Hear how I transform failure stories into the foundation of success today by using the pain from making mistakes to give me motivation to learn a better way of living. With a better way of living, miracles, success, and happiness become automatic. The idea of a successful person often looks like someone who has been willing to push through a lot of pain to get somewhere but in my experience it seems more that what most of us think of as a successful person usually reflects a willingness to use life's challenges as inspiration to find a better way to live.

The key seems to be about how the story of the failure is told. For example, in dating if you get dumped and blame the other person for it, there often is no opportunity to learn. If the truth is you believe you got broken up with or cannot get a date because you are too fat, using the pain of getting rejected to motivate you to start eating healthy and exercising more can lead to success finding the partner of your dreams.

For my business online, I got banned from Udemy in 2016 which was making me $20,000 to $90,000 a month on $50,000 to $250,000+ in sales a month. Out of nowhere they banned me and then I started telling a story of how I could not make as much money in 2017 without Udemy. In planning my expenses, I remember telling my friend Albert how I could pay him more in 2016 because I would have less income in 2017. Then I saw HOW CRAZY THAT WAS! Without knowing anything about 2017, I started acting like I did. As soon as I saw this failure story was disrupting my life, then I changed it to believing now that I will make more money in 2017 than in 2016. This new empowering story is likely to come true because I am telling it every day.

Today I am motivated to be an unconditionally loving husband that is healthy because of all the painful failures I suffered through dating. If instead I had made a story up of how awful women were because they would not go out with an obese man that lied on his dating profile and said he was athletic, I would probably still be single today. Without having the awful pain of perhaps my 1,000th hangover, I would not have found motivation to go to any length to stay sober.

Each story we tell is an opportunity to live or die. The positive stories we tell give us the chance to experience the pleasure of doing better and to get through the pain today of making a change for the better. Toxic stories we tell allow us to experience a minor pleasure today in being lazy while continuing to experience the same painful failures again and again. My exercise today is to look deeply at the stories I am telling and ask if each is helping me or hurting me.

Thank you very much for reading this and I hope you enjoy this episode of Happier People podcast!

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Hear today how I am trying the three to thrive morning routine similar to what Tony Robbins does each day to see if I get the same results in my life in the form of enhanced productivity and less stress! What I normally do is have five, ten, or even twenty things I want to get done in my business online. As an entrepreneur working full time online at home, I feel a huge pressure to take my business to the next level and the problem is I often overschedule. With a to do list in my mind that covers the whole day, I usually get at least half of it done but still feel like I did not do enough at the end of the day. While I would never work at a job where a boss expected this much of me, I routinely tolerate it from the boss in my head. The worst part is that I often make fear based decisions based on avoiding the pain that day and bringing the most pleasure. For bringing the greatest pleasure, I often associate making videos. In creating the greatest pain, I often think of boring business tasks like sending payments. Where I have a problem is when I choose based on fear that I will not have enough time to make videos later to make a bunch of videos in the morning. By the time afternoon comes and it is time to quit working, all the other tasks I have to do like maybe getting a book submitted for publication on Audible are not done. My rationalization is that I will always have more time later but the problem is that rarely do I have time to relax. Seven days a week I start work at around 8 or 9 in the morning with many nights finishing 10 or 12 hours later with an average of 3 to 5 hours of breaks in between. Weeks will often pass where I think about having to do the same task and not getting it done. This triggers my shame of not being good enough and finally I do something I have been putting off to the last minute which only reinforces the pain for that initial activity. Today I am trying Tony Robbin's three to thrive system he uses to pick three things he really wants to accomplish that day. My hope is that by 10 or 11 in the morning I will have finished the three things and be free for the rest of my day to do whatever. This will likely give me motivation to want to accomplish tasks today that might otherwise be in tomorrow's three to thrive. My exercise for today is to try this and report back to you on how it goes! Thank you for reading this description and I hope you enjoy the episode of Happier People podcast!

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Hear how today I was inspired to make a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation about suicide prevention and to plan on advertising it to the world with Google AdWords for video and Facebook ads after sharing it live on YouTube and Facebook later today! If you are looking for more ways to give back and do charitable work in your life today, I hope listening to my story here will help you see unique service opportunities available for you because the world needs your help just as much as it needs mine! When you are uncertain of how to volunteer more or donate your time and money, you might receive inspiration by understanding how I use prayer and meditation to ask the universe to give me the insights I need and the willingness to act on those inspirations. After spending years in my life skeptical about the value of giving back and now with seeing so much evidence in my own life of the power of serving others, you might find motivation to try one new activity today that will put you in a position to give back. For being happier people, fitting in, making more money, and feeling good about life, nothing is as powerful in my experience as living with the sole purpose of helping others. Thank you for reading this description of Day 53 of Happier People podcast and I hope you enjoy the episode!

Sincerely,

Jerry Banfield

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Would you like to actually achieve your next goal instead of making progress on it and giving up? How would you feel if your New Year's resolution for 2017 and beyond was not only accomplished but you smashed through your initial goal? For most of the last 15 years, I set goals and made New Year's resolutions but rarely ever lived up to them. For example, I would set goals of losing 10 pounds, quitting drinking, or making more money. Next I would focus only on how to achieve the goal rather than why I made it to start with. In a few days, weeks, or months, I would either have completed the goal or given up on the New Year's resolution. Either way, the purpose I originally set was never finished. If I wanted to lose weight, even when I did it I soon put the weight back on. If I was trying to stay sober for my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, I figured a few days, weeks, or months proved "I was not that bad, I can drink again" and the original goal of being healthier was totally lost. With business goals, this led me to achieve new income goals only to spend my money more foolishly than ever and end up back in debt worse than when I started.

Do any of the stories about sound familiar to you? If so you might enjoy listening to how today I am able to focus first on the WHY behind the goal I am setting, then move into what I can CUT or ELIMINATE to make room for the extra work to accomplish the goal, and finally I look at what I can improve in the life I already have to achieve the goal. I hope listening to these three steps will help you see that you already have enough motivation and inspiration to reach any goal you have set. Using that energy, I hope you are inspired to cut the least productive area of your life and use that empty space to do more in the life you already have and accept help with sticking to your New Year's resolution and making your goal something that stays accomplished. My exercise for today is to look at how I am applying these steps in my own life today to my business and personal life. Thank you for reading about this episode of Happier People podcast and I hope you enjoy it!

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Hear how I discovered an amazing lie that I have been telling everyone about not liking to read books! The fact is I read books every day and that for around ten years I have been telling people and believing that I did not like to read but that I did enjoy listening to books on Audible. When I look carefully at my life both recently and all of the past I remember, I see a consistent love for reading books. I have read more books than I can count in my life probably thousands. Every day I listen to books on Audible and every day I read at least two soft cover or hard cover print books. Why then was I just about to tell my friend Joseph Delgadillo last night while I was talking to him that I do not like reading books? Thankfully after telling this lie so many times I caught it coming out of my mouth in shock and told Joe that I did actually enjoy reading. How long have I been telling people that I do not like to read and then resisting, ignoring, and giving away any books people got me? For years my mother bought me books BECAUSE SHE KNEW I LOVED READING! Meanwhile I consistently put those books in the closet and then eventually gave them away. After telling the lie that I did not like to read books so many times, I eventually believed and acted on it despite years of evidence that I did. When did I start telling this lie? Maybe it was something like where I lied to my friends in college about not being a virgin. They were all sharing about the first time they had sex and I said that I had lost my virginity at 15 which was a total lie because I was a total virgin at the time. If I had to guess, I would say that I started lying about reading books in the same way. Either some girl I was dating or some guy I was friends with said they did not like reading books and I must have just said it too. To make sure no one caught me lying, I then just kept telling the lie for years to everyone I had told it to until JUST YESTERDAY I figured out the reading lie. Thankfully I told my friends about the virginity thing like a year ago and they didn't care. Apparently I am the main one that suffers from these toxic stories I tell and today my exercise is to keep looking to see if and when the next one comes out. The first step to being free of toxic stories and lies like this is to see that they exist! Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoy this episode of Happier People podcast!

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Hear how volunteering and making $25,000 a year produces the same amount of happiness as earning $70,000+ a year! After years of practicing giving generously and seeking today as my exercise to find a new way to do it, I am grateful that I was shown the power of giving by others. While many people said I was crazy or stupid to give so many of my online courses away just days after I made them, the free coupons I gave out to my courses resulted in millions of dollars in sales. Sharing the best strategy I had found after two years of working online to make money and get Facebook likes got my into the position to make a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and to teach online courses. Giving a little money away every day helps me feel wealthy and in feeling wealthy the universe continues to give back more to me. My goal is to give everything I have and trust that I will receive back just what I need. I am happier today than I have ever been and I work to keep that by giving away everything I am learning that is assisting me with being happy each day here in this podcast. For today my exercise is to make sure I see the next opportunity to give generously because I love the life I have today and want to continue sharing that joy with you. Thank you very much for reading this and I hope you enjoy this episode of Happier People podcast!

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Hear the story of the gambler who died and thought they went to heaven which I hope acts as a parable showing that winning League of Legends or any game in life all the time would be no fun. Applying this to my business is helping me understand that each failure or loss is exactly the experience I need to do better. Why do we think in life we should be able to pick the perfect partner or the right job or a fun hobby or the best investment on the first try? When I hear many people talk bad about online dating, I often discover they went out with one or two people before giving up. With dating I understand that I needed to fail as many times as necessary to get it right which took 8 years and hundreds of painful failures. Every time I would get excited when I was messaging a girl and every time it did not work out, it hurt again. Just days before meeting my wife after another failure, I wondered if I deserved to have a good life and just liked not having things work out. In some way, I found a deep spiritual truth that if everything just worked out all the time and we just got everything we did right on the first try, there would be no joy in anything. My exercise today as I try getting my music production studio setup is to be grateful for each learning experience as something goes wrong. In the middle of any frustration arising, I hope to remember what I have shared with you here today and see that this is my opportunity to be grateful for a day in heaven rather than a day in hell where everything always goes my way. Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoy this episode of Happier People podcast!

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Why is it every baby I see looks perfect? When does that change? As a scientist, I think it is critical to establish a clear point of "birth" or "death" where the perfection in a child becomes transformed or forgotten into something else that we then end up calling a person, an employee, a statistic, a criminal, a success story, or any of the other labels we apply to each other that seem more important than everything else. For example, my daughter now is a year and four months. Seeing her shows me all of the beauty of the world as does seeing any other baby. If in 30 years she is talking to her therapist about her problems, when would the change have happened from the baby I see now into the person being described to the shrink? I ask this after having went through the exact same change. 30 years after being a beautiful baby love to my mother, I was talking to a rector at my church explaining all of the sins I believed made up who I was. He helped me see my essential nature had never changed and that throughout my life the perfection I came into this world with was never lost! His words helped me remember that Christ or Love or Perfection or God or Being or a Beautiful Baby Love or Whatever You Call It is who I really am which is easy to see with a baby but hard to see sometimes with the child, teenager, or adult. My exercise for today is to see a chance to remember this in a place where I am attempting or in the act of forgetting it and believing something else. Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoy this episode of Happier People podcast!

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The unlimited power I have available now is to make the decision to create the life I want to have. I am grateful for each person that has helped me see the real choice I have each moment is heaven or hell. Life or death. Joy or pain. As I write this, I choose life again to be of service here to you with the hope of passing the same message I receive each day forward so that I may be prepared to receive it back. When I was unaware of the decisions I was making, I felt helpless, sick, and alone. It took a lot of unconditional love from people just like you to help me see the seemingly insignificant power I had to decide to do something this moment offered me everything I needed to make the life I wanted. Today after years of suffering in the life of my creation, I now am committed to making the best life I can here with the purpose of being useful in showing you the way and helping you show me the way. Hear stories of how I yelled at my parents wishing I had never been born and how I had some peace even in the depths of depression. See that you are not alone in your life and the power of decision you have at this moment is all you need to have everything you want. My exercise for today is to look this moment at the choice I have to love unconditionally or to condemn. To live and grow or to decay and die. Thank you for reading this and I hope this podcast episode is useful for you!

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Hear how I just discovered the opportunity to eliminate one activity I do daily and have done most days for the last twenty years! Playing video games has been part of the foundation of my life, the idea of who I am, and an activity I have spent probably 20,000+ hours on in my life. Within the last 24 hours, I just have been given the vision to see that my life might be better if I stopped playing any video games at all. No mobile games, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, or League of Legends! Just 48 hours ago I had committed myself to playing one game of League of Legends every day, one podcast episode a day, and one online class created every day. Clearly something had to give because I also have a wife, daughter, service commitment in my community, and the need to sleep. For months on some subconscious level I have suspected that my time gaming might be ending which might be why I have consistently made efforts to increase it. Why has it been so difficult for me to see my life might be better without video games even when more than 5 years ago I started my business to help people with video game addiction? What might you be missing in your own life today? While I hate saying I am busy, I have been feeling overwhelmed recently with doing too much. With no 10 to 20 hours a week eliminated out of my schedule, I feel a level of freedom I have not experienced in a long time. I feel free to read more books every day and to completely disengage fantasy from my life! So many people including my mother, friends, and even the haters online have helped me to make this change. I gave away a code for Riot Points which is the in game currency in League of Legends on my stream the other day. At the end of the stream, the guy I gave the code to called me a scammer because on his first attempt to enter it, he was not able to get it to work. In the moment, I realized that I was wrong. I was doing something that was not bringing more joy to the world and it was not the giveaway itself. It was the entire activity surrounding the giveaway which was the gaming. Within a minute, he came back and said he got it to work. I meanwhile got the openness to receive a new way of living without video games. With one thing after another being removed from the idea of who I am, I am excited to see what my life is today with this new freedom. I hope sharing this with you is helpful today! My exercise is to look at my life free from gaming. For your exercise, would you repeat this process with me? Would you find one area of your daily life where you would be better off eliminating in? Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoy this podcast episode!

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