of any possibility of taking any risk whatsoever and that’s what happens for most people when they’re thinking about taking something that’s a little outside our comfort zone or a risk. They get into all those “what if” scenarios. Well ask yourself, “What if it works? What if I do get the promotion? What if she does say yes? What if I win the race?” Whatever it may be. I know for a lot of men, and I’m sure a lot of women, if you’re trying to talk to someone maybe you’re attracted to, of the opposite sex, there’s that fear of rejection. “What if she says no? What if she laughs at me?” You know, “What if I have all this embarrassment? What if …” You know, whatever it may be. But what if he says yes? What if she says yes?

So it’s one of the ways you can kind of counteract the negative “what ifs” is by asking “what if this positive happens?” Because when you want to move toward something, what you focus on is what you find, you don’t want to focus on the negative, you want to focus on the outcome that you want to happen, the positive outcome. So it’s also important … One of the things I find interesting is … and I see it all the time, a few negative things happen. You have some negatives happen and then all of a sudden, oh gosh, it’s the end of the world, it’s the chicken … what’s the … The sky is falling. Running around, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling, oh my gosh, all these negative things happen.” But when you stop, and actually objectively look at everything, you can actually go through and count all these positives and the positives far outweigh the negatives. But because you’re focusing everything on these negatives, then that’s going to consume your whole thought process and hence, self-fulfilling prophecy, you head in that negative direction.

So one thing I recommend is take extra care to count your wins. Count the positive things, count the successes. Spend time … When something negative happens, we naturally grab onto that and store that into us. Grab the positives and take those with you as well and they can be the simplest of things. I’ve been really focusing lately on trying to smile a lot more. I naturally am somebody who’s just happy and they smile a lot. A lot of times, I find myself focused on something like that, but when I see somebody else … I was speaking this weekend at the Impactful People Event in Vancouver and it was at a assisted living, kind of, so a lot of old folks home and it’s just amazing, ’cause when you give this big smile and there’s a lady out walking her dogs and you get that smile back, you see the joy that happens in that little interaction, take those little moments and say, “You know what, that was a beautiful moment.” And just talking to this lady that was there.

So those happened all day long, but we tend to forget about all those things and we focus on the negative thing. Like, I got caught in traffic and didn’t make it aback to do my second session and speak on that. I can sit there and dwell on that, I spent a fair amount of time dwelling on that saying, “You know, what if I would have done this? What if I would have done this?” Fact of the matter is, I got caught behind an accident and it was unfortunate but it happened. So take extra care to count the positives. Count your wins, focus on those and please don’t watch the news.

I’m not saying don’t be informed, I think a lot of people think that automatically when they say, you know, “Well, I need to be informed, I need to know what’s going on in the world.” That’s fine, most of your general news stations, though, your public kinda news stations, you’re gonna see nothing but death, destruction, despair in the world and you might see a couple nice news stories sprinkled in there for the good of it. Which I’m really … I think there are some great stations here locally that do a great job of addressing and looking at like what small businesses are doing in the community and some of those things, but then you go back right to the other station and they’re like, “Okay, five people were murdered.” And if they don’t have anyone locally, they will go to the other side of the country, or the other side of the world to find that news to grab your attention.

You’ll notice the same thing when any snow starts to fall. They’ll, “Oh my gosh, snow watch. 24 hour snow watch and we saw a flake of snow in Portland fall, they may shut down schools.” So they’re trying to grab your attention and they know our base instincts towards fear, towards scarcity, towards potential pain. All these things that grab our attention and it’s innate for us that we pay attention to it. So you want to counteract that negative programming, try not to watch the news and then develop beliefs and patterns that help you counteract those innate programming.

What I mean by that is sometimes you can get into a negative spin cycle, is what I call it. You get into a negative spin cycle where your mind starts thinking of all these negative things and then you start creating these negative potential … I’ll give you … Say you might have known or seen someone who’s worried about their significant other cheating on them and they get into this negative thing and they think every single potential thing is them potentially doing something to cheat on them. Or that they’re going out on them or whatever it is. And what happens is that in that thing they tend to start pushing away the other person because they have all of this fear and then the fear turns into a different kind of behavior where they’re actually pushing that person away. It’s an interesting thing but … So instead … and that’s just one example, there can be hundreds of examples, you could be like, “Oh, this person is going behind my back and talking to this other person.” Who knows? Some of it may be true but ask yourself some simple questions. Questions keep control, they guide you and then stories create impact. So as you’re telling yourself these stories in your mind, you have to ask yourself a question, say, “Do I know everything about this situation?”

I had this recently where I had a team member, on our team, seemed really like something was wrong and my mind started going down kind of a negative path. And I asked myself, “Do I know everything about this situation? Maybe they’re having a hard time at home. Maybe they’re stressed, maybe there’s something at work that’s stressing them.” You know, “Maybe …” And so, rather than focusing on, “Oh, how can this affect me and hurt me?” I started thinking about them and saying, “You know, there’s potentially …” And so, I kinda tried to do what I could to maybe help to see if they were okay. Turns out, they did have a lot on their mind and it seems like just our little conversation and some help here and there kinda helped them get past that.

So it’s important to ask yourself those little questions and those can come up in a lot of different situations but I do find a good question is, “Do I know everything about this situation?” ‘Cause chances are, there’s things that maybe you don’t know, so rather than jumping to this conclusion or jumping to all these negative possible scenarios, say, “Do I know everything about this situation?” Ask yourself some questions and often it’s … the majority of the time, it’s actually nothing, that’s the thing. Majority of the time, it’s nothing, and when it is, how much control do you have over it anyways? So don’t spend so much time stressing over it.

One thing that can help, that if you do stress over things a lot, is to just take it to the extreme. Say, “Well what if that did happen, how would I move forward from that point?” And once you accept the possibility of that negative potential happening and say, “You know what, well I would still survive, I would be alive, and I’d be able to do xyz and I can move forward by doing this.” And now you already know, I can handle the most negative possible effect there, so that’s one way of dealing with it.

But I’d also recommend, this is probably one of the most directly impactful things, is if you have people in your lives that are very negative, I recommend you creating space between yourself and those people. I was at a point in my life, my gosh, kinda little after high school, sometimes during high school, but little after high school as well where just some of the people that I was around, they were great people but the direction that their lives were going and some of the things that they were doing were not the direction that I wanted to go. And I know that as people we tend to become like the people that we hang around with on a consistent basis. So if you want to improve and become better, surround yourself with people that you want to be like. People that inspire you, people that, if you’re trying to be more impactful and have a positive impact on other people, surround yourself with people that are doing those things. And that’ll help elevate you because you’re surrounding yourself by these people. Rather than pulling you down, you’re going to lift you up.

So those are just a few things on that. I can kinda go on this subject all day but I wanted you to … Today’s micro action, I just wanted you to write down one thing that comes to mind for you that is around kinda your base survival programming. So this could be something that’s around the four F’s, like some kinda focus there. Now, I know you probably just went and set yourself a goal around fornication, because that’s your reptilian brain at work, but seriously though, if you worry often, or you have anxiety over certain things, maybe you …

So for me, one of the things that I’ve been working on and I feel pretty good about, because … My fight or flight mode, I used to react really poorly in traffic. When I felt like my family especially … When it was just me, it wasn’t as bad, but when I had family in the car or something like that and I got cut off, my reaction was like, you know, the typical as what you’d see as kinda like road rage. I would go into fight mode because I’m like, this person is endangering my family, ’cause they just cut right in front of my car, we could have got in an accident.

And so I went into this fight mode and the stupidest part of that is I often would do things that would put my family in danger because I’m driving up next to them and I’m kinda yelling at them. Just stupid things but it was really hard for me to control that until I started realizing … consciously saying, asking myself in that situation, rather than saying … I realized that, yeah, they were endangering my family, that’s true, but my reaction was probably endangering my family and other people more. So it was making it worse, so how can I de-escalate that situation and just slow down and really back off of that person so I’m not focused on them? So it’s hard, especially for someone with a strong personality to do that, ’cause they feel like they’re almost giving in to that person, when that person is in the wrong, but for me, it’s less about my ego and more about making sure my family’s taken care of and that … I might even wave to that other person, or do a quick little honk or whatever it is but for me, that was a big thing.

So depending on what you have that you determine is something that you wanna work on around that area, maybe it’s that you watch the news all the time and you have this anxiety about feeling like the world’s getting worse, and honestly, there’s been studies done and there’s so many things that are actually better in the world right now, whether it be crime rates, whether it be economic factors, there’s less extremely poor people in the world right now than has ever been. But when you look at the news, there’s death, destruction, poverty and all this kinda stuff and it’s in your mind all the time but one of the problems that you see there, is it’s we used to not have … The information that we got on the news was from a 100 mile radius maybe. Or even way back when, it was people directly in your community, that was all the news you got but now, it kind of expanded as we got newspapers and things like that, but now we have the whole entire world’s information and all of it, the majority of the negative being amplified, not only by the media sources but by our own minds and so we get all of that information so it can be overwhelming.

So I call it the access to information effect, so we have a much larger access to information and therefore we often see the world in a more negative aspect than it truly is because we’re not also being all of that positive amplified to the same point, based on our own psychology and also based on the way the media sources pull out that information. So write down something you wanna improve around that area. Again, could be something as simple as controlling your temper in a situation, it could be as simple as not worrying so much and kinda controlling your anxiety around potential future outcomes and all those kind things, but yeah, write that down and just commit to working on that a little bit. So that’s all I have for today, but I really wanna thank you for listening and being on this path with me and making a great day.

All right. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the power of belief. For me, I think belief is really the most important element of your life. It’s everything. It’s the lens through which we see ourselves. It’s how we see others. It’s how we see the world. And hence, it shapes our reality. The power of belief has been shown throughout history through people achieving uncommon results, and it’s even been shown to impact one’s health. Yet, I think for most of us, we spend so little time looking at our beliefs and really analyzing what beliefs are limiting us, and what beliefs are actually beneficial to us.

So today, I’m gonna dive in a little bit more. I’m probably gonna be spending at least a few episodes on just discussing belief and why it’s so important. So, I wanna start by sharing some of my favorite quotes on belief. So, Henry Ford … right? Henry Ford has got a lot of great quotes, but one of my favorite ones from Henry Ford is, “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” So, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” I’ve been following that quote, or been thinking of that quote, for such a long time. It really resonates with me because I see it all the time.

There’s people that automatically classify themselves as, “Nope. That’s not something I can do. I’m not good at that,” or whatever it is. There’s not even a thought about it. It’s just a strongly held belief that they have, that that’s not something for them. They’re not good at it. They were once told that they weren’t good at it. Whatever it may be, they’re fearful of whatever it may be, that they don’t like to be in the public eye. Whatever it is. But, as soon as they think they can or think they can’t, they automatically limit themselves. You really narrow your results. You know, you don’t tend to venture outside your belief set of what you believe is possible for you, or that is really inline with how you see your life going. That’s fine, but it’s important to know that those are your bumpers. Right?

You’ve probably heard me, if you’ve listened to some of the previous episodes, me talking about how our thoughts, our emotions, our actions are like the water of a river. Well, the core beliefs, the underlying core beliefs, are the bedrock or the foundation of that river, and that’s what actually directs your life. That’s what directs your emotions, your thoughts, your actions. People often think that they can’t control their emotions, but it’s just not true. When something happens and you have a stimulus, the emotion that you generate is based on what you’re telling yourself about that instance. Right? It doesn’t just happen that something happens and then you get emotional from it. It’s that your perception of that, and your belief around that, tells you how you should feel. I should feel this way about that, because of my past experiences tell me I should feel this way about that. So how you control your emotions, how you control your actions, is by framing what it is in beliefs that are actually beneficial for you.

One other quote I wanna talk about, which Napoleon Hill … if you haven’t read the book Think and Grow Rich, I’d highly recommend that. I’ve read it a few times over the last 20 years. It’s good to kinda go back to it. I don’t remember exactly when it was written, but I know it was written a long time ago, and it’s still a classic today. But Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” Whatever you can come up with in your mind, and you can believe it, you can achieve it.

Let’s talk about belief a little bit. Because belief is such a large topic, I wanna narrow it in a little bit more. So for today, what I’m really focusing on is an individual’s core beliefs. Right? These are beliefs that we hold about ourselves, about others, about the world in general. Right? Core beliefs about ourselves most often start with an “I” statement, like I’m a funny person, I am a smart person, I am big boned, I have a hard time opening up to others, I am beautiful, or I am ugly. All of these are core beliefs. When we say them, and a lot of time what’ll happens is you’ll pay a little more attention to this, you’ll start to notice yourself sometimes saying things that’ll just come out. Because core beliefs are so far under the surface, they often aren’t something that you readily notice as you’re going through. So you’ll say something, and unless you’re kinda conscious about it, you won’t even realize it.

I often would say, “I’m big boned,” or, “I have a different metabolism. It’s harder for me to lose weight.” Right? And so, it doesn’t matter. Those are actually true, right? Like, it doesn’t necessarily matter the truth or non-truth of that statement. It’s more of, is that benefiting you? Are you saying that, and are you using it as an excuse? So, I often found myself for a while in that, where it just came out. It was like, “Oh, yeah. I have a hard metabolism. It’s hard for me to lose weight.” That was an excuse, and it’d just come out, ’cause that was a core belief I had about myself.

Well, okay, yeah. I do have a little different metabolism, maybe I’m big boned, whatever it is. That doesn’t matter. That shouldn’t stop me from being in good shape. Right? That shouldn’t stop me from being where I want to be, regardless of, “Oh, it’s a little more challenging for me.” So, there’s the same thing that happens though. Our core beliefs are often formed from things that we’ve learned since we were children. Right? So, we pick up core beliefs from our parents, from our friends, from our teachers. I remember I had a teacher that once told me that he never thought I’d amount to anything. Luckily, I didn’t take that in and actually develop that as a core belief. ‘Cause a teacher’s in a position of power, and they can have a lot of effect the children that they work with. And so, it’s important, just like a parent, it’s critical that you instill good core beliefs in the children that you have influence on. Right?

I’ll talk about that a little bit more from a parent’s standpoint, since I’m a parent of two amazing children, and kinda some of the stuff I try to do there. But, I mainly want you to think about in this initial episode, how powerful beliefs are. The belief, you know, it’s the reason we get up in the morning. It’s the reason we go to work. It’s the reason we love the person we love. I mean, belief is everything in our lives. Without belief, we don’t really have much of anything.

Once you get the gravity of the importance of beliefs, then we can kind of come back around and start looking at and analyzing what beliefs … you know, if you’re wanting to get from point A to point B, or if you’re wanting to live your life in a certain way, what type of beliefs do you need to develop? What type of beliefs do you have currently that are limiting you from doing that? What type of beliefs do you need to develop to get you to that point, to your goal? It’s not that hard, really, when you think about it. It’s just a matter of kind of reverse engineering. Okay, like if I want to be a conductor, you know, I have to look at that and go, “Okay,” conceive of the idea, see where I’m at. Can I believe it? So, I have to do all my research and really understand it, and then set out to achieve it. And then, I have to look at what kind of beliefs … interview other conductors. I have to look at who’s successful. All those kind of things, right?

So, Let’s talk a little bit about supporting beliefs, ’cause a core belief is like a table top. The more stable, the more strong a core belief is, the more supporting beliefs that has. And so, supporting beliefs are like the legs of that table. A supporting belief often comes in the form of … the core belief might be, “I’m smart.” Well, a supporting belief is, “I always get good grades. You know people have told me I’m smart, and I was in the top 5% of my class, so therefore I’m smart.” Right? There’s all these supporting beliefs that put that around.

Now, there’s times when someone who’s striving to get good grades and that’s, for them, is they have such a high belief and that the importance of that, but then they have other beliefs that are negative in that area. I’m not putting importance on getting good grades or anything like that, per se. I’m saying that that’s what people do sometimes.

What are some other core beliefs? I think a lot of people have limiting core beliefs around what they can do. Like, public speaking is one that I think a lot of people immediately shy away from. Right? Because I think one of our biggest fears is public embarrassment. So when you put yourself in that position, immediately people start sweating and start thinking and fidgeting and going, “You know what? That’s not something I wanna do. I’m not a good public speaker. I’m not a public speaker,” or whatever it is. And so, they reinforce, right?

Ask yourself why is belief so powerful. Belief is something that can build a country, or tear it down. Right? Belief will stop you in your tracks, or it can start the fire that lights the way for you. Right? Belief is that foundation of everything, and hence, it guides our entire life. There’s so many stories about the power of belief.

I think her name was Kelly … Kelly something. Kelly McGonigal, I think it was, did a talk on … it was like How To Make Stress Your Friend, or it was something about, that stress wasn’t negative basically. Anyway, she was a psychologist, I think, at Stanford. I listened to her talk and I found it really interesting, because in her talk, she was talking about how she felt like through working with people for a good part of her life, she had steered them wrong; because she had always been telling them over and over, that stress is a killer, stress will kill you, it can make you sick, and stress is bad for you. She was doing all these things, and now she feels like she needs some kind of repentance to some extent.

Because through a study that was done, they determined … they asked this large group of people. It was a fairly large sample size. They asked this large group of people their different beliefs on stress, whether they thought stress was bad for them, whether they didn’t really feel it was bad for them or negative, those kind of things. And then, they studied … over a long period of time, they looked at the medical records, they looked at the health history, death records, all those kind of things. And so, the interesting finding was that one, people with higher stress that believed that stress was bad for you, did have a higher rate of illness. They had a higher rate of death than the people who didn’t have a lot of stress, that believed stress was bad for them. The huge surprise in the study was the group of people that believed that stress wasn’t bad for them, they didn’t feel that stress was negative on them, and that they still had a high level of stress. They actually lived longer. They were healthier.

This kind of blew people’s minds away, because it wasn’t the stress. I wasn’t the stress that was bad for them. It was the belief that stress was bad for them that was actually affecting them. That is how powerful belief is. It can literally change our physiological response to things based on what we believe. Right? Like, you can be more calm in a situation based on your beliefs. If I’m going up to speak in front of a large group of people and I’m feeling a little bit of that stress rising, I can feel like that’s giving me the energy and it’s making me ready to go out there on stage. I just know that that’s gonna happen, ’cause I’ve done it a number of times.

There’s also tons and tons of stories that just blow my mind around, like, multiple personality disorders. There’s been multiple cases of people who have multiple personality disorders, and in one personality, that personality may have diabetes. The other personality, they don’t have diabetes. When they’re in that personality, like when they’re in that specific disorder, they’re in that specific personality, they’re tested and they come up as diabetic. When they’re not, they come up as not diabetic. Or, that they’re allergic. Like, there’s tons of ones where they’re allergic to one thing in the personality disorder, and then the other one, they’re not allergic. That’s their belief.

There’s been … I don’t remember his name, but it was a famous case of … he was Greek. He was diagnosed with cancer, told he had, I think, six or nine months to live. He was talking about going through chemo treatment therapy. He decided, “Well, since I only have nine months to live, I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna go back to my hometown in Greece.” He went back to his hometown in Greece. I wanna say he was in his 60s at that age. And so, he wanted to live his last few months in Greece. And so, he went there and connected with some of his old friends and family. They heard what was happening. They came over and started playing games with him. He started doing gardening and other things, and just really enjoying his life, and just focusing on some of the finer things in life. I wanna say he lived to be over 100 at that time.

This is all to kind of impact upon you the power of belief, right? In a future episode, I’m gonna go more into limiting beliefs. I’m gonna talk about how to really dive in and analyzed and understand your limiting beliefs. Because no matter where you’re at in life, I can guarantee you, you have beliefs that are impacting you negatively in your life. That’s fine, and who knows if we’ll ever get to the point where we have no beliefs that are having a negative impact on our life. That seems unlikely. But what you can do, is you can continue working on improving the beliefs that are beneficial for you. You can find those limiting beliefs, and you can say, “You know what?” You identify this belief, and you go, “Gosh.” It is extremely hard. I think, as a person, you feel very vulnerable as you start to find some of these things. It is challenging because you go, “You know what? That’s not the kind of person I identify with in my mind of who I am, but here I am saying these things that show that under the surface, I’m still maybe not as confident as I’d like to be, or as I think I am.” You know? Or, “Under the surface, I still may have this fear that everything’s gonna be pulled out from under me at the last second. Right?

My wife and I just got back from Thailand, so I have to apologize. My goal was to record a podcast every single week. We were in Thailand. I actually brought my computer and microphone and everything, and I was planning on recording a couple episodes while I was there, but my computer just stopped working for some reason. And so, I didn’t record any episodes while I was there. And so, I’m gonna catch up a little bit, and get back on track here. Unfortunately, life happens.

Speaking of life experiences and those forming strong beliefs, we had a pretty scary experience while we were there. First of all, Thailand is amazing. We went to Bangkok initially, and we didn’t plan on spending a lot of time there, because for us, it was a big city and we didn’t think we really needed to spend a lot of time there. We wanted to see other parts, and so we only spent one full day there. Had a lot of fun. It was beautiful. Then, we went up Chiang Mai. It’s farther north in Thailand. It was beautiful. Amazing people there. Did a cooking class, did zip lining, and just had a great time. Both my wife and I love Chiang Mai.

And then, we went from there to Phuket, and we were in Phuket for five days. Phuket was amazing. A little bit more of a city feel, but it was also on the beach, on the coast, so you’d have the nice breeze. The place we stayed at was amazing, Le Meridien in Phuket, which they took phenomenal care of us. Had tons of fun there. And then, we went to our last and our favorite place, was Koh Samui. Koh Samui is an island, and I would kinda compare it to a Hawaiian island, but in Thailand. So, you have this amazing tropical island feel, but you have 1/40th the cost, maybe 1/20th the cost. The Thai baht is much different than … their currency is much different than, say, the U.S. dollar. Depending on where you’re at, your money will go a lot farther than in most places.

What a lot of people do on the island though, and in much of Thailand, is they drive scooters around. It’s a great way to get around the island. It’s very inexpensive, and you’ll see a family of four on a scooter. You know, it’s interesting. One of the things that really opened up my eyes while I was there is, many of us, our day-to-day lives we often look at and go, “I don’t have this. I don’t have this.” You have these people in Thailand just loving life. They have this amazing love for life, and just positive, friendly nature. Here they are, four of them, riding on a scooter, a dad and husband. Dad and husband? Maybe. But, a husband and wife and two kids on a scooter, riding down the street, like taking them to school or something like that.

It just kind of blew my mind, because here we are driving in a car and going, “You know what?” Again, it all forms from our belief and what we feel we need to make us happy. Right? “I believe I should have this Lexus car, and then I’ll be happy with that,” and that never makes you happy, because things don’t make us happy. Right? Not in the long run.

So, we got on a scooter. We were having a great time driving around the island. We were like, “Why didn’t we do this way back when?” Because we were paying taxis and things like that. We got on a scooter, and we were driving around town, having a great time. Unfortunately, most of the scooters were gone by the time we got one, and we asked the hotel, “Could you find us a scooter?” And they said, “Sure.” And so, I think we got kind of one of the last picks of the liter, so to speak, and the breaks were not good basically. If we were going 30 miles an hour, and I squeezed the front and back break as hard as I could, it’d probably take us a good 40-50 feet to stop. Like, pretty bad.

So, I was being careful. I was staying back from cars as much as I could, but you know, people drive a little crazy over there. That’s just how it is. So, we’re driving down the street, and all of a sudden we hear screeching brakes and crashing cars, and there’s an accident in front of us. Cars are sliding, and one car tries to basically avoid another car. Here we are on the left, and we’re basically about to get squished between this car and the side rail. Right?

And so, my wife is on the back and I’m on the front. I’m sitting there trying to squeeze the break, so that we don’t end up in there, but realizing that we don’t have the time and the breaks aren’t working very well. I decided to take the alternate route, because the side rail actually was going to end in about 15 feet or so. And so, I sped up a little bit, and as the car was pushing over towards us and we could kind start almost touching the car on the side, at the very last second, I heard the foothold, or the foot stand … not the foot stand, but where my wife puts her feet basically. I heard that just barely scrape the side of the rail as we went by, and I thought, “Oh.” We just barely made it, right?

As I look up there, there was a couple that were on the ground. They were on a scooter, crashed. They were getting up, so they were okay, but they obviously had burns all over their legs and things like that from some of the scratches and sliding down, things like that. I thought, “Wow. We just barely made it through that.” And so, I kinda maneuvered around.

I asked my wife Jenny, I said, “Are you okay? Everything all right?” I hear it in her voice. She’s starting to tear up and she says, “No.” She’s like, “Let’s just go back to the hotel.” I look back, and I look down at her leg and her foot, and there’s blood all over her foot. So, those little footholds you put your foot on, well, it’s an island, we had flip flops on. Her foot was kind of a little bit on the side of that, and so as we went her over, her foot actually hit that side rail. The side of her leg actually scraped … the side rail actually took off a good portion, probably five layers or so, of skin on the side of her calf. And so, we couldn’t tell if, at that time, how deeply it was cut. There was a good amount of blood. Or, if it was broken or what.

Long story short, well, shorter. We head back to the hotel. The people at the hotel, the Le Meridien in Koh Samui were amazing. They took care of us and actually brought in a taxi, or actually one of their private cars, took us to the hospital, and Jenny got all taken care of. The hospital in Koh Samui was amazing, like, great care. I think the whole thing, x-rays, everything, the doctor visit, all that stuff, ended up being like $250 dollars U.S., so much cheaper and great care. Much cheaper than the U.S.

When all was said and done with that, I mean, Jenny didn’t let it really impact her vacation or anything. She was a super trooper, and just a strong woman. I’m sure she was in a lot of pain, but she still had a good time. We still did a lot of fun things after that. That night, we actually still got on the scooter. We weren’t gonna go very far, and we were gonna take it very easy. We went up and got dinner at this place called Doctor Frogs. Great little, I’d say Thai-talian. They have Thai and Italian food. The chef’s Italian.

Long story short, his food was amazing. While we’re having dinner, we hear the screeching of brakes, and then serious crunching of metal. Much worse than the first crash we heard. I knew at that moment that it was a pretty bad accident. I actually walked outside and looked at the accident. I took a little bit of time, because I knew it was gonna be bad and I didn’t want to … with what we’d been through, I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to … There was an ambulance that got there pretty quickly, and they were taking someone off in the ambulance. I saw that their foot was moving, and so they were obviously alive at that point, and that was good. But then, they had someone else that they were doing CPR on, and we’re pretty sure that that person didn’t make it.

You know, when you have an experience like that, it creates a very strong core belief. Right? This core belief around the potential for a lot of pain. Right? A lot of our beliefs are around what will bring us pain or pleasure, and that’s why we do or don’t do certain things. So, when you have an experience like this, all the sudden, you have this strong core belief that’s like, “You know what?” Like, we were done at that point. We said, “You know what? No more.” We gave the scooter back. If we were gonna go somewhere, we took a taxi or did whatever at that point, because neither of us wanted to potentially be in that position. Right?

The same thing happens in our life when you have a traumatic experience. Right? A lot of people who have gone through very tough times or had very tough experiences in their life, they have these incredibly strong core beliefs that are supported by these experiences, that it’s much harder to change. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible to change. Any belief is possible to change. One of those myths is that the older you get, that you can’t change your beliefs. You’re just stuck that way. That’s been disproven for a long time. We have what scientists refer to as neuroplasticity, and we can actually, as we change our beliefs, the way our connections, our neurons actually fire and connect, actually changes. Over time, those pathways change.

So, it literally is true that when you have these strong beliefs, they create these pathways over time, and those pathways are easier to happen, and changing those are harder, but that can still happen. Right? So, what I would suggest, I think, that people get to is, rather than just letting your life go on as all the beliefs that have been imprinted on you, that have been given to you against your will, or not against your will, but without your knowledge in a lot of ways, that you, living with those beliefs, is that you look at where you want your life to be. What you want your life to be like. Don’t look at is as a destination, but just look at it as the experience of life, right?

People a lot of times think their happiness is related to a position in life. It’s not. Happiness is a habit of how you think about happiness. If you, in your mind, believe that you need a car and you need a big house and you need all this money to be happy, guess what? You’re not gonna be happy until you get to that point, and then you’re gonna realize, “Wow. None of this stuff actually makes me happy.” ‘Cause it’s not about getting something to make you happy, right? Happiness is a belief we have about ourselves, and it’s something we can create every day.

So, look at how you want to live your life every day. If you wanna be in this great state every day, you wanna have a positive impact on people, whatever it is, understand those things, and then start to look at the beliefs that would actually support living that lifestyle, living that way; and start creating those beliefs, understand that the core belief is like a tabletop and that the actual legs of the table are supporting beliefs, so you want to put supporting beliefs under these core beliefs to create really strong foundational beliefs that will help you get to that point. Right?

So what happens is, when you consciously start choosing your beliefs, it empowers you beyond what you can possibly probably imagine at this point, that it opens up all of the possibilities. I have to think of it like, if you’ve seen the movie The Matrix, where once he realizes that … in one of the episodes he says, “You have to realize there is no spoon.” And the spoon bends in his mind, because he’s in the Matrix. This isn’t reality, right? Well, our mind, our belief structure, our senses are the same exact thing. You have these mental constructs in your mind, but they’re just mental constructs and you can change those things. It’s about changing your core beliefs and changing the supporting beliefs that are underneath that.

Now, that takes time and practice, but the better you get, the more flexibility you get there. The more practice you get changing your beliefs, it becomes easier to kind of be flexible in your mindset and change beliefs according to what will actually be beneficial to you and to the people around you in the world. Right?

I want to end, like I do with every episode, with a micro-action. And so, I want you to write in your note tool. If you, in listening to previous episodes, you already have this; if this is a new episode to you, it’s best to start at the beginning, and kinda start here. One of the things that I ask you to do is do a micro-action in each episode. In one of the first episodes, I have you use a note tool. In that note tool, it’s just a daily reminder that pops up. And so, you can do something like Google Keep or any kind of of notepad that has a reminder option.

And so, in a notepad like that, or if you just have paper, write it on paper. I want you to write down two lines. One is Beneficial Core Beliefs, and the other is Limiting Core Beliefs. So, over time what I want you to do is, as things come to mind … I mean, you can spend some time doing it right now if you want. Just right, the micro-action is really there to just give you something super simple that you can do and take action. So for now, I just want you to write down Beneficial Core Belief and Limiting Core Belief.

And then as things pop in your mind, you can open up your notepad and say, “You know what? I just said something I realized must be under the surface somewhere for me that I said that was a limiting core belief. I said I am not good at that. Well, let me write down what that is. I am not good at this. Well, what is it that I’m not good at? I’m not good at conflicts, maybe it was. Maybe I’m not good at talking to people in general. Maybe it’s I’m not good at talking to strangers or introducing myself, or I’m not good in public situations or I’m not good at a cocktail party,” whatever it is. Those are like limiting core beliefs that, when you say them, when you say that, you’re reinforcing this core belief that you hold.

And so first, you wanna identify that and realized, “Do I wanna continue reinforcing this?” ‘Cause I guarantee you, you could be good at it if you wanted to. So, why not maybe use it that way? Why don’t you say, “You know, right now I necessarily don’t wanna do that.” ‘Cause the language we use is important. I’m gonna be doing a specific episode specifically on the language and words we use and how they either free our mind, or they limit us in a lot of ways. Over time, as you’re writing those down, you’ll see, “Hey. I have these other core beliefs that are maybe more beneficial.” One of the ones that I’m most thankful for, that my mother impressed upon me, is that she always told me, she said … and I apologize. I said I’d talk more about from a parent’s standpoint, like instilling core beliefs. And so, I’ll talk about that a little bit.

But one of the things my mother always told me was, she always said, “You can do anything you want, if you put your mind and your heart into it.” And I heard that from her many times throughout my life. I believe that whole heartedly. I feel like that’s one of the most beneficial beliefs I have because … again, brand new to podcasting. I’m a newb. You can probably tell to some extent. But as a whole, I always figured, yeah, I can pretty much learn anything. If it’s important to me and I wanna really get into it, I can do it, I can learn it. Right?

A lot of people don’t have that belief. So, it’s trying to do something new that’s outside of their comfort zone’s extremely hard. So, if you wanna instill a core belief in someone, instill that core belief that they can do anything that they put their heart and mind into if they’re willing to work hard enough. Right? If they’re willing to work hard enough, and they’re gonna put their mind and heart into it, they can achieve that. I think as a parent, it’s critical that we instill these core beliefs in our children, and that we make our love for them unconditional, not based on grades, not based on performance in any one thing, that we let them know that they have our love unconditionally for everything, and that we instill strong core beliefs in them.

I wanted to touch on that a little bit. I can go into more at another point. I guess for now, start writing those down as you go through. Feel free to share with me if you have any limiting core beliefs that pop up. I say in the next couple episodes, I’ll do one specifically on how to analyze your core beliefs in more depth, and then how to kinda address and change those beliefs going forward.

In today’s episode we answer:

Today we’re talking about how to live your best life by creating a compelling vision. One of the most important aspects to living the best life possible is initially defining what does that mean to you because if you don’t understand what that means to you, you’re never going to get there. When you’re creating that vision of the life you want, you need to understand and define very clearly and visualize and have it in your mind, what does this mean?

Otherwise, you’re just kind of wandering around aimlessly, trying not to get hurt. Having a compelling vision will let you live a more purposeful life, and it subconsciously guides you towards the life you want to live. In this episode, we’re going to talk about why you should create a vision, some of the challenges you’re going to face in creating a vision, and questions that you should ask yourself along the way. Then now that you have a vision, what should you do with it?

Let’s get started by talking about why having a vision is so important. If you’ve listened to some of the previous episodes, you know that I like to use analogies a lot. I want to ask you a question. If you were going to build a home, if you were, let’s say, a home builder, and you wanted to build a home, would you start building a home without a blueprint? Probably not, right? You’d want to have everything really clearly outlined, where things are going to be and all that kind of stuff because otherwise you’re going to build a home and then it may not end up being the home you want.

Unfortunately, this is how most people go through life. They have a lot of things on their mind. They have a lot of goals and things, and a lot of times they’re not written down. They’re not documented, and they’re just kind of going through. Then sometimes they get the house they want, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they end up saying, “You know what? This isn’t really what I was planning on.” Well, where you need to start is by having a vision. You need to understand.

When I say a vision, I think a lot of people look at a vision as a destination. To me, while it does provide that foresight of where you’re going, like a destination, to me, it’s also about how do you want to live along the way? What experiences do you want to have? What kind of mindset do you want to have? Who do you want to go along the way with? It’s a lot more than just a destination in mind, and so that’s important to keep in mind.

Our natural reaction will be anytime that you’re thinking of trying or doing or being more, for a lot of people, there’s a little bit of a fear response because it’s different, right? It’s out of their comfort zone. It’s important that you’re aware of that, that you’re going to push your comfort zone a little bit, which is a good thing. You should always be looking to kind of push your comfort zone out a little bit more because if you don’t grow, then you’re going to keep doing and being and living in the life that you are right now.

If you are everything you want, then that’s fine. Then just be happy with that and be content. That’s fine, and that’s a good place to be. But if you do want to be more, if you want to help more people, if you want to give more, if you want to have a bigger impact, if you want to have, whether it be more time or friends or a companion or travel, all those things, if there’s other things that you’re striving for, then it’s important that you start kind of pushing that comfort zone out a little bit more.

The other things that you’ll run into is your current beliefs kind of in programming just getting in the way as you go through and create your vision. I can guarantee you if you start working towards your vision, you’re going to change it. It’s not going to stay the same over time. I’ve been writing a vision since I was probably in my early 20s, I want to say. It might have been, yeah, around 20 or so. There’s multiple changes over that time. I’ll talk a little bit more later on about some of the things I’ve done and my vision and all that kind of stuff.

One other thing I would just say, which is something that’s just a good lesson in life in general, is try not to let perfect get in the way of good enough. I think often this is a challenge for me with this podcast. Because of my limited time and things like that, I don’t have it set up enough to where I’m going to make it polished and perfectly outlined and everything succinct and all that kind of stuff.

Based on what I’m doing, I’ve chosen to do it in this manner, and so I have to be okay with that because if I want to spend more time on it, then I’d be taking time away from other things that are high priority for me, my business, my wife, my family, and things like that. But this is a priority for me, and I put two hours a week into doing this, and so with that limited time, this is how I do it. It’s hard for me to sometimes actually publish this because I want to go back and edit everything and make it perfect.

When you’re creating your vision, don’t try to make it perfect. Try to start just by creating something that is compelling for you, and then continue to add to it. I’ll talk about more about what to do with it and how to continue kind of utilizing it and modifying it along the way. I want to talk about a few questions that you should think about asking yourself when you’re creating a vision. One of the biggest things, I think, is, what are your core values?

That’s something a lot of people don’t necessarily have defined or written down as well, and so this will kind of help you in that process of thinking like maybe narrowing it down to your top maybe five, six, seven. There’s not this set rule amount, but I have like my five top core values that I focus on every day. This allows me to make decisions based on my value set, as opposed to what’s on fire or urgent or someone who is making an ask of me at that point, all those things. I have to focus on my values.

It’s really important that your vision and values be aligned. In future episodes, I’ll actually dive more into values specifically. Just so you know, if you are … so there’s a lot of people that are part of a business or that even run a business. A lot of this can be applied to your business’s vision statement as well, so when we’re thinking about some of these things. Actually, one of the things I’ve learned over my life as an entrepreneur and just as a person in general is there’s a lot of business tactics and personal tactics that overlap and benefit each other.

We have a very clear set of core values, and we start … when we bring people onto our team, everything starts with our core values. Everything is surrounding that. If someone has a great skill set but they don’t match our core values, then it just isn’t a good fit for us, right? They have to have the core values because that’s the core thing. When you’re thinking about creating your vision and living your life, if it doesn’t fit within your core values, then you can start to say, “Okay, this is not part of my vision or core values. It’s not really getting me to those I love and the things that we want to achieve together or all those things.”

It’s not really driving us in that direction. It’s actually taking us in the wrong direction. Core values aren’t something that you have just because it benefits you. They are things you have regardless of the circumstances and the things around you. Think about that. What are your core values? What are really important to you? I think you’ll find if you don’t have these currently defined that you may not be living your life. You’re living your life by your core values. What happens is when you manage your time by your core values more, that’s one of the biggest things about living the life that you want to live, is really having that alignment with your true kind of core values.

It’s really important as you go through this exercise to get that kind of outlined and have a good understanding of your core values. Now, that doesn’t mean again it has to be perfect. Just start and then continue modifying and improving a little bit along the way. Another question I would ask of myself if I was you is, how do I want people to remember or think of me? This could be family, friends, colleagues. It could be people in your community, in your industry, things like that.

I think it’s a good question because it kind of holds you accountable for what person you want to be and what impact you want to have and really understanding, am I doing every day the things that I need to do to kind of live up to these standards that I’m setting for myself? Another question that I think is a really good question is, what would a perfect day be like for you? I went through this exercise a while back. I’ve done it a couple of times and kind of defined it out.

It was interesting for me that one of the things about my perfect day was getting up and exercising in the morning and having the time to kind of get up and get going the day like that and maybe having some coffee, maybe reading some things and kind of educating myself and growing a little bit more. I thought about doing jujitsu and yoga or kind of switching those out some days, spending time working with my team and kind of coming up with different ideas and strategies for clients and things like that because that’s something I really enjoy, spending some time with my wife and family.

I was going through all those things, and what was interesting to me as I started thinking about this was, why am I not doing that right now? That was one of the really kind of eye-opening questions for me when I was going through that exercise, was I’m making a lot of excuses for why I’m not doing that now, “I don’t have enough time,” or “I don’t do this or that,” whatever it is. But I think in a lot of cases, there’s things that you can do right now that you’re not necessarily doing. For me, I had to change. I talked about those challenges of your beliefs and your programming getting in the way.

One of the outdated kind of beliefs or programming that I naturally said about myself was I’m not a morning person. That was getting in my way because I’d get up later and then I’d go straight to work. It wasn’t allowing me to first give to myself and really before I gave to others because the way you start your day can be really important. So I said, “You know what? I am a morning person.” I started going to bed a little earlier. I started getting up earlier and started working out each morning, and it was one of the biggest changes and had the most positive impact for me because I just feel that’s something that gives me a lot of energy.

I just feel a sense of bliss when I get up and I feel like I’ve already done a lot. I feel great physically, so all of those things. That was one of those things. You’re going to run into those things as you go through creating your vision that you may say, “Well, I don’t really have the time to do that,” or you’re going to make an excuse rather than making progress potentially. Just be aware of that as you’re going through different things. Another question that you might ask yourself is, what impact do I want to have? How do I want to impact the people around me?

That’s really cool to be able to kind of help with that part of things. From our company’s standpoint, one of the impact things we want to have is we want to have a really positive impact through our local community, and we specifically kind of target youth in that area. We support the Boys & Girls Club of Southwest Washington. We also focus on the Share homeless shelter here locally in Vancouver, both adopting families there and taking our team to volunteer. Our team gets paid to volunteer two days a year. We take on different projects for causes and things like that sometimes as part of that.

Then we’re also part of, recently, a new organization in Clark County, 100 Men Who Care of Clark County, which gives basically, between 100 members, gives $40,000 a year to local charities. That was a big thing for me as far as having an impact. That’s just one portion of it. Your impact could be, “You know what, I want my wife to feel loved and special every day. I want my children to feel loved and to feel that they can do anything.” You want to have that impact on the next generation, whatever it may be. Ask yourself, “How do I want to have that positive impact on the people around me?”

Then what is my purpose? This is often a hard question and one that you don’t necessarily have to answer right away. It could come over time. I’ll dive into purpose more later because when I talk about … I had mentioned the VBAR method in a previous episode and kind of dived into a little bit about what that meant. Vision, beliefs, actions, and results is kind of the overall method. There’s more that goes into it. Under vision, it stands for vision, values, and purpose. It is just under vision, is vision, values, and purpose.

Those are kind of three main areas of that quadrant when I’m thinking about kind of what I look at for myself, is what’s important. Your purpose in life, one of them is to find your purpose. Then once you find your purpose, it’s to live your purpose and challenge yourself and grow in a way so you can do that. I think my purpose in a lot of ways is to help other people realize that they have unlimited potential in what they can do in understanding how to kind of get out of their comfort zone and overcome kind of some of these obstacles, the mental and physical obstacles that may be in their way, to getting them close to achieving their purpose.

I think if everybody is having more of a purposeful life that it will be this positive ripple effect. It will impact local community and then eventually the world as a whole. That’s a good question to ask as you’re going through this. What do you want to be doing? Are there a certain type of work that you want to improve at? Are there skill sets that you want to get better at? Are there vacations that you want to take? Where are you living? Who do you see around you? Do you want to have a significant other? Do you want to have children? Do you want to have grandchildren? Well, that’s not really up to you.

As you go through this vision, you really want to kind of define and have this really clear kind of concise vision that you’re going towards. Now, I’ll give you a brief kind of the opposite perspective a little bit. Sometimes you want to be aware as you create this very clear, concise kind of vision, it’s extremely powerful if you do it in the right away, and it will help drive you towards that vision, and so it’s extremely compelling. It is important that you continue taking time and working on it, but if it’s not aligned with your values, that’s what … at one point when I was younger, I thought, “Hey, I’m totally …”

I had this vision that was all set up. I went from becoming a salesperson in this company to becoming an assistant sales manager and to then becoming the sales manager. I was making a significant amount of money for my age, I think 21, 22, 23, somewhere in that range. I thought, “Wow, I’m doing all these things,” but not really happy. I was 274 pounds, very overweight. I had recently had a daughter around that time, and so I wasn’t spending as much time with her, things like that, which as I started to realize … I actually ran across a book.

In fact, I have it in my bag right here, so I’ll tell you the title. The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management. This is by Hyrum Smith. He’s the CEO of Franklin Quest. This book, I have it in my bag because I was going to give it to somebody because it was one of the most impactful books in my life at that time. It was really understanding the alignment between how you … I know the title sounds kind of dry and the book isn’t a super easy read by any means, but it’s a very valuable book.

As you go through and you start realizing that you manage your time by urgencies of things and priorities, but they’re not often aligned with what you value, and if you live your life by that, you’re ultimately going down this path that’s not aligned with your vision, values, and purpose as a whole. It’s really important that you look at that and define that and then make sure there’s alignment between those things because having a compelling vision can be very strong, and it worked well for me when I was younger and kind of driven, but it wasn’t aligned with my values or my purpose in any way.

I eventually parted ways there because I was traveling every other week and I was doing all these things, making a lot of money. It was great, but it was more important for me to kind of align with my values and purpose, so I swung to the far other side where I started getting into mixed martial arts again and things like that. That’s when I started training at Team Quest back in the day and started throwing ultimate fighting events and all that kind of fun stuff, which that was very enjoyable, but eventually then I got, as you may have heard in the previous episode, that I eventually got misaligned there as well because financially things were bad and many other areas.

There’s this kind of balancing that’s always going on. I think balance is a little bit of a myth as far as having this kind of just stable balance across everything. I think you’re constantly rebalancing as you go, but it’s good that when you have this clear vision and you have values alignment with your vision and your purpose alignment, it’s extremely powerful, and it also just allows you to live a very happy and fulfilled life. Once you get into some of these questions, you’re going to start thinking about what actions, what belief sets do you need to make these things happen?

That gets in more to the whole VBAR method of once you have this kind of compelling vision, then you’ll start looking at, “Okay, what are the beliefs I have now that are kind of limiting me or holding me back from getting there? When I get to this point, what beliefs would I have developed to get to that point?” I believe in myself more that I could achieve anything, that I could learn anything if I put my mind to it. Whatever those beliefs are, you need to look at what those beliefs would be, and then you need to start working on developing those beliefs now. Otherwise, you won’t get to that point.

What are the actions that you need to take to get there? You need to kind of … this will go will go in further after you kind of go in the vision, and then this is kind of a cyclical thing where you continue working on each area. As your beliefs rise, all of a sudden you might go, “You know what? I was shooting too low. I totally have this much higher vision I could go for.” Think about the different roles in your life, like as a wife or a husband. What type of friend do you want to be to your wife or husband or your friends, what kind of member of a team, if you’re a member of a team, whether that’s at work or in a sports team?

Kind of think about all those things. When I was working back in early 2017, I went through and revamped my personal vision statement because I was at a point where I’d say I felt a little uninspired at that time. I had basically achieved all of the things in my vision, which you should be extremely excited and happy, which I was. At that point, I was very excited and happy, but I was also feeling like I wasn’t as driven because I had everything I wanted. I wasn’t hungry because I had achieved many of my financial goals, my personal goals. I have the wife of my dreams, best friend. Not that we don’t have challenges, but we work through them together.

I have two amazing kids and a successful business, and my health goals are pretty good. I’ve still got work to do there. It was one of those things. When you get to that point, it’s like, okay, I need to step back a little bit and I need to raise the bar, raise the VBAR. I went back and I started asking myself, “What am I giving to the world? What kind of impact am I having? How am I giving to other people? I looked at, how can I be a better husband, a better member of the community? As I was going through, I started working on all this thing of becoming more involved in the community.

Then I started working on … obviously, I knew since I was about 23 that I wanted to write a book, and I’ve been making notes about this for the last almost 20 years of some of the different things over time that I eventually wanted to write a book, and it’s one of those things that I had to stop making excuses for and just start making progress on. I looked at this podcast format as the way to do that because it holds me accountable to doing this so that I do it each and every week and get kind of my thoughts and ideas and everything out.

Then eventually, I’ll have a writer help me finish kind of editing everything and we’ll tighten things up and publish the book. There’s a lot of things I had to look at and say, “You know what, there’s some of the these things that I hadn’t thought of in a while,” so I made it a goal of mine to write a book, to have a more positive impact in the world and to help people more, whether that be the people at my office or the local community, all those things. That’s what I’ve been working on a lot for myself.

One of the things I realized that I wasn’t doing, and I think it’s important that you realize this, is when I say give, grow, and be grateful, and that’s my life’s motto, give … I think some people look at that, and they just go, “Oh, well, you’re constantly just giving to others.” Some people already feel like they give so much, and they don’t really get anything in return. It’s important that you first give to yourself. You are the most important person first, okay, because if you’re not in the right mental state, if you’re not in a position to do the things that you can do, you’re not going to be able to give to your spouse.

You’re not going to be able to give to your children, to your community, to your team members, all that kind of stuff. It’s really important that you first understand what you need to kind of get you either inspired. Like for me, that morning routine, getting up, focusing on the things that I’m grateful for, working out every morning, of the week at least. Doing those things for me just wakes me up and I just feel great for the day. That to me is one of the things that I give to myself. I give myself that time.

I spend some time in the sauna meditating afterwards and just focusing on different things. I spend time reading my vision and my goals and purpose and values every morning, having some coffee, so I’m up early before all these things happen, and yeah, then I start the day. Yeah, that’s a little bit about myself and kind of what I’ve gone through there. I’m happy to answer any other questions on that side as well. Just understand that crafting your personal vision statement will be a process, and it’s not going to be something that you just write down once and you’re done.

It will be something, as you look through and think about your goals, you’ll come back and you’ll tweak it a little bit more. It will just be this kind of ongoing cyclical process where as you achieve some of the things in your vision, your beliefs are going to increase, and you’re going to say, “You know what, I’m going to change. I’m going to see where I can have more of an impact, where I can give more. Maybe I can grow more in these areas,” all that kind of good stuff.

As you know, if you listened to the previous episodes, which I hope you have, we end each episode by having a micro-action, we meaning myself. I’m a Gemini, I guess. I want you to think about … when I say a micro-action, it’s just a repeat for if you are trying to … as a matter of fact, it’s something very simple. You can do it right away today and it will take very little time, usually less than a minute of your time. Now, over many, many episodes … I’m doing 52 episodes at least or until I kind of get all the content for this book out.

You’ll have developed these positive habits by taking all these little micro-actions. Kind of like a drip of water over time, it kind of creates a channel. In this episode … in the previous episode, I asked you to use a note-taking app like Google Keep or something like that, that has the reminder functionality, and to set it each morning to look at what you’re grateful for and read that each morning because if you start the day like that, it’s just an amazing day. It gets you in the right mindset.

In this one, I want you to open up your notes app, and then in all caps, I want you to write vision. For now, just write one question. Then over the next days, weeks, you can kind of build on it from there and it will be something that you kind of add to as you go because you’ll have this reminder set each morning to look at that and read it. Then things, when they do inspire you or come to your mind, just throw them in that note app and you can over time continue kind of editing it. But write this one question down. What am I grateful for now that I will be, do, or have in 10 years’ time?

What am I grateful for now that I will be, do, or have in 10 years’ time? It might sound a little bit weird, but I wrote it that way purposely because a lot of the times, we naturally gravitate towards things that we’re grateful for or they gravitate towards us. If you’ve heard of the law of attraction, it’s kind of that general consensus, is what you think about is what you become. Where your mind is focused on is where you go, all those kind of things. That’s why this is so important from creating that vision. It values your purpose overall, kind of having that clearly defined.

When you’re grateful for something, it naturally attracts those things. If you think about your spouse, for instance, if you’re not grateful for them, it pushes them away. When you’re grateful for them, it pulls them to you. Same with friends, right? When you have friends, if you’re grateful for those friends, you tend to treat them better and do things for them, which naturally strengthens those bonds and you tend to get more friends because you’re a good friend.

When you’re thinking about your vision in 10 years’ time and you’re saying, “You know what, in 10 years, in my personal life, I’m going to be here. In my professional life, I’m going to be here. In my health and fitness, I’m going to be here. In my financial, I’m going to be here,” whatever … it could be public speaking. It could be many different things. When you work backwards, almost like reverse engineering it, you say, “You know what, I’m grateful for now my ability to …” Maybe it’s to learn and become a better public speaker because you can.

I mean that’s just … I started out as a bad public speaker and became good and then I’m still working on getting to the great point at some point. What am I grateful for now that I will be, do, or have in 10 years’ time? Start just making notes and start working on creating your vision over time. Then each morning, this will pop up, and when you’re reading what you’re grateful for, I want you to focus on … read what you’re grateful for, and you can add some to that as well, and then read your vision each morning.

This will help reinforce it and help you continue working it and thinking about kind of what direction you’re going in life and where you want to go. As you continue kind of focusing on that, it’s a natural rule of law. What you focus on is what you find, so the more you focus on it, the more you naturally move in that direction. I want to thank you again for your time, and I’m glad you’re on this path with me. I look forward to chatting with you more.

In today’s episode, we’re going be talking about:

So, I’m actually gonna start with the concept of the riverbed. If you listened to the last episode you remember when I talked about how our thoughts, our emotions, our actions are like the water of a river and how our underlying core beliefs and our programming and all these things are the riverbed. And so, the concept … I like to use analogies like this ’cause I think it provides a little more concreteness for people in understanding how important their beliefs are to their everyday life. If you look at where you are currently in your life, it’s because of all of the core beliefs that you have now, that you’ve had throughout your life and that you currently have that have led you to this point. I want you to think of looking down over a landscape and kind of seeing this winding riverbed that’s flowing through the land, and as you’re looking at it start to imagine and think about how our everyday thoughts, our emotions, our actions flow … comes to the path of least resistance, right?

So, just like water does, our thoughts, our emotions, our actions tend to follow these patterns that we’ve developed, and that’s where the riverbed comes in because it’s basically these patterns that you’ve created since you were a small child, whether it be things that other people told you about yourself or it be things that you started believing about yourself, about the world, about others. All of these beliefs came to form who you are today. Now, many of these beliefs are so far under the surface we don’t even know that we have these beliefs, but they’ll come out in the language that we use sometimes, and you’ll start to notice them more, that you have these limiting beliefs that you never knew you had. Once you start to really analyze your beliefs you’ll start to see that you do have limiting beliefs. Everyone has limiting beliefs, even some of the best people out there that you think are positive every single day and are super successful. They have limiting beliefs as well.

But if you say, “You know what? This is really where I want to be, over here,” you have to look at what are the beliefs that I would need, what are the beliefs that someone who would be successful in reaching that state or reaching that goal — whatever it may be that you’re trying to achieve — what are the beliefs that they would hold, right, because that’s what ultimately is gonna lead you to get to that point. Now, changing habits, changing patterns is not easy at all. It’s definitely … It’s simple. It’s actually really simple, but it’s not easy. That’s why … I’ll come back to this, but I want to talk about the myth of willpower for a second. So, the reason … I say “the myth of willpower” is because … you know, often people look at willpower and think, “Oh, it’s this thing that you just have, and you go out there and do it and you’re good. I can just choose whatever I want in that moment and that’s how you change.”

The honest truth is that is a portion of it. But I want you to think about willpower in the form of rowing up a river, right? So, if you’re trying to row upstream, you’re basically working a lot harder than when you’re going downstream, and that’s okay, right? It’s okay to work hard, and sometimes that’s required, that struggle’s required to be able to take a different path. But when you are constantly rowing upstream at some point you will tire, you will endure and you won’t actually use your willpower in that case. So, what you need to do in order to actually successfully change your habits is use a combination of willpower along with understanding … really taking and analyzing the beliefs that you hold and understanding how those beliefs are determining your actions.

So, if I’m sitting there and I have a habit of eating too many doughnuts, which I have had in the past, eating too many sweets and sugar just in general, and I look at that and I say, “You know what? I want to have this willpower,” and in that moment what I found was … okay, a lot of times there were things that would come up whether I was upset or stressed about something that I would eat sugary sweets, whatever it may be. If I had a lot going on, I would feel like, “Oh, you deserve this. You’re working hard.” I would make these kind of justifications for doing that. And those times of either stress or frustration or whatever it may be, your willpower is lacking.

But over time what I had to do was … The problem is people often try to create this new path without blocking the old channel, and if you think about how water flows down a river, if you were to just start kind of creating a new channel, right … it’s not as developed as the old channel that’s reinforced better, this big, deep kind of channel where water’s going and you start creating this kind of line across the surface on the other side that’s only a few inches deep at that time, starts to get maybe a few feet deep, things like that. Water’s still going to be flowing down that other path. So, what you have to do is you have to use massive focus and you have to create a new channel, but you also have to dam the old channel. You actually have to block that old channel ’cause we tend to replace old habits in a lot of cases.

So, if you’re trying to stop an old habit, you can replace it with a positive habit. So, instead of, for instance … if it’s say sweets or whatever habit it may be, you can look at the old channel and say … you can associate a massive amount of discomfort and uncomfortableness, pain with that channel, right? If I continue eating sweets, eating all these things, I’m going to be overweight. I’m going to have health problems, and how’s that going to make me feel? How’s that going to hurt the people in my life, right? How are all these things gonna happen? This isn’t an easy process whatsoever. It is … As you look into your own feelings about whatever habit or behavior you’re trying to change, it can be pretty emotional as you kind of uncover some of these things why you do what you do.

But when you look at it … and this is where focus comes in, right? So, I’ll start to talk about the VBAR Method as a whole. And part of the VBAR Method … The “V” in VBAR is vision, and so a lot of your actions also are based on your vision and where your focusing. If I’m looking right in front of me, and I’m only looking at that doughnut sitting in front of me, then at that point the pleasure of eating the sugary sweet is outweighing everything else because I don’t have … a lot of the pain and discomfort doesn’t come at that point, right? It comes later on down the road. So, you have to have a vision, and so you have to be looking out on the horizon. If I look out on horizon, then I’m actually seeing all of the pain associated with the action that I’m taking right now and I can actually see the pleasure with not doing it because now I’ve created this new channel where it’s like, “You know what? I feel so much better.”

When I actually eat a lot of sugar, the strange thing is I get drained of energy. It affects me in a weird way, and so I don’t like that. I don’t like being drained of energy, right? But when I’m eating good foods, I feel more fit. I feel more attractive. I am better emotionally and physically with the people in my life, my wife, all those kind of things. So, I can start to associate the things that I want, the things that will bring me joy and pleasure as I’m looking farther down the road. So, that’s why it’s so important to look at where your vision is, right? If you have no vision, right, if you don’t really have a clear vision of where you want your life to go down the road, then you’re always living by the whim of what’s right in front of you.

When you’re making choices based on what’s right in front of you in that moment, things that actually will bring you discomfort or bring you joy necessarily in that short term won’t necessarily bring that in the long term, that next day, the next week. There’s a lot of things that could bring you joy in the moment, but down the road not so much. So, I want to give you kind of a brief overview of what I call the VBAR Method. This is really from years and years … since I was about 23 years old … Gosh, that’s been a long time, almost 19 years. I had been slowly kind of writing different concepts and learning and all these things. I think this is a collection of what works for me, and when I’m looking at what I’m trying to achieve whatever it may be, right, when I’m looking at the life I want to live, when I’m looking at how I feel each day and what I’m doing — all those different things …

When I’m thinking about all those things, I’m analyzing generally these four kind of areas. So, VBAR … just like it sounds, a V-B-A-R, stands for vision, belief, action and results. So, when I’m looking at whatever it may be, whether it’s a relationship, whether it’s my business, whether it’s a health or fitness goal I’m often analyzing where I’m at in these four different areas. What is my vision in this area? Is it very clear? Do I have a clear picture of what I’m going to be, right? When I’m looking at it and saying, “You know what, this is where I’m going to end up. There’s no question about it. This is my vision. This is where I’m going to go,” and then I look at my beliefs and I say, “You know what? Some of these beliefs I have right now don’t necessarily support in a constructive way me reaching this vision, so how can I change those beliefs to help better kind of construct the path that will lead my thoughts, my emotions and my actions in the right direction to ultimately achieving the results I want?”

So, if you go from beliefs to the actions that you need to take and you look at, “Okay, here’s the actions that I need to take to get there,” often it’s really clear, right? We often know what we need to do. It’s more of how do we get in the habit of doing it? You’ll hear the excuse a lot from yourself, from others, that they don’t have the time. That’s bull. Bull. Just all around bull. It’s your priorities, right? For most people, the average person spends over an hour on social media. There’s an hour right there. A lot of people spend time watching TV, doing other things. You can get up earlier. There’s all these different things. So, it’s more of what is a priority for you. There’s other things. There’s ways you can organize your life, so all of that is not something that you need to make an excuse. One thing you’ll hear from me often is you can make excuses or you can make progress, but you can’t make both. All right?

So, when you look at that and you go, “You know what? I have this clear vision of where I’m gonna be,” and you start looking at aligning your beliefs with that based on what actions that you need to take to get there. A lot of times there’s gonna be discomfort in getting to this point, right, because when you’re looking at the water of a river it’s often following the path of least resistance. So, in that, your thoughts, emotions and actions are that water, and so you need to take that willpower, right, in combination with understanding the supporting beliefs that is guiding that and you need to use that just like … Ultimately, your path was originally created over multiple actions that you took along with beliefs, things that kind of were either put onto you, into you, things that you absorbed and ultimately kind of created this path. But over time, just like dripping water over a long period of time will create a channel, you with your actions will also start doing the same thing.

What you have to do is change your beliefs and use some serious focus just like a … there’s a … What’s it called? A high pressure, basically, water jet can cut through like 12 inches of steel, and it’s basically taking water under a super high pressure with a little bit of, I think, sediment in there. I don’t … I’m not an expert on this for sure. But it actually can cut through steel, 12-inch thick steel. And so, you need to think about how can you put all of this focus and pressure in creating this new channel and associating the discomfort with taking the old channel, right? Part of that is looking long term and understanding how that’s going to affect you in the long term. And then, as you go through actions and you look at results, an important part of the results, one of the most important parts of this is how do you define everything, right, ’cause two people could have the same experience and come out saying two totally different things.

I can go up and say, “Hey, it’s my first time really doing public speaking,” and I go out and I speak in front of we’ll say 50 people. I can go up there and say, “You know what?” Afterwards I can say, “I felt like I could have done a lot better had I prepared more, had I done other things, but overall I’m happy I did it. It was a great experience for me, and I want to get better at it. I’m okay that I didn’t necessarily do as well as I wanted to do because it was my first time. That’s fine. I’m gonna get better and I’m gonna learn from this and do better next time.” And then another person could have that same experience and say, “You know what? That was the worst experience of my life. The whole crowd was staring at me, and I said some things that were awkward and it was just so uncomfortable and I’m never gonna do that again,” right?

So, how you define and assess your results and how you look at that and say, ” You know what? I’m gonna assign meaning to how this happened.” If I’m working it and trying something … and say you’re a salesperson, and you’re going out there and you’re getting all these “no’s”, that result of a “no” you could say, “Oh, you know what? This means I’m not good at this,” or it could mean, “You know what? I just haven’t got enough ‘no’s’ yet.” It all depends on how you assess and kind of define the results that you’re getting, kind of the overall meaning that you assigned to that, and then how you change to look at, “Okay. Well, how do I get better to get me closer in line to where I need to be?” ‘Cause no one, no one in the world ever started out being great at something, right? No one came out of the womb walking. It’s just not something that happens, okay? We all start out being bad at something.

And then, over time of being bad at something, we get good at it, and then eventually you can become great at it. But putting the pressure on yourself to be great at something right out the gates or not allowing yourself the vulnerability to be bad at something, not … Basically, it’s more of a … I don’t want to necessarily use the term “weakness”, but people think of vulnerability as weakness, and I honestly think of the lack of vulnerability as a weakness because if you don’t allow yourself to actually expose yourself and get out there to being vulnerable, then you’ll never get to that point of embracing that … being comfortable with being uncomfortable, that drive where it’s like, “You know what? I got to constantly get in positions where I’m a little more uncomfortable, a little more uncomfortable each day,” ’cause what it means is that you’re growing and you’re learning, right?

So, this was just a brief kind of introduction. I’m gonna go into a lot more detail in the next episodes, but I wanted to kind of give you a high level overview. If you have questions, comments, anything like that, throw it please in the comments or shoot me an email through the site — kevingetch.com. You’re gonna help by asking some of these questions because I think it’s going to help refine some of the methodologies, some of the ideas that I have because, like I said, this is new for me as well. I’m going through this with you. I’m trying to create this … write this book through kind of an audio method. But today I want to finish with a micro-action, as always. And today I want you to think about one thing that you’re uncomfortable with, and again this is a micro-action. This isn’t something massive. Go if you want to take that action. That’s totally up to you.

But even something as simple as telling someone you care about them can be hard, right, ’cause it’s vulnerable. Your spouse, your friend — just letting them know you care about them, that could be your micro-action. It could be that, “You know what? I’m uncomfortable getting up early.” It could be that, “I’m uncomfortable putting my neck out there and telling my boss that I want to learn a new skill, and I want to do this.” It could be that there’s that person that you haven’t talked to that you want to just say hi to. It could be just saying hi and smiling at someone. Whatever it is, just start with that small action of becoming comfortable with being uncomfortable. It all starts with that first drop, that little drip of a micro-action. So, go out there, think about what it is that you want to do, a small action like I said. It could be so simple as just saying hi to a stranger and smiling at them and do it.

Thanks again for listening to the Give, Grow & Be Grateful Podcast. If you received value from today’s episode, please share it and comment. Also, make sure to subscribe so that you’re updated when new episodes come out. Remember, every day you have a choice how you live. It’s not about what you get, it’s about what you give. Work on growing each day and getting out of your comfort zone, and then as you grow more you’ll be able to give more and have an abundant life and develop the habits of happiness by starting every single day with a focus on the things that you’re grateful for. I’m glad that you’re on this path with me, and make sure to choose to have a wonderful day.

Above is a video of the talk I gave at VanTalks. Below is the transcription:

One summer, when I was 12 years old, I was exploring the woods nearby my father’s farm when I stumbled across a nest on the ground with a spotted egg in it almost the size of a tennis ball.

Being the curious kid I was, I picked it up, cradled it in my t-shirt and walked it back to the farm. Where it made perfect sense to me to put it in the chicken coup with the other eggs. To my surprise, one of the hens sat on it just like it was her own egg.

A couple weeks later the egg hatched. Turns out it was an eagle egg. All of the other chickens gathered around to stare at this awkward Chicken. After a few weeks he started trying to spread his large wings and every time he did the chickens would point and laugh, because he was different. It didn’t take long for the eagle to learn not to spread his wings.

By the following summer, the eagle was walking like a chicken, bocking like a chicken and pecking at feed on the ground like a chicken. He had learned how to be a chicken. We ended up nicknaming him Cheagle, short for Chicken Eagle.

The story I’m sharing with you is clearly part fable, but it is all based on a true story. So, pay close attention.

One day Cheagle saw a shadow fly across the ground and he looked up and saw an Eagle soaring above. Something inside him changed that day. He saw this majestic bird in the sky and he felt deep inside that it was his purpose, his dream to soar through the sky just like her.

The Mother Hen said, “Cheagle, don’t listen to them, you can do anything you want if you put your mind and heart into it”.

Every day from then on out Cheagle got on top of that chicken coup and tried to fly, and every day he bit it, and every day the chickens would make fun of him. This went on for months and months.

Until one day another Eagle soared above…. And Cheagle somehow got up the courage to get on top of the roof of the farmhouse. All of the chickens gathered around genuinely concerned for him and told him, “Cheagle it’s too risky, you’re going to get hurt… just give up”, but he wasn’t about to give up. Cheagle ran as fast as he could, spread his wings and jumped off the side of the house and started to flap his wings. He started plummeting towards the ground… he flapped his wings harder and harder and just before he was about to hit the ground he closed his eyes and flapped his wings one last time. Realizing he hadn’t hit the ground he opened his eyes to see that he was gliding over the chicken coupe. He flapped his wings harder and harder and rose into the sky to join the other eagle.

I always enjoyed telling this story to my kids, but one thing I’ve never told them is… I AM CHEAGLE,

When I was younger, I felt awkward at times. I was overweight, and other kids made fun of me. And like many kids do, I started trying to fit in, to be cool, to conform. I started to build the wall we all build.

You see, our natural human instinct is to avoid pain. It doesn’t matter whether it’s physical or emotional pain our brain treats it the same. If you’ve ever touched a hot stove, you learn quickly you never want that to happen again.

Have you ever been in love? Had your heart broken? If you have, you know it’s a pain much worse than touching a hot stove. We tell ourselves, I’m never going to let that happen again and we build this wall around ourselves.

This wall helps shield us, hide our emotions, our shame. It helps us fit in, protects our vulnerable spots. Some of us spend our entire lives behind this wall never exposing our true selves.

If you remember just one thing from my talk today I want you to remember this.

Everything you desire

You see, the problem is the same thing that are instincts are telling us to do to protect ourselves is preventing us from getting what we desire most in life. And the more we build this wall to avoid what we fear the farther we push away what we desire most.

My mother was a truly amazing woman! She really did tell me, you can do anything you want if you put all of your heart and mind into it.

You see, my mother helped instill in me the core belief that if I work hard enough and put my mind and heart behind something, no matter what it was I could make it happen. And I chose to believe it.

That’s when I realized that our beliefs control our path in life. I started working on changing my beliefs, beliefs I carried about myself, about others and about the world. I realized that anyone who gets good at anything has to be bad at it long enough. I changed how I viewed failure, fear and pain. They were no longer these horrible things, but they’re a part of the process that we all need to go through.

And boy have I experienced pain. I mean, I’ve fallen on my face more times than I care to remember. If there’s anything I learned after two failed business start-ups, almost losing my home after falling on financially hard times, having my heart broken, after I embarrassed myself on stage in front of 500 people and I lost my mother to cancer a month before my 31st birthday… if there’s any secret in life, it is to just get up and keep moving forward.

When I had my heart broken, it was really painful. I wanted to close up and not let anyone in. But instead, I made the decision that I was going to lean into the pain, the fear, because I wanted to find this amazing, beautiful, independent woman that loved me, for me, and all my imperfections.

When I met Jennifer (my wife), it was one of the most exhilarating and scary moments of my life. and I’ve jumped out of an airplane at 15K feet, but when I jumped out of that plane and was plummeting through the air I didn’t feel anywhere near as vulnerable as when I was falling, in love with her. But that’s what you have to do, even though you’re scared, even though the “chicken” voices inside your head are saying don’t do it, you’re going to get hurt… YOU JUMP… and you hope with all of your heart that you can fly.

Now, after two failed business attempts you’d think I would have learned my lesson… and well actually I did. You see those failures taught me important lessons that prepared me to start our current company, Webfor, and because of the beliefs I had developed and all the failures and pain I had endured I was able to put together one of the best teams in the world of web design and digital marketing and together we’ve been able to build a successful company that has helped 100’s of businesses and 1,000’s of employees.

I mentioned before that our beliefs control our path in life.

You see our everyday thoughts, actions, and emotions are like the water of a river. The bed of the river is made up of our base survival instincts and core beliefs. Just like water is directed by the channel of the riverbed… your thoughts, emotions, and actions are guided by your survival instincts and core beliefs.

There are layers upon layers of core beliefs stacked with supporting beliefs that have formed over years and years. Many of these beliefs are so far under the surface you don’t even know you have them or why you even have them and most you didn’t consciously choose, but nevertheless, they are guiding your path in life.

The good news is beliefs are just mental constructs, that with work, can be reinforced or deconstructed. Or you can choose new beliefs, beliefs that actually benefit you. Beliefs that help guide you to the BEST you and to living a fulfilled life.

Belief is one of the most powerful forces on our planet and when we become conscious and start to control our beliefs rather than letting them control us, we awaken a part of ourselves… a part of ourselves that this world desperately needs!

Part of the moral of the story a lot of people miss is how others helped inspire Cheagle to chase his dreams… to dare to fly… to fail… to push through pain, embarrassment… and to get up and try again…

I’ve had so many people inspire me throughout my life… my wife, my children, co-workers, clients… but one of the people who had the biggest impact on my life was my mother.

She used to tell me…. “The smallest of actions can have a ripple effect, like how dropping a pebble in a pond can create thousands and thousands of ripples that spread across the entire pond.”

Each one of us is impacting the world every day… whether we like it or not. The question isn’t can you change the world, but are you making it better?

I said this story was about me, but The Truth is… We are all cheagle.

At one time or another we are all chickens in life, we conform, afraid to be different… afraid to stand out, worried about what others might think of us… but, you should never shrink to fit others views based off their own fears or perceived limitations. Each one of you is special…. And to (live a fulfilled life) you must let down your wall, expose yourself to the pain, failure, embarrassment… you must believe in yourself and have the courage to act in the face of these fears and never give up!

Don’t ask yourself… who am I to dare to be great… to be special… Instead, ask yourself… who are you not to be? This WORLD needs you… WE need you… to be your BEST you!

I encourage all of you to “Expose Yourself”… in the right way… and let your own light shine so bright, that it lights the path for others and inspires them.

Thank you!

Give, Grow & Be Grateful is my life’s motto and I’m in the process of turning it into a book by documenting a large portion of it in podcast format. To get the most out of it, please make sure you start with this introduction episode and go through the episodes in order. Your involvement and input is important to the final product so please get involved (subscribe, comment below, and share).

In this episode:

Episode Notes:

My commitment to you. I will be producing a new episode each week for 52 weeks or until I feel I’ve poured out my soul into this book. You will get 100% raw transparency from me. This is a passion project for me. I’m not doing this for profit. Any future proceeds that come from this will go towards non-profits that support our youth. In fact my company, Webfor is sponsoring the Toast for Teens event hosted by the Boys and Girls Club of SW WA coming up in a few weeks.

How can you support the show, help others and help yourself going forward? First, make sure you subscribe. Please share the show on social and if a specific episode or comment resonates with you, please comment and/or share that episode with others.

At the end of each episode I will ask you to take what I call a micro-action. This is something small that will not take much time on your part, but overtime all of these micro-actions will act like a snowball rolling down a hill and you will gain momentum towards your goals.

A commitment I ask of you is that you take the minute or two to do this small micro action. Today’s micro-action – Subscribe to the show and either listen to the first episode or set a time that you’re going to listen to it. Easy peezy… right!

I am excited to be on this path with you and I want to thank you for your time and attention. I promise I will not waste that gift!