Give, Grow & Be Grateful

Kevin Getch

The goal of the Give, Grow & Be Grateful book and podcast is to help you master your mind, reach your goals, achieve meaningful happiness and live a fulfilled life. You have near limitless potential to be, do or have anything you put your mind and heart fully into. My hope is that the strategies (& stories) I share will help you develop the path to living your most fulfilled life.

Episodes

  1. Episode 1

    Expose Yourself: The Story of Cheagle

    Above is a video of the talk I gave at VanTalks. Below is the transcription: The Chicken Eagle (AKA Cheagle) 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. Cheagle started spreading his wings again, flapping them, pretending to fly. The other chickens would laugh at him and tell him, “Chickens can’t fly”. 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”. The next day Cheagle got on top of the chicken coup. He ran as fast as he could spread his wings… jumped off the side, started flapping his wings and… landed face first in the dust. The other chickens were laughing so hard, they were rolling on their backs with their little feet in the air. 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, The Wall 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 and everything you fear Is on the other side of this wall That you’ve been building for years ~ Me (I think) 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. Beliefs Control our path in life 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. Chickens CAN fly 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. The Riverbed 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 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? We are all Cheagle 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

  2. 12/30/2017

    Give, Grow & Be Grateful: An Introduction

    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: I introduce you to the Give, Grow & Be Grateful podcast/book/concept so you know what to expect. I share a little bit of my story, who I am, why you should listen and why I’m passionate about helping you live your best life. Then I explain the next steps as well as my commitment to you. At the end of each episode I will give you a micro-action that will overtime help you develop positive pathways that will lead to success, happiness and fulfillment.  Episode Notes: The Give, Grow & Be Grateful podcast/concept/book and explain how we’ll progress forward. Instead of writing a book I am speaking it in a podcast format, so you are getting the sneak preview before it’s published. I will be providing insight, strategies and stories that will help you create a vision for the future, reach your goals, master your mind and emotions.. and of course live a happier and more fulfilled life. A little background on myself. About 12 years ago… I was dead broke… and at one of the lowest points in my life. I had started a company called (ESP) Entertainment & Sports Productions and I was throwing Ultimate Fighting type events with Randy Couture and Matt Lindland (where I trained at Team Quest) and while it was a great experience and I had a lot of fun… I was raising an amazing 4 year old girl…it was Dec… and I was not not making enough money to be able to pay my bills let alone the mortgage on the house… or get Christmas presents for my daughter. I felt like a complete failure…as a man, as a father, as a provider… I remember….I broke down crying… But something also changed in me.. I didn’t want to be the person I felt like… so I decided to change. It wasn’t but three months later that I met the woman of my dreams… who I ended up Marrying and having our son… Later on in 2009.. I started Webfor, a creative and digital marketing agency that helps business elevate their brand online. Today we employ 15 people and our team has won multiple awards. I sit on multiple boards, volunteer my time and give generously… so what did I do? That is exactly what I’m going to share with you in the upcoming episodes. Together we can find where you want to be in the future and determine what choices you need to make now to get there. 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!

  3. 01/12/2018

    The (Not So) Secret to Living Your Best Life

    Summary & Transcription In today’s episode, we’re going be talking about: The myth of willpower. We’re also going to go over the concept of the riverbed. Then I’ll give you a brief introduction to what I call the VBAR Method. In future episodes, we’re gonna break this down in more detail, but for right now I just want to give you kind of a high level review. Of course, we’ll end like we will with every episode, with a micro-action that I’ll ask you to take today. 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. So, it’s okay to have limiting beliefs. It’s okay to be where you’re at in your life at this time. But what I want you to do is understand how these beliefs guide your life. And so, if you want to be living a certain type of life, whether that be just … you want to be just happy, right? You want to live every day happy, or whether you want to have an impact on the people that you come into contact with, or an impact on the world, or whether you want to do better in your work or whether you want to start your own business. Whatever it is, you have the ability to do it. It’s just a matter of looking at … in that topographical map, right? If we’re looking down on it and you say, “Hey. You know what? This is where my river is leading me, and this is where I’ll end up if I continue with the same belief set that I have.” 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 what

  4. 01/14/2018

    Create Your Best Life with a Compelling Vision

    Summary & Transcription: In today’s episode we answer: Why is creating a compelling vision so important? What challenges will you face when creating your vision statement? Will your vision change? What questions can you ask to help create a compelling vision? Micro-action: What action can you take right now to put you on the right path? 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. Just like a builder might use a CAD design to get a better view of the vision of what this future home might look like, there’s a lot of different exercises that you can do from vision boards to just visualizing yourself being in this state you want to be, whether it’s just waking up in the morning and just being grateful to be alive and just visualizing that until you get to the point where you can actually experience that. Some of the challenges I want you to be aware of when you’re working towards creating a vision is first, there’s going to be a fear response. If you’ve never created a vision, you’re going to say, “Well, how do I do this? I don’t necessarily know how to do this.” I’m going to help try to guide you a little bit along the way. Of course, you have Google. You can search and do a lot more there as well to kind of pull up different ideas or worksheets and things like that, that you want to do. 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. A lot of this is kind of wisdom and tips and things that I’ve gotten from both sides that I’ve kind of merged together in my own way. A lot of it’s things that some of it you may already know. Some of it you may not. For business, for a company, to grow and really achieve something and have a positive impact in their industry and their community and the world, they have to have a compelling vision, right? They have to have a vision that people subscribe to, that they get behind, and that they feel good about going after that and helping that group of people achieve that vision. A lot of the things, as we talk through this, just like a company’s vision will change and you need to have values for your company, if you have this company that doesn’t have kind of a core set of values and doesn’t have a vision, it’s just going to kind of grow and then people are going to come in that maybe don’t fit what you were thinking. They just kind of do that. It’s very clear with my own company, Webfor. We have a very clear vision of where we’re going and how we want to help people. 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

  5. 03/04/2018

    The Amazing Power of Our Beliefs

    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, the opposite is true, as well. A person can say, “I’m dumb,” and that could be because they’ve heard that throughout their life. Their parents tell them, “Don’t be stupid. Why do you always make these dumb mistakes?” The teacher told them, “You’re horrible at this,” whatever it is. Right? That they don’t get good grades. So, that’s how it is. Now again, you can look at that and go are they have that core belief I am dumb because they’re getting bad grades? Or, are they getting bad grades because they have the core belief that I am dumb? All right? So, it’s a little bit of the chicken and egg kind of thing. Obviously, both have an involvement there, but I can guarantee you the person who is getting good grades has a belief in the value of getting good grades, and they have other beliefs that are supporting them towards getting those good grades. They’re seeking recognition and importance through those things. 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 a

  6. 03/12/2018

    Overcoming Your Crappy Reptilian Brain

    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 f

  7. 08/17/2018

    One Thing That Will Immediately Improve Your Life

    What’s the one thing that, if you can change it immediately, and that if you did it it would make all other things in your life better? Today I’m going to share with you what that is. It’s something that, if you take it to heart, it will undoubtedly improve your life today. If you commit to living in a beautiful state going forward, it will help you have more beautiful relationships, a thriving business, and an all around happier life. You ready to get started? Perfect. I just want to recap. We’ve talked a little bit going through the VBAR method and I’m bouncing around a little bit here, but the V in VBAR is vision, and there’s also underneath vision is values and purpose. Then underneath the B is, B is for belief. Then below that you have programming and state. Then under the A is action, so I use acronym TEA is thoughts, emotions, and actions. The R stands for results, which is an acronym there is ARC, which is assessing results and changing. Okay? In this particular area I want to talk about the one thing that can improve your life immediately. That, literally, you can change with the snap of your fingers, on the drop of a dime, whatever your kind of statement is there, like, you can change it immediately if you work on it. The first when we talk about, you’re going to be like, “Oh, how can you change that immediately?” It’s something that takes practice. Now, if you jump right in and just kind of go all out, like, you can do it pretty immediately. One of the most important things in your life is your state, and what I mean by that is your overall mental and physical state that you’re in. Think about how important state is. Your state determines how you’re going to respond to others. If you’re in a bad state and you’re agitated and you’re not feeling well, are you more likely to kind of snap at someone or do something like that? Yeah, of course you are. Now, if you’re in a great state where you’re kind of top of the world, you’re smiling, you’re happy, how are you going to respond to somebody in that state, right? We don’t, most people, the majority of the world doesn’t really look at their state as something that they need to actually manage to improve their life. Your state can, you know, like top athletes know that their state is a critical component to their performance. If you’re going to go into a basketball game or an Olympic athlete, your mental state is a critical component to the performance. That’s something that we’ve known for years. Well, for us, every day, whether you’re an Olympic athlete or not, you can go out and actually just live in a beautiful state. You can live in this beautiful state and enjoy life if it’s just something you practice on. Really, our life is all about, are we enjoying what we’re doing? Not just enjoying it, but what is the state that we’re living in? Are we in an enjoying, beautiful kind of state that we’re in where we’re appreciating everything? Or, are we in this negative, kind of agitated state where everything bothers us? How much of your life are you actually spending in those states? I’ve always known the importance of state, and that’s why it was in kind of this method that I built. I had never been to a Tony Robbins event. It was actually on my wife and I’s bucket list to go to an event, and we wanted to go together. We went recently in March, we went to the Unleash the Power Within event in San Jose. I can tell you first of all, it was one of the best investments of my life. I can say that with 100% confidence, just knowing one of the best investments that we can make is in ourself, and I’ve known that for a long time. I’ve actually read Tony Robbins’ books and listened to tapes for a long time, along with a lot of other great people that are really focused on reaching a level of achievement and a level of happiness within yourself and how to do that. A lot of it’s psychological and physiological on how we achieve these things, so I’ve just been studying a lot of the different people who do that. One of the things I can say I know with 100% confidence is because I have seen direct benefits from just this one area. I’d say the biggest takeaway I got from the event, now, there is a ton of great information and great experiences. You know, we walked on hot coals and hugged strangers and all that kind of stuff. It was, I’m sure, uncomfortable for some. It was probably a little bit more out of my wife’s comfort zone than it was out of my comfort zone. One of the biggest takeaways that I brought back from that is the importance of our state. Now, I, as I mentioned, already in my mind thought I knew the importance of it, but I was grossly underestimating really how important your state is every day. What I wasn’t doing was, I had my little methods for kind of improving my state, but I wasn’t taking it as more on as like, really, this is one of the most important things. It was just one of the things that, “Okay, yeah, I want to be in a good state and I can do that by changing my focus,” and I knew some different little things, but some of the things that, I think he taught at the event, and you got to experience at the event, were really kind of pushed home the importance of state. One of the things that Tony asked us, he said, “Hey, if you want to do this,” he said, “you know, this is something that if you decide to do it could change your lives forever,” was to choose to live every day in a beautiful state. Now, I really like this idea. I watched the Netflix, I think it was I’m Not Your Guru that Tony did. I think he mentioned that in there, and I said, “You know what? I really like that,” because I already had kind of that mentality, but not necessarily those words. I said, “You know what? I already decided that, so I’m here, so yeah, let’s do that.” That was making the choice very easy. One of the things he asked us to do was to write a letter and to send it to two people explaining our decision to live in a beautiful state. You know, kind of a way of holding yourselves accountable. For me, instead of writing a letter, I am just sharing that with you. My mother always told me, “Act as if the whole world is watching,” so I am just putting it out there so the whole world can watch or listen if they want to. I guess, here is my statement to the world and to all of you, that I’m making the decision to live in a beautiful state because I know how important it is for the impact that I want to have in this life. I know if I’m not living in a beautiful state, my impact is not only going to be less, but it could be negative in some ways. I’ve talked about some of that in my past podcasts how certain things trigger me and maybe I get into a bad state when I’m driving or different things like that. For me, I want to live in this, as much as I can, if something happens, you know, I want to take the quick time to address it. I think I want to be clear in saying that, what I’m doing is I’m not kind of ignoring problems. That’s not what this means. It means, yeah, problems happen, but I’m not going to let those problems, external things going on impact my internal state as far as how I’m choosing to feel. I can sit there and focus on all the negative things, but if it’s something I can’t change, why sit there and focus on it, right? Why not just be positive, enjoy the day I’m doing, and just be like, “You know what? Yeah, things happen like that, unfortunately.” In the past, they have happened, and then at the end of the day a couple months later I realize, “Wow, that actually really had a positive impact once I learned this from that challenge,” or whatever it was, or, “this new person came into our life or our company because of that experience, which was challenging at first,” right? It’s something that I think a lot of people look at and they go, they think positive thinking, like that term has kind of gotten a bad wrap. Which, I think it’s mainly because people think positive thinking and they’re thinking, “Oh, that means you’re not looking at the problem,” and that’s not true. I prefer the term beneficial thinking. If we’re going to live our lives and enjoy it to the utmost that we can, we need to really have strategies to think thoughts that are beneficial for us. Part of that is addressing, like I mentioned in one of the past episodes, the kind of crappy reptilian brain that we’ve been dealt, we need to know about that and we need to be able to deal with the mind and understand when some of these thoughts come into your head, how to just either get them out or to deal with them and process them in a way that doesn’t negatively impact our state in an ongoing manner. For me, I’m doing this not only for myself but for my wife, for my kids, for my business, for the community and ultimately for the world, because I know that my state that I’m in is going to affect how I impact the world, and I want to make sure that I give the most of myself that I can. I think that that’s one way that I can enhance what I’m doing there. I want to talk a little bit about how it’s impacted me personally, so that you can think about, “Okay, well, those are areas that either I want to improve in my life or different things.” Some of the things that immediately I noticed improved because of my state was my relationships. It seems pretty simple, but I noticed for, like, my wife and I, we both have our own businesses with a family, two beautiful kids, we have a house and then we have a couple rentals, and life is busy. You have sports and activities and PTO meetings and I’m on a board, and just life can get a little hectic. What we were both doing to some extent, is we were letting some of our busyness kind of impact our state, and then in our lowered states, that was in some areas, like so

  8. 03/04/2021

    What You Focus on is What You Find

    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. Now, the day of, he got there. He got to the whole thing. They walked him through the instructions, and they did everything they needed to do. He got in the plane. He’s going up there, and he’s going to go solo because he’s in like Mexico or something. I don’t know. This story has some loopholes, obviously, but generally you have to go tandem in United States, but forever reason, wherever he was at, he was able to jump out of the plane solo. 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. That’s part of the marriage of vision and focus is that if you don’t have a vision, and what you’re focusing on is just, you can focus on a number of things, just change your initial thought to focus on something that you’re grateful for or something more positive, whatever it may be, and that’s definitely good, but when you’re thinking about ultimately where you want to go, you want to have that direction so that you can constantly realign your focus towards where you want to go and the type of life that you want to live. 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 differ

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The goal of the Give, Grow & Be Grateful book and podcast is to help you master your mind, reach your goals, achieve meaningful happiness and live a fulfilled life. You have near limitless potential to be, do or have anything you put your mind and heart fully into. My hope is that the strategies (& stories) I share will help you develop the path to living your most fulfilled life.

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