The Daily Helping

Today our expert guest is Rachel Richards, a 27-year old former financial advisor who’s made a name for herself in the personal finance realm when she quit her job in 2019 and retired with over $10,000 a month in passive income. She’s the best-selling author of “Money Honey” and “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement.” She’s been featured on The Penny Hoarder and the New York Times and has been contracted to speak at several colleges. Her money lessons have helped thousands of millennials work their way out of financial despair. She’s done the impossible—making the topic of money management fun, entertaining, and simple.

Being financially responsible from a young age, Rachel and her husband were able to buy a duplex in Kentucky after graduating from college debt-free. They saved up enough money for a downpayment in a few years and began their real estate journey. In that same year, Rachel also published her first book, “Money Honey,” which became another valuable income stream. By last year, they had 35 rental units and two books making significant amounts of money and allowing Rachel to retire. Now, she wants to help others duplicate what she’s done.

Everyone’s situations are going to be different, and your path likely won’t be exactly the same as Rachel’s, but she does have some advice for getting started. The first thing you need to do, before you start thinking about passive income, is to make sure everything else is in order financially—that your high-interest debts are paid off, you have money in emergency savings, and that you’re prepared for when there is a recession. The next step is to start thinking of how you can diversify your income. If one piece of your income dries up, you still have other income streams coming in. And that’s where you start thinking of passive income.

When you’re first starting out with passive income, the first question to ask yourself is: Do you have more time or more money? If your answer is neither, ask yourself which you can free up more of, because you will need one or the other to create passive income. If you’re trying to free up money there are two main approaches: Spending less or making more. Reducing your expenses is important but there’s a hard limit to how much you can do there. The flip side of that is increasing your income, which has unlimited potential.

Rachel’s main avenues for passive income were through real estate and book royalties, but those are far from the only options. In her book, “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement,” Rachel outlines 28 different passive income models—there is something out there for everyone, and you only need to find the one or two that work for you. Coin-operated vending machines and laundromats are two popular models of passive income. If you have a skill that you are knowledgeable in you can create an online course and generate income through that. There are so many options, and there is something for everyone.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“Anybody can do this. I am no more special or smart or hardworking than anybody else out there. Anyone at any age and on any income can absolutely achieve financial independence.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: moneyhoneyrachel.com
• Passive Income Bonus Kit: moneyhoneyrachel.com/bonus
• Read: “Money Honey”
• Read: “Passive Income, Aggressive Retirement”
• Instagram: instagram.com/moneyhoneyrachel
• Facebook: facebook.com/moneyhoneyrachel

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

Today our expert guest is intimacy expert Allana Pratt, a global media personality and the go-to authority for those who’ve suffered heartbreak and are ready to live apologetically and attract an open-hearted, ideal relationship. Her vulnerability and courage landed her a featured weekly column on the Good Men Project, and she’s been featured as a guest expert at the Huffington Post, People Magazine, Forbes, CBS, Fox, and the Jenny McCarthy Show.

She is also the author of six books and hosts the edgy podcast Intimate Conversations, where listeners learn to find the relationship they deserve.

Allana got into the work she does today to take care of herself. She was a self-proclaimed people pleaser and always striving for approval and appreciation to fill this void inside of her—which she thought had to come from the outside in, not the inside out. After two divorces and a custody battle, she started to look at the common factor in both relationships—herself—and what her blind spots might be. The blind spot, she found, was that she did not have an intimate relationship with herself.

When you create an intimate relationship with yourself, it can save your marriage, help you find the right partner, make you peaceful in your skin, make sex better, and even bring in more money. It completely up-levels your life.

Creating an intimate relationship with yourself requires embracing the light as well as the dark. Most of us are addicted to something that keeps us from feeling: Facebook, porn, ice cream at 3 A.M. And since we’ve never been taught to feel, or that feelings are bad, we keep going back to these behaviors that won’t allow us to rest and be present and feel safe in our own body.

When you start to take a look at your inner self, keep this in mind:

• Stop resisting the parts of yourself that you’re judging and come into acceptance of that side of yourself.
• Assign labels or names to aspects of your identity without negative connotations. It helps identify which emotion is calling for our attention. By labeling them and acknowledging them, you can balance them within yourself and take on the positive aspects of those feelings.
• Give yourself permission to play, slow down, or create unique experiences. Some things might sound silly, gross, or illogical, but if you have the urge inside of you, decide if you can give yourself permission to do it.

Most people think their self-worth is earned from the outside in. They think that if people outside of them, or circumstances outside of their control, just behaved in a certain way, then they would feel okay on the inside. But that doesn’t work. You need to integrate the feelings within yourself and earn that self-worth from the inside.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“Do you have a thriving, intimate relationship with yourself? Do you even check in? So a simple practice you can do at the beginning of every day and the end of every day, you can have one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly and go, ‘Hey sweet thing.’ And breathe. ‘What is it that I haven’t slowed down enough to hear you say? I’m listening.’ If you begin to do this very simple, 30 seconds of your whole life at the beginning of the day and the end of the day, your inner self will go, ‘I matter. I belong. I’m enough.’ Because you care about you. And that fundamental practice will spill into all areas of your life.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: allanapratt.com
• Listen: Intimate Conversations
• Instagram: instagram.com/allanapratt
• YouTube: youtube.com/user/AlanaPratt
• Facebook: facebook.com/coachallanapratt
• Twitter: twitter.com/allanapratt

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

This is a very special episode because, instead of our usual expert guests, I am going to share with you a story of something I never imagined would happen in my life—

A few weeks ago, I suffered a stroke. I never imagined this would happen to me, so today’s episode is a little different — I want to share my experience, what I learned, and my advice to help you avoid something like this happening to you.

Here’s the story: In the middle of the night, I woke up feeling extremely restless and anxious. I grabbed the pillow out from under my wife’s head, apologized to her, and went back to sleep (which, in hindsight, is incredibly dangerous to do). Three hours later, our dog woke me up and I got dressed to go get him. I felt unsteady and groggy, but I had attributed that to my allergy medication. When I woke up in the morning, I opened my mouth and I noticed my speech was slurred, but I still blamed it on the medication. However, when we got downstairs and I tried to get the dog outside, I realized that I couldn’t figure out how to use the flashlight on my phone—and it all clicked together. I had had a stroke.

When you break your arm, you are able to roughly get a grasp on what the next few weeks of your recovery are going to look like, what modifications you are going to have to make, and when you get to return to normal. When you have a stroke, it is very different. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to return to work, to keep doing this podcast, and there’s no way to know at that moment.

The day after going to the hospital and confirming that I had a stroke, they began performing some cognitive and physical therapy tests on me, and I passed. Steps have been taken that should prevent this from happening ever again, and my recovery is going well.

This experience left me with some things that are really important for me to share:

• Like many others, I have been incredibly fearful of hospitals since the coronavirus. The precautions they were taking within the hospital, however, made me feel incredibly safe, possibly more than I would be grocery shopping. If there’s anything going on medically with you, please don’t avoid going to the hospital.
• I felt that I was in the best shape of my life when this happened, but I had continually been working after just five hours of sleep, telling myself that if I loved what I do it’s not really work. But everything takes a toll, so make sure to take breaks and recharge yourself.

It’s hard to imagine this happening to you—I sure didn’t. But I was remarkably lucky. The stress we’re under now is extreme, and it’s important to do whatever we can to mitigate our risks. Because this could happen to anyone, and hopefully with some of this advice it won’t happen to you.

The most important thing right now is to focus on balance. And balancing all areas of your life, be it relationships, be it work, be it your side hustle, whatever you’re doing in your life. You need to control the time and control the energy spent around that so that you can be well.

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Listen to The Daily Huddle: www.therealshare.com
• www.seekyourpowers.com
• www.glassdoor.com/blog/how-to-handle-mental-health-issues-in-the-workplace/
• www.therealshare.com/

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

Today our expert guest is Wade Lightheart, three-time Canadian national all-natural body-building champion who competed as a vegetarian and host of the Awesome Health Podcast. He’s one of the world's premier authorities on natural nutrition and training methods. Having majored in sports science at the University of New Brunswick, he’s authored numerous books on health, nutrition, and exercise that are sold in over 80 countries. He also serves as an advisor to the American Anti-Cancer Institute and is the co-founder and President at BiOptimizers, a digestive and health optimization company.

With the way the world has responded to the coronavirus pandemic, there has been massive economic drawbacks and disruptions to people’s daily lives—which leads to a stress response in the body. We tend to look at stress as a bad thing, but if you had no stress in your life, you would die. So how much stress is enough, and how much is too much?

The idea behind BiOptimizers is to optimize your biology. When looking at people in the military, there was a clear divide between people who came out of the experience fine and others who experienced PTSD or other ailments. The big difference between the two was the biological difference to responses to fear or danger. When we are faced with information, displaced from the physiological activation of movement, we don’t break down and eliminate the stress chemicals in our body.

So, how do we increase our resilience to stress and balance “good stress” while avoiding “bad stress?”

• Remove artificial stressors from your life: Stop watching news or seeking out things on social media that produce fear and stress.
• Stop using screens or blue light devices 1-3 hours before bed, or at least start using blue light-blocking glasses.
• Maintain a form of exercise in your life.
• Get in the sunshine and reset your circadian rhythm.

Stress in life is not only unavoidable, but necessary for survival. What we can and should do is optimize the stressors that we allow into our lives as much as possible and avoid those that are wholly unnecessary.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“You are bigger than the challenges that come to your life. Crisis is oftentimes an invitation from divinity for you to find the superself that lies within. You can overcome anything.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more at https://bioptimizers.com/
• http://www.wadelightheart.net
• Awesome Health Podcast: https://bioptimizers.com/category/podcast/
• Get 10% off with code DAILYHELPING: https://bioptimizers.com/dailyhelping
• Take the FREE Awesome Health Course: https://bioptimizers.com/TDH
• Ep. 103: The Golden Age of Digestive Health | with Wade Lightheart

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

Today our expert guest is Geoff Thatcher, the founder and CCO at Creative Principles. He’s had a long career creating brand experiences, vision centers, museums, theme parks, and live events before he launched his own experience design firm in 2017. His eclectic background always delivers a fresh perspective and his experience includes everything from the grand opening of the Warner Bros. World Abu Dhabi to the renovated American Airlines Museum in Texas.

Geoff is also a writer and teacher. He’s ghostwritten books, blogs, and even facilitated a communication workshop for the CIA, and his new book “The CEO’s Time Machine” is a fictionalized story inspired by real-world events and business lessons.

How do you be creative? Creativity is about making connections. Part of making connections is filling your life with the stimuli and inputs that will allow you to make those connections. The more you read, watch, and experience, the more you have to draw your inspiration from and make connections between things that are less obvious.

You also need to know what style of creative you are: a hermit creative or a studio creative. Hermit creatives thrive on solitude and need to be alone to create, while studio creatives need to be able to bounce ideas off of others and collaborate. Even though Geoff is an extrovert, he still is at his most creative when he is by himself.

The lesson to be gleaned from “The CEO’s Time Machine” is that a business’s decisions rely as much on the past as they do the future. Even if you know what happened in the past, and even if you could see into the future, you would still have to make the decision to make a decision today. Too many companies ignore their past instead of learning and growing from it. And at any company, the future of that company is already there if you look for it — the people and voices that are already there.

To avoid making those mistakes, it’s important to listen to a mantra from Bruce Weindruch of the History Factory: “Start with the future and work back.” Think of where you want to be, and then look back into your past and look at the milestones that inform where you actually want to go in the future.

Ultimately, the future is ours to create. If we can use our creativity to see the connections between the possibilities of the past and the future, we can make it happen.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“Don’t be afraid to share your idea. Don’t be afraid. People will laugh, people will giggle, that’s okay. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas because one of those ideas just might change the world.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: creativeprincipals.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/geoffthatcher
• Twitter: twitter.com/geoffthatcher
• Read: “The CEO’s Time Machine”

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

Returning for the second part of our interview, our expert guest is Jack Canfield, known as America’s #1 success coach and co-author of more than 200 books, including “The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be,” “The Success Principles Workbook,” and the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, which includes more than 40 New York Times best-sellers.

If you don’t know what your breakthrough goal is, how do you cut through the noise and define that? Jack believes that everyone is born with a purpose — something that brings them immense amounts of joy to do. Whatever that purpose is, you then have to find a way to monetize it. Find out what people need that you can deliver that makes people come alive. If you don’t know right away, hold on to the question and meditate on it. The answer will come to you, but you have to get out of fear and lean into creativity.

In Jack’s latest book is “The Success Principles Workbook,” but he actually doesn’t want people to *read* this book — he wants you to *do* the book. The book does have enough information on why to do the things he’s asking you to do, but the bulk is about how to take action. There are exercises, worksheets, and interactive questions to help you get clear about what steps to take.

The sequencing of events in the book is also critically important: Take 100% responsibility for your life, getting clear about your life purpose, getting clear about the vision that will fulfill that purpose, turning that vision into specific goals, getting clear about the beliefs you will have to hold, using visualization and affirmations, 

Jack Canfield wants to leave a legacy of making the world realize that everyone can be as successful as they want. His goal is to have a million people teaching the Success Principles in school, chuches, businesses, and more.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“I want people to know that you have everything in you that you need to achieve anything that you want. You may have to learn something you’ve never learned before, you may have to partner up with people you’ve never met before, you may have to get some certifications that you don’t have, but you are never given a dream without being given the capacity, the ability, the mindset, the skills, the talents. You may have to develop the skills but the talents are in you. So if you have a dream, know that you have the capacity to make that dream come true. I would just add to that that there is a science of success. We talk about neuroscience, we talk about physical science, there is a science of success. And if you study that science and you do things in the right way, in the right order, at the right time, you can achieve anything that you want.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: www.jackcanfield.com
• Read: “The Success Principles"
• Read: “The Success Principles Workbook”
• www.chickensoup.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/JackCanfieldFan
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/jackcanfield_official
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/JackCanfield

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

Today our expert guest is Jack Canfield, known as America’s #1 success coach and co-author of more than 200 books, including “The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be,” “The Success Principles Workbook,” and the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series, which includes more than 40 New York Times best-sellers.

Jack had always wanted to make a difference, but when he was just starting out, he had no idea what kind of reach and impact he would have today. He would have been thrilled with one best-selling book, but it has gone far beyond that. At the end of the first book, he asked for people to send in their stories in case they decided to make another book, and the outpouring of support they received was astounding.

Jack recently released “The Success Principles Workbook” as a companion guide to “The Success Principles." Most people read the book, get really inspired, and then put the book on their shelf and don’t follow through with it. The people going through his coaching programs and seminars were doing really well, and he wanted to find a way to put a coaching program in a book.

What is it that some of the world’s most successful people are doing?

• Take 100% responsibility for your life and your results.
• Look around for the opportunities available. Even in difficult times, that just means people are in more need than ever before. Meet those needs.
• If you want something in life, you have to ask. Don’t be afraid of hearing no. If you do, you didn’t lose anything. You’re right where you always were. Asking is a numbers game, so keep asking until you hear a yes.

This is just the first part of the incredible interview with Jack Canfield. In part two, we’ll hear more success principles, as well as Jack’s “Daily Helping.”

Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: www.jackcanfield.com
• Read: “The Success Principles"
• Read: “The Success Principles Workbook”
• www.chickensoup.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/JackCanfieldFan
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/jackcanfield_official
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/JackCanfield

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

Today our expert guest is Benjamin Hardy, an organizational psychologist, successful entrepreneur, and the best-selling author of “Willpower Doesn’t Work”. He’s known for helping people break free from the shackles of what they perceive to be a permanent personality, a mindset shift that can completely transform the way you view your world and your potential.

Benjamin grew up in a traumatic situation: His parents divorced when he was 11 years old and his father became a drug addict from that age on. Benjamin went on a church mission for two years and saw an extreme change within himself, and he later saw his father overcome addiction. He started studying psychology and realized he was interested in human change because he had witnessed so much.

With so much addiction in his life, Benjamin wrote the book “Willpower Doesn’t Work” to illustrate that, no matter how much willpower you have, you won’t make room for any change unless you change your environment. It’s about engineering situations and focusing on the context instead of the individual.

Benjamin’s latest book, “Personality Isn’t Permanent,” came from the idea that unresolved trauma is typically a strong indicator of why someone would be in addiction. He learned that personality is often shaped by former trauma as well. The book is not about trauma, but what he learned was that trauma is capable of freezing your personality — you stop being able to develop as a person. He had studied change and he knew it was possible, so he wanted to find out how we could break free of our pasts.

The moment someone loses a sense of purpose in their future, the present becomes completely unmanageable. The goal for anyone struggling with their past is that they have to find a future that gives them a sense of purpose so they can begin to reshape themselves. There are four “personality levers” that drive personality more than anything:

• Unresolved trauma
• Your identity narrative
• Subconscious patterns
• Environment

There are ways that we can impact all of these levers in order to affect our personality. The work isn’t going to be easy; we have been trained to attach ourselves strongly to our personality. But if you want to change and you believe your future self can be a different person, it’s absolutely necessary to steer the direction you move forward in.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“The reason people get stuck in patterns is because of a lack of emotional flexibility. If you have suppressed pain from the past, you need to talk about it with people in your life or journal about it. The same is true of your future self. You need to put yourself in situations of uncertainty where you can start to handle situations of the unknown. It does take courage, but courage is the thing that starts shifting the subconscious in the right direction.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: benjaminhardy.com
• Read: “Personality Isn’t Permanent”
• Read: “Willpower Doesn’t Work”
• Facebook: facebook.com/benjaminhardy88
• Instagram: instagram.com/benjamin_hardy_phd

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

Today our expert guest is Marisa Imôn, a best-selling author, musician, voice actor, and motivational speaker. As the owner of Marisa Imôn LLC, an audio production and meditation company, she has created hundreds of meditations and meditative musical compositions for businesses and apps all over the world in addition to those on her own podcast, Incandescent: An Unconventional Meditation Podcast. In 2019, she wrote and published the international best-selling book "Super Intense" about her journey using mindfulness to live well with multiple mental illness diagnoses including bipolar disorder and ADHD.

From when she was just an infant, the very first word people would use to describe Marisa was “intense.” At the age of ten, she suffered from a long-lasting clinical depression. Most of the advice she was given was to smile, act like she was happy, and eventually, she would feel fine — well-meaning but ultimately harmful advice. She never got to the point where her feelings went away, but she became better at hiding them from others, and ended up doing several harmful things to keep herself from looking at those emotions.

Eventually, she had a breaking point. In college, her friend found her wandering around with no idea where she was. It turned out that she was experiencing a manic episode, which all made sense looking back on her life. Now that she is aware of her condition, instead of trying to run away from the intensity, she has learned to work with it and embrace it — and it has become a superpower.

After following a strict medicine regimen for several years, she started to believe that this would be the rest of her life. If she missed one dose she would have several negative side-effects within an hour, which severely impacted her work and life. She was either at the mercy of her pills or at the mercy of her emotions, but she knew there had to be another way.

This was when she discovered meditation. With her diagnosis of ADHD, she really didn’t believe that she could sit in stillness, but she started listening to guided meditations everywhere. Over time she started to notice herself connecting to her breath in the moment more often and being more present, and once that started happening she started sitting in stillness. It was then that she realized that she was not her diagnosis, she was something greater than the sum of her life.

If you want to get started with meditation, it’s first important to understand what it is not. Meditation is not completely emptying your mind, it is not something that only gurus can do. There are several different styles of meditation, and it is important to find a style that works well for you. Any time you allow yourself to focus in on the present moment is a meditation — whether you’re washing the dishes or having a conversation or staring at a candle.

When you start meditating regularly, you can find yourself taking time to meditate throughout the day. You see the benefits of renewed focus, relaxation, and resilience for anxiety and stress. Marisa’s podcast, Incandescent, calls itself an “unconventional meditation podcast.” What makes it unconventional is that it is meant to fit into the times in your life when you are doing something else with your body. If you’re ready, try out meditation and see the benefits of it for yourself.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“Always honor your emotions. As I mentioned, for so long in my life I ignored any emotion below neutral and acted like it was bad or something I had to hide from or avoid but instead when I realized all those feelings were essentially just wounded parts of me wishing I would turn around and give them love that’s when everything changed. So whenever you’re feeling an emotion that feels uncomfortable, instead of doing something to avoid it, just look at it and be like, ‘Hey, hey there fear. Come to the table. I love you. I welcome you in. What do you have to teach me?’”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: www.marisaImon.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/marisaImonmusicandmiracles
• Read: "Super Intense"
• Listen: www.incandescentmeditations.com

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media

Today our expert guest is Derek Stone. After working to support his family as a struggling artist, he chose to reevaluate his life and his way of thinking. In three short years, he grew a small one-man show into a multi-million-dollar company.

When Derek’s business first hit seven figures, he tried to identify what the turning point could have been. He traced back his incredible transformation to the decision to forgive his father. He left the path of blame and began traveling down the path of forgiveness, which led him to live his best life. He is now on a mission to empower others to make similar transformations by helping them take charge of their own lives.

Derek’s childhood involved several traumas. He was sexually abused by his step-father, he didn’t know where his next meals would come from, and they often lost power or hot water due to unpaid bills. He blamed his dad because he believed it was his responsibility to protect Derek from these things.

He lived with a facade that everything was alright, but inside he was increasingly bitter. He carried that anger until he was 19, when he attended a conference called Stomping Out the Darkness, based on the book “Stomping Out the Darkness” by Neil T. Anderson and Dave Park. It was there that he confronted the idea of forgiving his dad.

David began to forgive everyone in his life that had wronged him as they came to his mind — his father, his mother, his abuser. When he was done, he didn’t feel a need to hide behind his facade anymore. He rekindled his relationship with his father, and he felt a burden lifted from him.

In 2014, David’s construction business began taking off. He found it hard to balance that work, family events, and his passion for touring as a musician. He made the decision to walk away from touring. This led to some serious depression — not because he wasn’t touring, but because he lost the platform for his message. Eventually, it came to him that he could share the message in a book: “Why Should I Forgive?”

The process of forgiveness is not easy, but it is so important to your development as a person.

• Outline the vision of where you want your life to go and what kind of person you want to be.
• Cleanse your surroundings of toxic, negative people. You want to emulate positive, healthy people.
• Figure out how to make healthy decisions.
• Take responsibility for your own life.
• Deal with the self-critic and the cost of bitterness.

Even when someone has done you real harm, forgiveness is an act you do for you. It is not a justification for what they did to you but giving yourself permission to stop holding on. It is a gift you give yourself. 

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“You’re not a victim. When you play the victim, you give the person who harmed you power over you. You have to get to the point where you say ‘No more. I am not a victim.’ For claiming that will disarm the power your offender has over you. You are enough. You have what it takes. I believe in you. You must believe in you. There is greatness within you and within all of us because we were created by perfection in his image. You have to participate in your own rescue, as my friend Tommy Breedlove says. Phillippians 1:6 says ‘And I am sure of this that he who began a good work will bring it to completion.’ So go. If you still have breath in your lungs, go. Go and change the world. You are going to help create the world that my kids grow up in, and their kids, and I want to leave it better than I found it. Together you and me, armed with the power that forgiveness brings to set others free, we can do this. You can do this. For whatever is your why, choose to forgive.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: www.derekstone.online
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/Derekstone28
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/derek-stone-b342ab125
• Read: “Why Should I Forgive?”
• Read: “Stomping Out the Darkness” by Neil T. Anderson & Dave Park

The Daily Helping is produced by Crate Media