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I’m Nino Prodan. And this is the smashes ism podcast. This week, I talked a lot about facing your emotions, but not only facing them, also using them. Because in these days being stuck inside, with so much uncertainty, it’s hard to hide from your emotions. It’s hard to get away from them to distract yourself. So why not take the opportunity now, to learn how to deal with them to practice the skill to grow the skill to learn how to utilize your emotions, to gain knowledge and insight. You know, there’s that phrase from Spider Man back when Tobey Maguire was doing it. And it’s that with great power comes great responsibility. And I want to tell you that emotions are great power and to wield them correctly. You have to take the responsibility and learn to To use them, because if you don’t, they’ll be used on you. Because that’s what happens with the news. With politics. all they’re doing is trying to ignite your emotions to get a response out of you so they can dictate what you do, how you think how you act. If you think you’re in control of everything you do all day long. I want to ask you, have you ever zoned out while you were doing something? Have you ever zoned out while you’re driving somewhere and actually started driving the wrong way, maybe even ended up somewhere where you didn’t intend to be? See, we’re not in conscious control of everything we do all day long. Nobody is I’m not and I work in this realm all the time. If you’re in denial of it, then I want you to stop lying to yourself. Most of our days we spend running unconsciously, most of our tasks we do unconsciously. If you have a habit. It’s unconscious programming. It is conscious But once it’s established, you usually do things unconsciously, you drive unconsciously. For the most part, you might pick the destination. But do you think about every turn of the wheel? When you walk? Do you think about taking every step? Or do you think about where you’re going? And sometimes you don’t even think that. So if you do all that unconsciously, all the time, every day, how many other things are happening without you being aware of it? Are you planning ahead for things? Are you reacting to things as they happen? Because if you’re reacting to things, you’re running more unconsciously, than you might think. And when you run unconsciously reacting to things, you’re running purely on emotions. So start to tend to those emotions, start to understand them. That way you can make decisions on things and run more consciously aware of everything that’s going around you, going on around you and also know when someone’s trying to To manipulate you trying to elicit a reaction out of you. And if it’s something you want to do, then you decide to do it. But make it your choice your decision. When you’re around loved ones, interact with them consciously interact with them the way that you want to. That way you can spend more time with them being how you would ideally want to be with love and compassion. And decide where your attention goes. And do more of what you love and live life the way that you want to live it. I hope you take all this to heart and really start looking at your emotions and turning them into your superpower. I’m Nino Prodan, and I will talk to you next week.

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Welcome back. I’m Nino Prodan. And this is the smashes system podcast. Yesterday I left off telling you about how I contained my anger, and grew my relationships because of it. But I also paid a consequence. And it was my health. But it wasn’t only my health, there was also a fire to life, that I lost a little edge that I had. And it was a part of me that. if I could harness without losing my control to it could benefit everybody. And I realized this as I started learning to understand my anger, I talked about how I began coaching. Well, I began training to be a coach. And it was during that time that I started to learn to understand my anger. instead of pushing it down and trying to control it. I started to learn to listen Because my anger was a part of me, it is a part of me. It’s a part of everyone. It’s an indicator, a barometer of a situation. See, all our emotions are like the gauges in a cockpit. They’re telling us what’s going on in the world around us. What’s the climate, what’s the wind speed, it’s telling us about our environment. And if we start to learn to listen, if we learn to harness the input from our emotions, you start to understand the world around us better. You start to understand ourselves better. And we also start to take control of our decisions. I learned that I no longer had to surrender control of myself to my emotions. Once I learned to harness the knowledge, I was able to act the way I wanted to. Not letting someone else control the way I acted. Not letting a situation control the way I acted, but choosing consciously how to act. My anger no longer was my enemy. It became my friend to inform me when something’s going wrong, and help energize me to deal with situations when it was necessary. I learned to listen to my emotions. That way I could use them to be a better person to be the person that I would idolize. And it all started with listening to my emotions. I’m Nino Prodan, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

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Welcome back to the semester system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. Yesterday, I was talking about how anger used to consume me how it could steal the joy out of my days and weigh heavily on relationships. And it made me think about a relationship I once had, where we went on a road trip to Pittsburgh from Cleveland, Ohio. So it’s about a two hour drive. We were going there to meet up with her friend, hang out for a night and then drive her back with us. So we get there. We have a wonderful night hanging out, go to leave the next day and I start driving. And as I’m driving her friend starts complaining about my driving, sometimes even yelling distractingly and as she does this, my temper is just simmering, and as it goes on, I finally got to the breaking point and let loose a string of interest. salts that silence the car for the next two hours. And upon driving home, I grabbed my bag. And I said goodbye. Know that I not I did not say goodbye for the sake of seeing you later, I said goodbye. And yes, I know this relationship is over after the way I acted. Now thankfully, nobody was hurting us. And it was a newer relationship. So it wasn’t somebody that was depending on me and had a lot of trust built in me. But what I realized after that was that I needed to get a hold of my anger. And so I started digging into it. Why am I so angry? I asked myself, and what it brought me back to was what I learned from my father. When I was a kid. punishments didn’t just come from wrongdoing, they came from how someone else felt. And so what I’ve learned is that when Someone made me feel something. They were responsible for my anger, and they were deserving of my anger. But I realized that this wasn’t right. So what I had to do was start to reprogram what I was thought, what I was taught what what my upbringing taught me about anger, one that it was okay to unleash it on people to that somebody else was responsible for it. And they deserve the punishment for making me feel that way. And so what I started doing was containing it, controlling it, I’ve built up my willpower to the point where I could stuff it down far enough that it wouldn’t affect the people around me. And I started seeing my relationships become stronger. I started seeing people happier around me, and then I got into a really long relationship and was able to build love Trust and kindness into my relationship. I thought everything was great. But for some reason, during that time I started putting on weight. My hair started getting thinner. And I got to the point of being pre diabetic. And I thought, Oh, it’s my eating or I’m not getting enough exercise. And so I started exercising, and I lost some of the weight. But I was still feeling stressed in my body. And I was still diagnosed pre diabetic. My blood pressure wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good. Like 135 over 90 ish of my blood sugar was about 110 fasted, so something was up. And thankfully right at that point, I was getting into coaching. And what I learned during coaching Was that your mind and body are both linked on that. One affects the other and what I learned about how anger was affecting me, changed my life forever. And I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.

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Welcome back to The smashes system podcast, I’m Nino Prodan. A while back, I used to have a problem controlling my temper when someone did something wrong, or I felt like someone was trying to offend me, I would lash out. And I would do on that anger all the time. And if I didn’t lash out enough earlier on, sometimes I would hold it in. And that way, I could save it up, and then find a way to teach people a lesson. help them understand what they did end, give them what they deserved. And that would really focus and stew in that anger. It would consume me consume my attention for most of the day, sometimes, sometimes days on end, I would think about all the scenarios about what I should have done, or how they should have acted if they were acting appropriately. The treating me correctly, are all the witty quips that I could have used, sometimes even thought of ways to have just avoided the whole interaction to start with. And I would tell myself, I can’t believe they would make me this angry. Why would they want to make me angry like this? Did they not respect me enough? But I started to realize how much time it was taking away from me how much my attention was going towards being the person that I didn’t want to be. I didn’t feel good. being angry, didn’t feel good getting back at people after the fact. Yeah, it felt good to plan it all out, and then put it in the place and see them experience pain and and then I would feel bad afterward. I would say why did I do that? They didn’t deserve that. Yeah, I was mad for them making me mad. But it’s kind of like that saying have an iPhone. an AI leaves everybody blind. And that started to come into my mind. Like, where was this retribution anger gonna take me to in my life. And I started thinking about how much of my life it was taking away. How much of my time that I spent stewing on it could have been out enjoying myself, spending time with friends and family, spending time having fun and enjoying myself, rather than cycling through a loop. Sir, realizing that if I continued on with this kind of behavior, I could push away my close friends, make it hard to find new friends, push away family and anybody else that was that’s there to support me. I said to myself, I don’t want to lose these people. They’re important to me. So I started on my quest to get a hold of my anger, to be able to control it and stop it from ruining the things that I hold most dear in my life. That’s the people, the relationships. And what I found, I believe not only saved my relationships, but made them stronger and continues to strengthen my relationships, not only with the people I have known, but with everybody that I meet, and I’ll tell you more about that tomorrow.

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Welcome back to The smashes system podcast, I’m Nino Prodan. Today I want to talk about one of the systems that I use for getting myself to take action when it’s tough or when I don’t feel like it when I’m physically exhausted. You know, if you’re working a nine to find job all day, and then you have to cook dinner, and if you have kids, you have to take care of your kids. After all, that it’s really hard to continue pushing yourself. And all you want to do is just rest, take a break, relax, recover. And of course, you do need to take care of yourself. But sometimes, especially at the beginning of starting a business or starting to work on a new project, you have to push a little harder to get momentum to start and get going. Sometimes when you’re Starting things off, there’s a high learning curve or it takes a while Get comfortable with what you’re doing. Because it’s new. And if you have to fit it in along with the rest of the work you have to do all day. And maybe it’s not something that you can insert at the beginning of your day, before you start working on everything and you have to insert it at the end of your day, I get one trick away right there. But if you do have to wait until the end of the day to do it, sometimes it’s really hard to push. And so other than doing it first thing in the morning and getting it out of the way before everything you get in your way. If you can’t do that, then maybe you want to use this system. And that’s to first create a goal, create something that you’re striving towards and create it. So it’s something bigger that you can’t just accomplish really fast. Something that you have to take multiple steps to achieve something that you have to create a routine to achieve. So and that’s part two is to create Create a routine to achieve that large goal when you work at something every day, even if it’s a small amount of effort, but it’s repeated very often, it makes a bigger impact than you can see, while you’re doing your small daily tasks, and routines. I like to compare this to leasing a car and driving it to work every day and then driving it back home every day. It may not be that far of a drive, but after a whole year, it really adds up. And most of the time, it actually puts people over their leases, acceptable miles for the year, because small things add up to be big things as long as they’re repeated and consistent. And the third part of the system is to put significance behind what you’re doing. Make it something that’s important for you. It’s important for your family. It’s bigger than you has to be bigger than you. And something that’s important. Because there might be days where you just don’t feel like it. You’re tired, you don’t feel well, you’ve had a really rough emotional day. That’s when this comes into play, and helps you continue to keep up that routine to keep the consistency. Because you know, to achieve the big thing, you have to do all the small things. So when you make it about something bigger than you someone else, it helps you find that inner strength that you have inside of you to be able to push through the tough and difficult times. Because you do have that inner strength. Just need to use it. For something more than just yourself. I’m Nino Prodan and I will talk to you tomorrow.

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Welcome back to The smashed system podcast. I’m your host, Nino Prodan. This week, we spoke a lot about the impact of the corona virus on our daily lives and the uncertainty that it has created. And I’ve given you a couple tools to deal with it. And what all that really comes down to is creating systems. And what those systems are is ways to take advantage of the way your brain normally reacts, things that you can repeat to get a predictable result. See, as a kid, I used to forget my keys all the time. I used to forget things all the time. When I was leaving the house, someone would remind me my mom, my dad, my sister would say hey, don’t forget this. And I would say okay, and then I will go do one thing. And guess what? I would forget thing that they told me about. So what I did was create a system. So I wouldn’t forget things. I was leaving the house. I will put things by my shoes, because my shoes were the last thing to go on. If something was by my shoes, there was about a 99% chance that I would remember it. And then I went to create other ones that were similar, like checking for my keys as I was about to close the door, because I was notorious for locking myself out. And then along the same lines is I got tired of looking for my keys all the time, I kept losing them. And I thought about it and it eight hours out of my life, looking for keys. And so what I did is I started putting my keys into a basket along with my wallet, and anything else that I carried on me every time I left the house. So when I went to leave the house, everything was in the same location. Now everything isn’t foolproof because sometimes you get distracted, you’re carrying things into the house and then you forget to put stuff in the basket but The most part, these systems work, because they’re based on triggers. And triggers can be good or bad. Psychological triggers are used to manipulate people, but you can also use it to manipulate yourself. You can use it, to create habits within yourself, to act a certain way to think a certain way to feel a certain way to remember things. If you forget things all the time, you can do like I did, and start creating triggers to jolt your memory to think about what it needs to do before leaving the house. Or when you’re getting home from doing something and you want to feel a certain way. You want to put the day behind you because it’s stressful. You want to put your focus on your family. Create a trigger as soon as you walk through the door, going through the doorway could be your trigger, and you can see yourself shedding the skin of the day off as you walk. through the door and becoming a new person, you can imagine the stress swing on your shoulders and as soon as soon as you walk through the door, you could see a fall off and repeat it every single time you walk through the door, put a sticky on the door to remind you. That way, your brain starts to do it automatically as you continue doing it. You could also use this right now, if you’re working from home, say you’re having trouble concentrating. So set aside an area for yourself that’s only dedicated to time for work, and do your work there. That way. Every time you sit in that seat in that spot, it activates your brain to know that it’s time to work. Don’t do anything else while you’re sitting there. And also get help from everybody. Let them know if they see you sitting there. It’s not acceptable to bother you. And one way to do this too is to limit The time that way, when you’re focused, you’re not being bothered. But then you give it a break, so that you can relax and pull away and also not interrupt work time while you’re sitting in the chair or sitting in that spot. And soon enough, your brain will recognize that spot as the place to get work done. And then when you sit there, you’ll actually become more prod

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Welcome back to The smashes system podcast. I’m your host, Nino Prodan. This week, we’ve been talking about dealing with the uncertainties that have been given to us with a Corona virus. And today, I want to dig further into that by talking about the what ifs, the what if this happens, what if that happens? A lot of the time these concerns are valid. There’s something that you need to think about. So you can take action. But the problem is, most of the time, we get stuck in a loop and keep thinking about all the bad things that can happen. But we do nothing with those questions. Also, we don’t validate the questions or the problems that come up. We don’t actually analyze the concerns and see if there’s something that we can do about it. So that’s what we’re going to dig into today. Instead of letting all these thoughts run amok in our mind and stress us out, let’s start To use our concern as a constructive way to solve problems, human imagination is one of the most powerful problem solving machines. But to harness it, we need to organize it. So if you catch yourself starting to spin in a cycle of what ifs, take some time out, and start writing them down. Go through everything you’re imagining, and write it down. That way, you can see the problems that lie in that what if, and start to address them, start to think of solutions to the problems that come up. So first, write down the big What if, or if you have a lot of them going through your head, write them all down. And once you’ve done that, start to write down the follow up what ifs. And once you’ve done that, I want you to step away. We’re not going to problem solve right away. I want you to step away Do something that takes your mind off that you haven’t written down now, so you won’t need to dwell on it. If you’re in an area where you’re isolated enough to go on a walk or go on a walk, if you’re stuck inside at home, do something active, get your body moving, do a light workout, or some yoga or some breathing exercises to help your body release any tension. And there should be a good 20 to 30 minutes minimum of downtime where you’re not thinking about this kind of stuff. And then after that, you’re going to come back to what you wrote down and start looking at it and seeing which concerns are valid first, which things that you wrote down have a possibility of happening. And anything that doesn’t, I want you to cross it out, say, okay, I’ve listened to you. You’re not valid. Thanks for playing. Then I want you to start going down through your list and writing out solutions. To every concern that you have, one of your concerns is you won’t have enough food. So your solution is to find a whole bunch of low cost calorie dense food that can be stored to stash away in your house. So then the next time you’re out, you can go buy a 25 pound bag of rice. And then once you’re done going through everything, if there’s stuff that you couldn’t solve, I want you to start researching it online. Start to Google, what if this, or how do I do this? That way you can start answering the things that you need to answer. Start to create solutions. That way you can prepare in advance for some things, as in prevention, and then other things you can prepare for in advance to address it. create solutions to all your what ifs. That way those concerns aren’t holding you down from the current moment from your life. Right now, that way you can live it without the stress without the uncertainty because you know how to solve problems in advance. I hope this helps you create some peace of mind during all the uncertainty. I’m Nino Prodan, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

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Welcome back to The smashes system podcast. This is Nino Prodan. This week, we’ve been talking about what steps you need to take during this uncertain time. And Monday, I talked about getting everything off your mind and dumping everything from your mind onto paper. So you can organize it and get it off your mind. So you stop worrying about it. Stop trying to answer those questions and put it in order so you can start taking action. And yesterday, I talked about grounding yourself in a morning routine, setting off your day, right? With the right mindset, taking care of yourself so that you can show up in your day the way you want to. Well, today I want to talk about further putting worries to rest. And one way to do that when it’s uncertain like it is now is to look at your finances and be honest with you. You know, now is a really good time to audit and see where you’re putting your money. What are you spending your money on? Is it something that’s actually worthwhile? Or is that something that you thought was a good idea and you never use. So the first step right now is to go through your bills to go through your credit card statements, and see where you are spending your money. Not just where you think you’re spending your money. Start writing everything down, put it in a spreadsheet. That way you can calculate what you’re spending. And once you get everything written down, once you understand where all your money is going, start to look at what you actually use. How many things are you subscribed to that you pay for, but don’t use or if you do use something, how many times a month do you use it? How much value do you get out of it? Is it something that is worthwhile to you? Or was it a really good idea at one point, but never put to use. And there’s one thing that I really want to talk to you about here too is not to beat yourself up about things. Don’t think, Oh man, I’ve wasted all this money on this up until this point, I haven’t used it. Don’t worry about it. If you haven’t used it to this point, just look at cutting it, don’t beat yourself up over not using it. And don’t think now that you’re aware of it, that you’re going to use it out of nowhere. If you haven’t used it to this point, it’s just not going to be used. Just cut it. If you find, then real need to use it at some point and subscribe to it again. Now, if you’re not just working from home, but have also been laid off, now’s the time to actually drastically change your spending and start to really look at what provides you real value what provides you necessary value and what can you cut, don’t think it’s going to be forever. That way you don’t hold on to unnecessary cerie things, look at the things that you would like to do and which things you currently do. If cutting something will stop you from doing something that you don’t like to do, say you watch a lot of TV and you wouldn’t like to watch a lot of TV, then maybe just cable internet and not cable TV would be a good answer to that. Start looking at how cleaning house can actually help clean up your habits can help you start concentrating on the things that you want to concentrate on focusing on the things that are important to you in life. And not just for you end up by default. What provides you value for the things that you do value? And how do the things that you subscribe to shape your habits? Which habits do you want? Which habits Do you not want? make your decisions on what you want. Now is a time to start cleaning up your spending. Start looking at the value that you receive. Start looking at the habits that you want and design your spending accordingly. I’m Nino Prodan. Please take care. I will talk to you tomorrow.

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Welcome back to The smashes system podcast. I’m Nino Prodan. This week, I’ll be talking a little bit about what to do now that the world has been flipped upside down yesterday I talked about how to kind of sort everything out Now that everything’s being thrown at you coming at you like 100 miles an hour and what to do to get all those thoughts out of your brain? No, I hope you really follow through and you’ve gotten things out of your brain so you can kind of focus on what you need to do and start getting yourself prepared. Start taking care of yourself, start taking care of your family. Give yourself the ability to distance yourself so you can take care of yourself. And today, I want to talk about what to do to start having a little bit of normalcy in your life. How do you get yourself to a point where you’re not getting up and freaking out all day long until you go to bed. And what I found that really helped me as I traveled the world for the last year and a half is if you get a good morning routine down Just a couple of things to kind of ground yourself in a little bit of routine, a little bit of predictability kind of starts to set the tone for the rest of the day. And the cool thing is right now, if you’re working from home, you’re not commuting, so you have a little more time to yourself. So why not use that time to calm your brain down, to set your intentions for the day, and actually have a little time to yourself and take care of yourself. Now, if your job isn’t letting you work from home right now, you’ve been laid off or something like that, but you’re still at home. This is a perfect opportunity for you to get a routine together and a perfect reason for it. Because your whole world has been flipped upside down. So what I’m going to do is instead of give you a whole bunch of options, I’m going to just give you a general outline of what a morning routine usually looks like. So when you first wake up, you want to take care of three things, you want to take care of your mental state, your emotional state and your physical state. So you could start off drinking a glass of water, and then doing something mental, or maybe even something physical. It’s all up to you. Now a couple of the mental things that people do is meditation, just take a little bit of time to start focusing on how much grateful for or if you actually have a meditation practice or practice yoga or something like that, you can start doing that. Another mental exercise you can do is setting your intention for the day. Who is it that you want to be today? What things would you like to accomplish? How would you like to react to difficult situations, if you start to plan what you’re going to do in advance, when things happen? In the moment, your brain will already be primed and how it’s going to react. Then after or even before the mental things, one, two physical things. So you want to take care of your physical body by just getting a little movement in. It doesn’t have to be anything too vigorous. You could do stretching or yoga, or a couple bodyweight exercises just to get your heart rate up a little bit. It actually works even better than coffee to wake you up in the morning. And now mind you, this is all right when you wake up, might want to do a more advanced workout, and then take a shower or take a shower beforehand to get your day started. But this is all what you do initially. And it shouldn’t take more than, say 20 minutes at least to start, you know, you might want to add things on later on some journaling and that kind of stuff. But if you’re just starting off, keep it simple. And then as you cement some things into place, then you Start adding things on and grow more habits to benefit. I hope this helps in this tough time. I will talk to you tomorrow.

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Welcome back to The smashes system podcast. This is Nino Prodan. Today I want to talk about one of the tricks that I use when everything’s chaotic. And this is especially helpful in stuff like what’s going on right now. You know, there’s lots of chaos going on, and you are totally thrown out of your regular routine. And so you feel Off Balanced, kind of like antsy or edgy, stressed out something, something’s not right. And this is one trick I use, and I have used for a really long time to start to get everything back in order. And what I do is I do what’s called a brain dump. And way back in the day, I used to go down to the beach at night, sit there by myself, listening to the waves crash, and just write down everything that came to mind. And that’s really what you want to do now. not go to the beach and everything, but just get everything off of your mind. And what happens is once you get everything written down on paper, once it’s solid on something else, your brain actually stops trying to solve all those problems all at the same time. It realizes that you said, Oh, yeah, this is important. I’m going to get it down so I don’t have to hold on to it. Now. I know it’s going to be addressed now that it’s on this list. And so that’s the first part, you want to just start writing down everything that you possibly can. But sometimes that’s kind of hard to do, because you don’t have prompts where you might think that you’re going to forget something. Well, the first thing is, don’t worry about it. Just keep writing. And once you get to the point where you can’t think of any more then start bringing out the prompts. But the first step is just to give yourself as much time as you need to start writing everything down. If you don’t have a lot of time that You know, start with five minutes. Once you get started, it just keeps coming and it might keep going throughout the day. And so you just keep a notepad or something that right on nearby that way you can get it down. But if you do have a lot of time and you can really just get all this out and sort everything, then that’s even better. So once once you just get everything out that that’s Top of Mind, then you start using prompts. So you think about maybe some appointments that you have, right now those they’re probably all going to be online, but write it down. You know, anything that comes to mind when you think about appointments, think about all the things that you wish you could do if you had the time. Think about all the maintenance that you need to do on things on yourself on your house, car computer, things that you need to clean up or put an order or organize. Think about any upcoming birthdays or trips that you have planned right now they’re probably all canceled but you know in a year, maybe a trip The books are start looking into it. Where would you like to go? Think about stuff that you’d like to do stuff that you want to do stuff for you stuff that you want to learn books that you want to read, stuff that you want to write, or things that you want to learn, like take classes on brain dump about finances, about money about what might be weighing on you, or what you’d like to organize and get a better understanding of, you know, one thing that comes to mind to right now is it with all the long term stockpiling that we need to have going into the next couple of weeks, possibly a couple of months, is you know what supplies that you need to have a lot of which food items would you like, which toiletries Do you need more than just toilet paper? You got to start thinking about deodorant shampoo and that kind of stuff. What do you have to do for work? Who do you have to email? Who do you have to start setting up projects with? Do you need to set up a home office? How What do you need for the home office? What would