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 some times it was impacting how we interacted with each other. It makes sense, right? If you’re in a state where you’re just like, “Oh my god,” you come home from the day, you’ve worked really hard and you come home and you just lay down on the couch and you don’t want to do anything. Then, you’re not going to interact with your spouse the same way, your husband or your wife if you don’t have the energy to put into that, one of the most important things in your life, it should be at least, in my opinion, then you’re not going to get as much out of it. A lot of your state is kind of your energy level that you’re at. I think we don’t enrich ourselves kind of on a daily basis as far as keeping our energy levels up. For me, I noticed right away as I was improving my state, my relationship with my wife improved greatly. She noticed the same thing. Like, we talk about it a lot, and we are both kind of doing different things that we focus on our state each day. To me, my wife’s happiness and joy is one of the things that impacts my life the most. If she’s not in a good state, it’s hard for me to … I’ve gotten better at it, but it’s hard for me to not be in a good state. As she’s been in a better state, it brings me so much joy to see her happy. Her smile, her eyes, just everything about her, when she’s full of joy and happiness, it’s like the world is a beautiful place for me because that’s a huge goal of mine is just to make sure that she’s happy. Now, I know that that’s her decision, that’s her goals to make her happy, but I still feel a strong desire there to make sure she’s happy, and same for her to me. Right? We both feel that. This has been a huge area for us, just improving our state to improve our relationships, not only with each other, but with our children, how we react to them, whether we kind of snap at them or whether we actually take the time. One of the things that I noticed right away was, I think a lot of people either tend to really focus on past, like, there’s a lot of people I know that their mind’s always in the past. They have all these memories of the past and they think about the past. That’s the majority of their mind. Then, there’s a lot of people who kind of think about the future more often and they don’t really think about a lot of things there. I used to be more that I have my mind was mostly all in the future. Well, part of the problem with either living in the past or in the future is, hey, you can’t control the past, you can’t change the past, and the future is really the way you impact the future is in the present. If you’re not living in the present you’re often going to miss things, opportunities that come up in the present if your mind is so far in the future and you’re focusing on all these things that you’re not actually conscious in the present. That’s something I noticed right away is that I was much more present with the people that I was interacting with, whether it be my family, my coworkers, my clients, just people in the community, strangers in a coffee shop. I felt as I was in this more beautiful state, I was much more connected, I guess, to people. That was something that allowed me to be in the moment, and really also understand and experience their feelings, their emotions, their state a little more effectively. Because I’m in the moment, I’m listening, I’m active, I’m really engaged with them and my mind’s not three years out in the future and processing all these different possibilities, which is something that is both a skill of mine but also can bring a lot of stress when you’re thinking about all the potential things that could happen, both positive and negative and trying to go through all of that. That’s how my mind works, unfortunately. From a business standpoint, it’s been a huge impact. I mean, for any of you that are business owners, you know that it can probably be one of your greatest sources of pride and just happiness, but it can also be a big stress. Problems are going to happen. That’s just part of a business. You’re going to have things that don’t work one day. You’re going to have someone that takes in the position of someone else and you’re going to have to fill that role. You’re going to have some problems where it’s like you have so much business that you have to hire someone. Right? Those are the better problems to have. There’s generally two problems, either you have too much business or not enough, and generally you want the too much. You know, there’s people that, if you have a lot of employees, you’re going to have some times when there’s strong emotions around certain things. Then you’re going to be thinking, “What if this happened?” There’s a lot of potential stresses around that. When you’re in a heightened state, in a peak state, then you can actually process those so much more effectively. Instead of spending so much time with anxiety over these different things, you can actually process them with a much more clear mind, make decisions more quickly, and not carry that weight as much when you’re living in a beautiful state. For me, it’s really improved my outlook tremendously, not allowing a lot of these other things to impact me on an ongoing basis. What I would want for you and for everyone else is to really understand the power of the state that they’re living in and how it impacts their performance, how it impacts their relationships, how it impacts their body. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the tactics to improve your state. Now, I think for anybody, it doesn’t really matter how comfortable you are with out of the box thinking or anything like that, some of this still might feel weird to you. You have to kind of open up your mind and really allow yourself to do things that may feel weird to you, or whatever it may be. Not too weird, obviously, but just, like, there’s a few things that really impact your state. One of the big things is physiology. If you’re sick, if you have a fever and a flu, that can impact your state. I didn’t realize how much before, I guess it’s always one of those things that men are really bad when they get sick. Yeah, like, I actually got a little bit of, I’m not sure what it was, a fever or something at the time, but I actually felt better while I was sick than I used to feel on an ongoing basis. I thought that was the weirdest thing ever for me, but a lot of it was because of the state I was in. Before when I got sick it allowed me to just put myself in this lower mental state and I wasn’t allowing myself to do that. I was in a beautiful state. I was going to have high energy as much as I could. I was going to work through it, all that kind of stuff. I was able to deal with that sickness or that illness better. Generally, when you’re already living in a beautiful state more often, you’re actually going to have a lot less sickness in general. You can probably notice when someone’s in a bad state. Right? If you see somebody, I want you to in your mind imagine somebody who, they’re in a coffee shop, and maybe you can tell that they’re depressed or something is really weighing on them. Do they have a smile on their face? Probably not, right? Is their head up and are they bright eyed, or is their head kind of leaning down a little bit? It’s leaning down, right? Are their shoulders, do they have a good posture about them or is their shoulders kind of slumped, are they leaned forward a little bit? Immediately, you start to notice that when you see somebody in this state, you can tell. That’s one of the many reasons why your interactions with other people, when you’re not in a good state, people can tell the state you’re in to some extent, and that comes through in what you’re saying, so it’s part of the communication. Then, there’s a lot more to that aspect as well. The same thing, now imagine somebody who is sitting there in a coffee shop and they have just realized this idea that they want to achieve and they’re so excited about moving towards this idea in their mind, and they just have so much happiness and so much energy. Now, is their head leaned down or is it up? Are their eyes beaming? Are they smiling? They’re smiling, their eyes are beaming, their shoulders are up, they have all this energy. They’re breathing is probably not shallow, they’re probably breathing fully and they have all this energy because they’re excited, because they’re in this peak kind of state is what they’re feeling. Physiology, how you actually have your body, your breathing, all those kind of aspects affect your state significantly. If you have a frown on your face or if you have a smile on your face that’s going to impact how you feel. I want you to just try something. I want you to start smiling, think about something that makes you happy, either something silly or whatever it is. You start smiling, you immediately feel the difference. You feel the difference in probably my tone of voice as I start smiling. As you start smiling thinking about something silly or funny or whatever it is, you notice all of a sudden, you start smiling, or you continue to smile. That smile is no longer just something that you’re kind of just making. It’s like, “Okay, I actually feel this way.” Physiology is a big part of what affects your state. Now, we could drive down this a lot more from how we breathe on an ongoing basis and not getting enough oxygen and how we take care of our body and exercise and all of those things. Those are all important parts of your physical and mental state. Then there’s also focus. In the next episode, something I’ve been saying since I was about 20 years old is, what you focus on is what you find. It kind of goes along the similar lines of what we think, I forget who said the quote, but it’s like, what we think, therefore we become, or what we think kind of determines our world. It’s a similar kind of idea is, your focus. Where are you putting your focus? If you are, I’ll give an example of like, motorcycle racers. One of the things they teach people who ride competitively really fast around those tracks on motorcycles, is if they are hitting these corners at, gosh, 150, 160-plus miles an hour going around some of these corners, and they see someone just crashed in front of them, if they actually even kind of keep an eye on that person and watch what they did for a second, it’s highly likely that they’re going to crash too. Its similar, like, back in the days when I used to snowboard and you’re flying down and you see a cliff or something that you’re like, “Oh gosh, I don’t want to go off that cliff.” Well, if you keep looking at that cliff and focusing on it, you’re going to go off that cliff. You have to turn and focus on where you want to go, not where you don’t want to go. For the motorcycle rider, they train themselves to not see that where they might end up looking, crashing like this other person. They tend to focus on the track where they want to go. That’s something that is a big part of your state as well, is, are you focusing on what you don’t want to do or what’s not working, as opposed to focusing on the vision of where you want to go, what you are achieving, and what you are grateful for and all those kind of things. That’s a big part of what impacts state as well. Then there’s of course the words we use. Which, that’s a big thing I’ve always been very passionate about is, I hear people using words that are either self-demeaning or restricting to what they can achieve. All those kind of things reinforce certain patterns that can either be positive or negative. We want to make sure that we are looking at our physiology, we’re looking at where we focus, and then ultimately the words that we’re using to help improve our state. Now, I want to give you, I had never done this exercise before Tony Robbins’ event. I was normally just kind of doing more of like a thing where each morning, and I shared this with you if you listened to some of the previous episodes, my routine as far as reading some of the things I’m grateful for, I go through my goals every morning, and some different things that I kind of really focus on. I’m choosing to focus on where I’m going, choosing to focus on what I’m grateful for, so a lot of this stuff was already in line with what I was doing, so I was kind of priming myself and you kind of ultimately for something like this, which I think is a great exercise. Now, again, this is one of the areas where you need to open yourself up a little bit, but I’m going to put some links in the description below that you’ll be able to visit, and you can hear basically how Tony Robbins walks people through a priming exercise. What I’ve been doing, because it aligns so well with what I was already doing, is I just basically take this audio, and each morning rather than reading what I’m grateful for and doing that, I actually just listen to this each morning, and it walks through about a 12 to 15 minute kind of audio. It’s kind of a combination of a guided meditation and more of a guided focus, and little bit of a breathing exercise to kind of get your grounded, and he calls it priming, so primed for the day, and to really think about the things that you’re grateful for and just kind of focus on also the things that you want to see happen, and really walking through seeing them happen. Really, when you do that and you believe that and you can conceive it in your mind and you can kind of believe it, then you know ultimately you can achieve that. It’s a great kind of experience each morning to realign, refocus on what you’re grateful for, and where you’re going, these goals that you’re moving towards. It just is a phenomenal way to start the day. I would say if you don’t think you have 15 minutes to do this, then you need to do it more than anything, because this will ultimately allow you to have more time and will allow you to kind of be more present with the people you’re in and really ultimately achieve a lot of your goals and just live a more happy and abundant life. The micro-action today is to look for the link that I shared in the description below, click it, and what I want you to do is either just, you can download the audio from one of the links, the Tony Robbins site you can download the audio and basically put a shortcut on your phone or have the link in a reminder or however you want to do it so that you can listen to it. I want you to try this for at least five days. Try it for five days, and I think what you’ll notice is that it really changes your state, your outlook, and kind of just enjoy life better. That doesn’t mean when things pop up that, our triggers or negative things that you’re not going to change your state. It’s about living more often in this peak beautiful state, as opposed to letting yourself get down into that kind of state that’s more painful and miserable, and ultimately something that you want to be out of. It’s about looking at that and saying, “You know what? I’m not going to let myself be in this state more than 90 seconds,” is I think one of the things Tony Robbins said. I found that I can usually pull myself out pretty quickly of the state, but I think it takes practice. If something happens and the mind is heading down this kind of path, there’s different tips and tricks and things that you can do to kind of get your mind focused off of that and start focusing on different things, things you are grateful for. That’s probably one of the easiest things for me, is to really just start focusing on the things I’m grateful for and focus on more of love and just that outcome as opposed to these other things, and what I can give as opposed to something that’s either I feel like is being taken from me, or whatever it may be. I tend to try to focus on those things and it pretty quickly just lets that other feeling go away. Again, I want to thank you for your time and taking this journey with me. Yeah, if you have any questions feel free to either comment on the blog below or shoot me an email. Have a great day. Thanks again for listening to the Give, Grow, and Be Grateful podcast. If you received value from today’s episode, please share it and comment. Also, make sure to subscribe so that you’re updated when new episodes come out. Remember, every day you have a choice how you live. It’s not about what you get, it’s about what you give. Work on growing each day and getting out of your comfort zone. Then as you grow more, you’ll be able to give more and have an abundant life. Develop the habits of happiness by starting every single day with a focus on the things that you’re grateful for. I’m glad that you’re on this path with me and make sure to choose to have a wonderful day.

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 and fidgeting and going, “You know what? That’s not something I wanna do. I’m not a good public speaker. I’m not a public speaker,” or whatever it is. And so, they reinforce, right? It’s like these canals that you continue to chop away at and put more concrete on those canals so they’re unmovable in your thought patterns. So, you create these canals, these almost patterns of thought around certain things, and then you reinforce them with the language that you use with the beliefs that you have in those moments. But, it doesn’t take anything but a simple change in belief, or a question, to change your direction to find out and say, “You know what? Have I ever really tried to really go after public speaking and actually do it? No.” Right? So, why would you say, “I’m not a public speaker”? So then, you can start analyzing those things and getting through that. Ask yourself why is belief so powerful. Belief is something that can build a country, or tear it down. Right? Belief will stop you in your tracks, or it can start the fire that lights the way for you. Right? Belief is that foundation of everything, and hence, it guides our entire life. There’s so many stories about the power of belief. I think her name was Kelly … Kelly something. Kelly McGonigal, I think it was, did a talk on … it was like How To Make Stress Your Friend, or it was something about, that stress wasn’t negative basically. Anyway, she was a psychologist, I think, at Stanford. I listened to her talk and I found it really interesting, because in her talk, she was talking about how she felt like through working with people for a good part of her life, she had steered them wrong; because she had always been telling them over and over, that stress is a killer, stress will kill you, it can make you sick, and stress is bad for you. She was doing all these things, and now she feels like she needs some kind of repentance to some extent. Because through a study that was done, they determined … they asked this large group of people. It was a fairly large sample size. They asked this large group of people their different beliefs on stress, whether they thought stress was bad for them, whether they didn’t really feel it was bad for them or negative, those kind of things. And then, they studied … over a long period of time, they looked at the medical records, they looked at the health history, death records, all those kind of things. And so, the interesting finding was that one, people with higher stress that believed that stress was bad for you, did have a higher rate of illness. They had a higher rate of death than the people who didn’t have a lot of stress, that believed stress was bad for them. The huge surprise in the study was the group of people that believed that stress wasn’t bad for them, they didn’t feel that stress was negative on them, and that they still had a high level of stress. They actually lived longer. They were healthier. This kind of blew people’s minds away, because it wasn’t the stress. I wasn’t the stress that was bad for them. It was the belief that stress was bad for them that was actually affecting them. That is how powerful belief is. It can literally change our physiological response to things based on what we believe. Right? Like, you can be more calm in a situation based on your beliefs. If I’m going up to speak in front of a large group of people and I’m feeling a little bit of that stress rising, I can feel like that’s giving me the energy and it’s making me ready to go out there on stage. I just know that that’s gonna happen, ’cause I’ve done it a number of times. There’s also tons and tons of stories that just blow my mind around, like, multiple personality disorders. There’s been multiple cases of people who have multiple personality disorders, and in one personality, that personality may have diabetes. The other personality, they don’t have diabetes. When they’re in that personality, like when they’re in that specific disorder, they’re in that specific personality, they’re tested and they come up as diabetic. When they’re not, they come up as not diabetic. Or, that they’re allergic. Like, there’s tons of ones where they’re allergic to one thing in the personality disorder, and then the other one, they’re not allergic. That’s their belief. Now, I’m not saying that you just go out there and believe that I can fly, and you’re gonna fly. You know, don’t jump that far end of the spectrum. Just understand that the power of belief, it affects us; not only our trajectory in life and our happiness and everything about us, but it also affects physiologically, as well. There’s been … I don’t remember his name, but it was a famous case of … he was Greek. He was diagnosed with cancer, told he had, I think, six or nine months to live. He was talking about going through chemo treatment therapy. He decided, “Well, since I only have nine months to live, I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna go back to my hometown in Greece.” He went back to his hometown in Greece. I wanna say he was in his 60s at that age. And so, he wanted to live his last few months in Greece. And so, he went there and connected with some of his old friends and family. They heard what was happening. They came over and started playing games with him. He started doing gardening and other things, and just really enjoying his life, and just focusing on some of the finer things in life. I wanna say he lived to be over 100 at that time. This is all to kind of impact upon you the power of belief, right? In a future episode, I’m gonna go more into limiting beliefs. I’m gonna talk about how to really dive in and analyzed and understand your limiting beliefs. Because no matter where you’re at in life, I can guarantee you, you have beliefs that are impacting you negatively in your life. That’s fine, and who knows if we’ll ever get to the point where we have no beliefs that are having a negative impact on our life. That seems unlikely. But what you can do, is you can continue working on improving the beliefs that are beneficial for you. You can find those limiting beliefs, and you can say, “You know what?” You identify this belief, and you go, “Gosh.” It is extremely hard. I think, as a person, you feel very vulnerable as you start to find some of these things. It is challenging because you go, “You know what? That’s not the kind of person I identify with in my mind of who I am, but here I am saying these things that show that under the surface, I’m still maybe not as confident as I’d like to be, or as I think I am.” You know? Or, “Under the surface, I still may have this fear that everything’s gonna be pulled out from under me at the last second. Right? So, there’s all these kind of beliefs that we have, and I want you to analyzed those and go, “You know what? I have this belief. Why do I have this belief?” And you start looking back and going, “You know what? Different experiences throughout my life kinda led me to this point.” My wife and I just got back from Thailand, so I have to apologize. My goal was to record a podcast every single week. We were in Thailand. I actually brought my computer and microphone and everything, and I was planning on recording a couple episodes while I was there, but my computer just stopped working for some reason. And so, I didn’t record any episodes while I was there. And so, I’m gonna catch up a little bit, and get back on track here. Unfortunately, life happens. Speaking of life experiences and those forming strong beliefs, we had a pretty scary experience while we were there. First of all, Thailand is amazing. We went to Bangkok initially, and we didn’t plan on spending a lot of time there, because for us, it was a big city and we didn’t think we really needed to spend a lot of time there. We wanted to see other parts, and so we only spent one full day there. Had a lot of fun. It was beautiful. Then, we went up Chiang Mai. It’s farther north in Thailand. It was beautiful. Amazing people there. Did a cooking class, did zip lining, and just had a great time. Both my wife and I love Chiang Mai. And then, we went from there to Phuket, and we were in Phuket for five days. Phuket was amazing. A little bit more of a city feel, but it was also on the beach, on the coast, so you’d have the nice breeze. The place we stayed at was amazing, Le Meridien in Phuket, which they took phenomenal care of us. Had tons of fun there. And then, we went to our last and our favorite place, was Koh Samui. Koh Samui is an island, and I would kinda compare it to a Hawaiian island, but in Thailand. So, you have this amazing tropical island feel, but you have 1/40th the cost, maybe 1/20th the cost. The Thai baht is much different than … their currency is much different than, say, the U.S. dollar. Depending on where you’re at, your money will go a lot farther than in most places. What a lot of people do on the island though, and in much of Thailand, is they drive scooters around. It’s a great way to get around the island. It’s very inexpensive, and you’ll see a family of four on a scooter. You know, it’s interesting. One of the things that really opened up my eyes while I was there is, many of us, our day-to-day lives we often look at and go, “I don’t have this. I don’t have this.” You have these people in Thailand just loving life. They have this amazing love for life, and just positive, friendly nature. Here they are, four of them, riding on a scooter, a dad and husband. Dad and husband? Maybe. But, a husband and wife and two kids on a scooter, riding down the street, like taking them to school or something like that. It just kind of blew my mind, because here we are driving in a car and going, “You know what?” Again, it all forms from our belief and what we feel we need to make us happy. Right? “I believe I should have this Lexus car, and then I’ll be happy with that,” and that never makes you happy, because things don’t make us happy. Right? Not in the long run. So, we got on a scooter. We were having a great time driving around the island. We were like, “Why didn’t we do this way back when?” Because we were paying taxis and things like that. We got on a scooter, and we were driving around town, having a great time. Unfortunately, most of the scooters were gone by the time we got one, and we asked the hotel, “Could you find us a scooter?” And they said, “Sure.” And so, I think we got kind of one of the last picks of the liter, so to speak, and the breaks were not good basically. If we were going 30 miles an hour, and I squeezed the front and back break as hard as I could, it’d probably take us a good 40-50 feet to stop. Like, pretty bad. So, I was being careful. I was staying back from cars as much as I could, but you know, people drive a little crazy over there. That’s just how it is. So, we’re driving down the street, and all of a sudden we hear screeching brakes and crashing cars, and there’s an accident in front of us. Cars are sliding, and one car tries to basically avoid another car. Here we are on the left, and we’re basically about to get squished between this car and the side rail. Right? And so, my wife is on the back and I’m on the front. I’m sitting there trying to squeeze the break, so that we don’t end up in there, but realizing that we don’t have the time and the breaks aren’t working very well. I decided to take the alternate route, because the side rail actually was going to end in about 15 feet or so. And so, I sped up a little bit, and as the car was pushing over towards us and we could kind start almost touching the car on the side, at the very last second, I heard the foothold, or the foot stand … not the foot stand, but where my wife puts her feet basically. I heard that just barely scrape the side of the rail as we went by, and I thought, “Oh.” We just barely made it, right? As I look up there, there was a couple that were on the ground. They were on a scooter, crashed. They were getting up, so they were okay, but they obviously had burns all over their legs and things like that from some of the scratches and sliding down, things like that. I thought, “Wow. We just barely made it through that.” And so, I kinda maneuvered around. I asked my wife Jenny, I said, “Are you okay? Everything all right?” I hear it in her voice. She’s starting to tear up and she says, “No.” She’s like, “Let’s just go back to the hotel.” I look back, and I look down at her leg and her foot, and there’s blood all over her foot. So, those little footholds you put your foot on, well, it’s an island, we had flip flops on. Her foot was kind of a little bit on the side of that, and so as we went her over, her foot actually hit that side rail. The side of her leg actually scraped … the side rail actually took off a good portion, probably five layers or so, of skin on the side of her calf. And so, we couldn’t tell if, at that time, how deeply it was cut. There was a good amount of blood. Or, if it was broken or what. Long story short, well, shorter. We head back to the hotel. The people at the hotel, the Le Meridien in Koh Samui were amazing. They took care of us and actually brought in a taxi, or actually one of their private cars, took us to the hospital, and Jenny got all taken care of. The hospital in Koh Samui was amazing, like, great care. I think the whole thing, x-rays, everything, the doctor visit, all that stuff, ended up being like $250 dollars U.S., so much cheaper and great care. Much cheaper than the U.S. When all was said and done with that, I mean, Jenny didn’t let it really impact her vacation or anything. She was a super trooper, and just a strong woman. I’m sure she was in a lot of pain, but she still had a good time. We still did a lot of fun things after that. That night, we actually still got on the scooter. We weren’t gonna go very far, and we were gonna take it very easy. We went up and got dinner at this place called Doctor Frogs. Great little, I’d say Thai-talian. They have Thai and Italian food. The chef’s Italian. Long story short, his food was amazing. While we’re having dinner, we hear the screeching of brakes, and then serious crunching of metal. Much worse than the first crash we heard. I knew at that moment that it was a pretty bad accident. I actually walked outside and looked at the accident. I took a little bit of time, because I knew it was gonna be bad and I didn’t want to … with what we’d been through, I wanted to help, but I didn’t want to … There was an ambulance that got there pretty quickly, and they were taking someone off in the ambulance. I saw that their foot was moving, and so they were obviously alive at that point, and that was good. But then, they had someone else that they were doing CPR on, and we’re pretty sure that that person didn’t make it. You know, when you have an experience like that, it creates a very strong core belief. Right? This core belief around the potential for a lot of pain. Right? A lot of our beliefs are around what will bring us pain or pleasure, and that’s why we do or don’t do certain things. So, when you have an experience like this, all the sudden, you have this strong core belief that’s like, “You know what?” Like, we were done at that point. We said, “You know what? No more.” We gave the scooter back. If we were gonna go somewhere, we took a taxi or did whatever at that point, because neither of us wanted to potentially be in that position. Right? The same thing happens in our life when you have a traumatic experience. Right? A lot of people who have gone through very tough times or had very tough experiences in their life, they have these incredibly strong core beliefs that are supported by these experiences, that it’s much harder to change. That doesn’t mean it’s not possible to change. Any belief is possible to change. One of those myths is that the older you get, that you can’t change your beliefs. You’re just stuck that way. That’s been disproven for a long time. We have what scientists refer to as neuroplasticity, and we can actually, as we change our beliefs, the way our connections, our neurons actually fire and connect, actually changes. Over time, those pathways change. So, it literally is true that when you have these strong beliefs, they create these pathways over time, and those pathways are easier to happen, and changing those are harder, but that can still happen. Right? So, what I would suggest, I think, that people get to is, rather than just letting your life go on as all the beliefs that have been imprinted on you, that have been given to you against your will, or not against your will, but without your knowledge in a lot of ways, that you, living with those beliefs, is that you look at where you want your life to be. What you want your life to be like. Don’t look at is as a destination, but just look at it as the experience of life, right? People a lot of times think their happiness is related to a position in life. It’s not. Happiness is a habit of how you think about happiness. If you, in your mind, believe that you need a car and you need a big house and you need all this money to be happy, guess what? You’re not gonna be happy until you get to that point, and then you’re gonna realize, “Wow. None of this stuff actually makes me happy.” ‘Cause it’s not about getting something to make you happy, right? Happiness is a belief we have about ourselves, and it’s something we can create every day. So, look at how you want to live your life every day. If you wanna be in this great state every day, you wanna have a positive impact on people, whatever it is, understand those things, and then start to look at the beliefs that would actually support living that lifestyle, living that way; and start creating those beliefs, understand that the core belief is like a tabletop and that the actual legs of the table are supporting beliefs, so you want to put supporting beliefs under these core beliefs to create really strong foundational beliefs that will help you get to that point. Right? So what happens is, when you consciously start choosing your beliefs, it empowers you beyond what you can possibly probably imagine at this point, that it opens up all of the possibilities. I have to think of it like, if you’ve seen the movie The Matrix, where once he realizes that … in one of the episodes he says, “You have to realize there is no spoon.” And the spoon bends in his mind, because he’s in the Matrix. This isn’t reality, right? Well, our mind, our belief structure, our senses are the same exact thing. You have these mental constructs in your mind, but they’re just mental constructs and you can change those things. It’s about changing your core beliefs and changing the supporting beliefs that are underneath that. Now, that takes time and practice, but the better you get, the more flexibility you get there. The more practice you get changing your beliefs, it becomes easier to kind of be flexible in your mindset and change beliefs according to what will actually be beneficial to you and to the people around you in the world. Right? I want to end, like I do with every episode, with a micro-action. And so, I want you to write in your note tool. If you, in listening to previous episodes, you already have this; if this is a new episode to you, it’s best to start at the beginning, and kinda start here. One of the things that I ask you to do is do a micro-action in each episode. In one of the first episodes, I have you use a note tool. In that note tool, it’s just a daily reminder that pops up. And so, you can do something like Google Keep or any kind of of notepad that has a reminder option. And so, in a notepad like that, or if you just have paper, write it on paper. I want you to write down two lines. One is Beneficial Core Beliefs, and the other is Limiting Core Beliefs. So, over time what I want you to do is, as things come to mind … I mean, you can spend some time doing it right now if you want. Just right, the micro-action is really there to just give you something super simple that you can do and take action. So for now, I just want you to write down Beneficial Core Belief and Limiting Core Belief. And then as things pop in your mind, you can open up your notepad and say, “You know what? I just said something I realized must be under the surface somewhere for me that I said that was a limiting core belief. I said I am not good at that. Well, let me write down what that is. I am not good at this. Well, what is it that I’m not good at? I’m not good at conflicts, maybe it was. Maybe I’m not good at talking to people in general. Maybe it’s I’m not good at talking to strangers or introducing myself, or I’m not good in public situations or I’m not good at a cocktail party,” whatever it is. Those are like limiting core beliefs that, when you say them, when you say that, you’re reinforcing this core belief that you hold. And so first, you wanna identify that and realized, “Do I wanna continue reinforcing this?” ‘Cause I guarantee you, you could be good at it if you wanted to. So, why not maybe use it that way? Why don’t you say, “You know, right now I necessarily don’t wanna do that.” ‘Cause the language we use is important. I’m gonna be doing a specific episode specifically on the language and words we use and how they either free our mind, or they limit us in a lot of ways. Over time, as you’re writing those down, you’ll see, “Hey. I have these other core beliefs that are maybe more beneficial.” One of the ones that I’m most thankful for, that my mother impressed upon me, is that she always told me, she said … and I apologize. I said I’d talk more about from a parent’s standpoint, like instilling core beliefs. And so, I’ll talk about that a little bit. But one of the things my mother always told me was, she always said, “You can do anything you want, if you put your mind and your heart into it.” And I heard that from her many times throughout my life. I believe that whole heartedly. I feel like that’s one of the most beneficial beliefs I have because … again, brand new to podcasting. I’m a newb. You can probably tell to some extent. But as a whole, I always figured, yeah, I can pretty much learn anything. If it’s important to me and I wanna really get into it, I can do it, I can learn it. Right? A lot of people don’t have that belief. So, it’s trying to do something new that’s outside of their comfort zone’s extremely hard. So, if you wanna instill a core belief in someone, instill that core belief that they can do anything that they put their heart and mind into if they’re willing to work hard enough. Right? If they’re willing to work hard enough, and they’re gonna put their mind and heart into it, they can achieve that. I think as a parent, it’s critical that we instill these core beliefs in our children, and that we make our love for them unconditional, not based on grades, not based on performance in any one thing, that we let them know that they have our love unconditionally for everything, and that we instill strong core beliefs in them. I wanted to touch on that a little bit. I can go into more at another point. I guess for now, start writing those down as you go through. Feel free to share with me if you have any limiting core beliefs that pop up. I say in the next couple episodes, I’ll do one specifically on how to analyze your core beliefs in more depth, and then how to kinda address and change those beliefs going forward. Again, thank you for your time and being on this path with me, and make it a wonderful day.

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 you. Think about that. What are your core values? What are really important to you? I think you’ll find if you don’t have these currently defined that you may not be living your life. You’re living your life by your core values. What happens is when you manage your time by your core values more, that’s one of the biggest things about living the life that you want to live, is really having that alignment with your true kind of core values. It’s really important as you go through this exercise to get that kind of outlined and have a good understanding of your core values. Now, that doesn’t mean again it has to be perfect. Just start and then continue modifying and improving a little bit along the way. Another question I would ask of myself if I was you is, how do I want people to remember or think of me? This could be family, friends, colleagues. It could be people in your community, in your industry, things like that. I think it’s a good question because it kind of holds you accountable for what person you want to be and what impact you want to have and really understanding, am I doing every day the things that I need to do to kind of live up to these standards that I’m setting for myself? Another question that I think is a really good question is, what would a perfect day be like for you? I went through this exercise a while back. I’ve done it a couple of times and kind of defined it out. It was interesting for me that one of the things about my perfect day was getting up and exercising in the morning and having the time to kind of get up and get going the day like that and maybe having some coffee, maybe reading some things and kind of educating myself and growing a little bit more. I thought about doing jujitsu and yoga or kind of switching those out some days, spending time working with my team and kind of coming up with different ideas and strategies for clients and things like that because that’s something I really enjoy, spending some time with my wife and family. I was going through all those things, and what was interesting to me as I started thinking about this was, why am I not doing that right now? That was one of the really kind of eye-opening questions for me when I was going through that exercise, was I’m making a lot of excuses for why I’m not doing that now, “I don’t have enough time,” or “I don’t do this or that,” whatever it is. But I think in a lot of cases, there’s things that you can do right now that you’re not necessarily doing. For me, I had to change. I talked about those challenges of your beliefs and your programming getting in the way. One of the outdated kind of beliefs or programming that I naturally said about myself was I’m not a morning person. That was getting in my way because I’d get up later and then I’d go straight to work. It wasn’t allowing me to first give to myself and really before I gave to others because the way you start your day can be really important. So I said, “You know what? I am a morning person.” I started going to bed a little earlier. I started getting up earlier and started working out each morning, and it was one of the biggest changes and had the most positive impact for me because I just feel that’s something that gives me a lot of energy. I just feel a sense of bliss when I get up and I feel like I’ve already done a lot. I feel great physically, so all of those things. That was one of those things. You’re going to run into those things as you go through creating your vision that you may say, “Well, I don’t really have the time to do that,” or you’re going to make an excuse rather than making progress potentially. Just be aware of that as you’re going through different things. Another question that you might ask yourself is, what impact do I want to have? How do I want to impact the people around me? This could be from a philanthropic standpoint. It could be you want to be able to support certain charities, things like that. One of the systems and tools we have at work for recognition, I love that we basically get points for people recognizing each other. It’s called Bonusly. It’s a really cool tool. People kind of recognize each other for main core values and doing exceptional things for clients and stuff like that, and then they get those points and they can use them to buy things, but often you see people giving to charities, so they give the points in the form of money to charities. That’s really cool to be able to kind of help with that part of things. From our company’s standpoint, one of the impact things we want to have is we want to have a really positive impact through our local community, and we specifically kind of target youth in that area. We support the Boys & Girls Club of Southwest Washington. We also focus on the Share homeless shelter here locally in Vancouver, both adopting families there and taking our team to volunteer. Our team gets paid to volunteer two days a year. We take on different projects for causes and things like that sometimes as part of that. Then we’re also part of, recently, a new organization in Clark County, 100 Men Who Care of Clark County, which gives basically, between 100 members, gives $40,000 a year to local charities. That was a big thing for me as far as having an impact. That’s just one portion of it. Your impact could be, “You know what, I want my wife to feel loved and special every day. I want my children to feel loved and to feel that they can do anything.” You want to have that impact on the next generation, whatever it may be. Ask yourself, “How do I want to have that positive impact on the people around me?” Then what is my purpose? This is often a hard question and one that you don’t necessarily have to answer right away. It could come over time. I’ll dive into purpose more later because when I talk about … I had mentioned the VBAR method in a previous episode and kind of dived into a little bit about what that meant. Vision, beliefs, actions, and results is kind of the overall method. There’s more that goes into it. Under vision, it stands for vision, values, and purpose. It is just under vision, is vision, values, and purpose. Those are kind of three main areas of that quadrant when I’m thinking about kind of what I look at for myself, is what’s important. Your purpose in life, one of them is to find your purpose. Then once you find your purpose, it’s to live your purpose and challenge yourself and grow in a way so you can do that. I think my purpose in a lot of ways is to help other people realize that they have unlimited potential in what they can do in understanding how to kind of get out of their comfort zone and overcome kind of some of these obstacles, the mental and physical obstacles that may be in their way, to getting them close to achieving their purpose. I think if everybody is having more of a purposeful life that it will be this positive ripple effect. It will impact local community and then eventually the world as a whole. That’s a good question to ask as you’re going through this. What do you want to be doing? Are there a certain type of work that you want to improve at? Are there skill sets that you want to get better at? Are there vacations that you want to take? Where are you living? Who do you see around you? Do you want to have a significant other? Do you want to have children? Do you want to have grandchildren? Well, that’s not really up to you. As you go through this vision, you really want to kind of define and have this really clear kind of concise vision that you’re going towards. Now, I’ll give you a brief kind of the opposite perspective a little bit. Sometimes you want to be aware as you create this very clear, concise kind of vision, it’s extremely powerful if you do it in the right away, and it will help drive you towards that vision, and so it’s extremely compelling. It is important that you continue taking time and working on it, but if it’s not aligned with your values, that’s what … at one point when I was younger, I thought, “Hey, I’m totally …” I had this vision that was all set up. I went from becoming a salesperson in this company to becoming an assistant sales manager and to then becoming the sales manager. I was making a significant amount of money for my age, I think 21, 22, 23, somewhere in that range. I thought, “Wow, I’m doing all these things,” but not really happy. I was 274 pounds, very overweight. I had recently had a daughter around that time, and so I wasn’t spending as much time with her, things like that, which as I started to realize … I actually ran across a book. In fact, I have it in my bag right here, so I’ll tell you the title. The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management. This is by Hyrum Smith. He’s the CEO of Franklin Quest. This book, I have it in my bag because I was going to give it to somebody because it was one of the most impactful books in my life at that time. It was really understanding the alignment between how you … I know the title sounds kind of dry and the book isn’t a super easy read by any means, but it’s a very valuable book. As you go through and you start realizing that you manage your time by urgencies of things and priorities, but they’re not often aligned with what you value, and if you live your life by that, you’re ultimately going down this path that’s not aligned with your vision, values, and purpose as a whole. It’s really important that you look at that and define that and then make sure there’s alignment between those things because having a compelling vision can be very strong, and it worked well for me when I was younger and kind of driven, but it wasn’t aligned with my values or my purpose in any way. I eventually parted ways there because I was traveling every other week and I was doing all these things, making a lot of money. It was great, but it was more important for me to kind of align with my values and purpose, so I swung to the far other side where I started getting into mixed martial arts again and things like that. That’s when I started training at Team Quest back in the day and started throwing ultimate fighting events and all that kind of fun stuff, which that was very enjoyable, but eventually then I got, as you may have heard in the previous episode, that I eventually got misaligned there as well because financially things were bad and many other areas. There’s this kind of balancing that’s always going on. I think balance is a little bit of a myth as far as having this kind of just stable balance across everything. I think you’re constantly rebalancing as you go, but it’s good that when you have this clear vision and you have values alignment with your vision and your purpose alignment, it’s extremely powerful, and it also just allows you to live a very happy and fulfilled life. Once you get into some of these questions, you’re going to start thinking about what actions, what belief sets do you need to make these things happen? That gets in more to the whole VBAR method of once you have this kind of compelling vision, then you’ll start looking at, “Okay, what are the beliefs I have now that are kind of limiting me or holding me back from getting there? When I get to this point, what beliefs would I have developed to get to that point?” I believe in myself more that I could achieve anything, that I could learn anything if I put my mind to it. Whatever those beliefs are, you need to look at what those beliefs would be, and then you need to start working on developing those beliefs now. Otherwise, you won’t get to that point. What are the actions that you need to take to get there? You need to kind of … this will go will go in further after you kind of go in the vision, and then this is kind of a cyclical thing where you continue working on each area. As your beliefs rise, all of a sudden you might go, “You know what? I was shooting too low. I totally have this much higher vision I could go for.” Think about the different roles in your life, like as a wife or a husband. What type of friend do you want to be to your wife or husband or your friends, what kind of member of a team, if you’re a member of a team, whether that’s at work or in a sports team? Kind of think about all those things. When I was working back in early 2017, I went through and revamped my personal vision statement because I was at a point where I’d say I felt a little uninspired at that time. I had basically achieved all of the things in my vision, which you should be extremely excited and happy, which I was. At that point, I was very excited and happy, but I was also feeling like I wasn’t as driven because I had everything I wanted. I wasn’t hungry because I had achieved many of my financial goals, my personal goals. I have the wife of my dreams, best friend. Not that we don’t have challenges, but we work through them together. I have two amazing kids and a successful business, and my health goals are pretty good. I’ve still got work to do there. It was one of those things. When you get to that point, it’s like, okay, I need to step back a little bit and I need to raise the bar, raise the VBAR. I went back and I started asking myself, “What am I giving to the world? What kind of impact am I having? How am I giving to other people? I looked at, how can I be a better husband, a better member of the community? As I was going through, I started working on all this thing of becoming more involved in the community. Then I started working on … obviously, I knew since I was about 23 that I wanted to write a book, and I’ve been making notes about this for the last almost 20 years of some of the different things over time that I eventually wanted to write a book, and it’s one of those things that I had to stop making excuses for and just start making progress on. I looked at this podcast format as the way to do that because it holds me accountable to doing this so that I do it each and every week and get kind of my thoughts and ideas and everything out. Then eventually, I’ll have a writer help me finish kind of editing everything and we’ll tighten things up and publish the book. There’s a lot of things I had to look at and say, “You know what, there’s some of the these things that I hadn’t thought of in a while,” so I made it a goal of mine to write a book, to have a more positive impact in the world and to help people more, whether that be the people at my office or the local community, all those things. That’s what I’ve been working on a lot for myself. One of the things I realized that I wasn’t doing, and I think it’s important that you realize this, is when I say give, grow, and be grateful, and that’s my life’s motto, give … I think some people look at that, and they just go, “Oh, well, you’re constantly just giving to others.” Some people already feel like they give so much, and they don’t really get anything in return. It’s important that you first give to yourself. You are the most important person first, okay, because if you’re not in the right mental state, if you’re not in a position to do the things that you can do, you’re not going to be able to give to your spouse. You’re not going to be able to give to your children, to your community, to your team members, all that kind of stuff. It’s really important that you first understand what you need to kind of get you either inspired. Like for me, that morning routine, getting up, focusing on the things that I’m grateful for, working out every morning, of the week at least. Doing those things for me just wakes me up and I just feel great for the day. That to me is one of the things that I give to myself. I give myself that time. I spend some time in the sauna meditating afterwards and just focusing on different things. I spend time reading my vision and my goals and purpose and values every morning, having some coffee, so I’m up early before all these things happen, and yeah, then I start the day. Yeah, that’s a little bit about myself and kind of what I’ve gone through there. I’m happy to answer any other questions on that side as well. Just understand that crafting your personal vision statement will be a process, and it’s not going to be something that you just write down once and you’re done. It will be something, as you look through and think about your goals, you’ll come back and you’ll tweak it a little bit more. It will just be this kind of ongoing cyclical process where as you achieve some of the things in your vision, your beliefs are going to increase, and you’re going to say, “You know what, I’m going to change. I’m going to see where I can have more of an impact, where I can give more. Maybe I can grow more in these areas,” all that kind of good stuff. As you know, if you listened to the previous episodes, which I hope you have, we end each episode by having a micro-action, we meaning myself. I’m a Gemini, I guess. I want you to think about … when I say a micro-action, it’s just a repeat for if you are trying to … as a matter of fact, it’s something very simple. You can do it right away today and it will take very little time, usually less than a minute of your time. Now, over many, many episodes … I’m doing 52 episodes at least or until I kind of get all the content for this book out. You’ll have developed these positive habits by taking all these little micro-actions. Kind of like a drip of water over time, it kind of creates a channel. In this episode … in the previous episode, I asked you to use a note-taking app like Google Keep or something like that, that has the reminder functionality, and to set it each morning to look at what you’re grateful for and read that each morning because if you start the day like that, it’s just an amazing day. It gets you in the right mindset. In this one, I want you to open up your notes app, and then in all caps, I want you to write vision. For now, just write one question. Then over the next days, weeks, you can kind of build on it from there and it will be something that you kind of add to as you go because you’ll have this reminder set each morning to look at that and read it. Then things, when they do inspire you or come to your mind, just throw them in that note app and you can over time continue kind of editing it. But write this one question down. What am I grateful for now that I will be, do, or have in 10 years’ time? What am I grateful for now that I will be, do, or have in 10 years’ time? It might sound a little bit weird, but I wrote it that way purposely because a lot of the times, we naturally gravitate towards things that we’re grateful for or they gravitate towards us. If you’ve heard of the law of attraction, it’s kind of that general consensus, is what you think about is what you become. Where your mind is focused on is where you go, all those kind of things. That’s why this is so important from creating that vision. It values your purpose overall, kind of having that clearly defined. When you’re grateful for something, it naturally attracts those things. If you think about your spouse, for instance, if you’re not grateful for them, it pushes them away. When you’re grateful for them, it pulls them to you. Same with friends, right? When you have friends, if you’re grateful for those friends, you tend to treat them better and do things for them, which naturally strengthens those bonds and you tend to get more friends because you’re a good friend. When you’re thinking about your vision in 10 years’ time and you’re saying, “You know what, in 10 years, in my personal life, I’m going to be here. In my professional life, I’m going to be here. In my health and fitness, I’m going to be here. In my financial, I’m going to be here,” whatever … it could be public speaking. It could be many different things. When you work backwards, almost like reverse engineering it, you say, “You know what, I’m grateful for now my ability to …” Maybe it’s to learn and become a better public speaker because you can. I mean that’s just … I started out as a bad public speaker and became good and then I’m still working on getting to the great point at some point. What am I grateful for now that I will be, do, or have in 10 years’ time? Start just making notes and start working on creating your vision over time. Then each morning, this will pop up, and when you’re reading what you’re grateful for, I want you to focus on … read what you’re grateful for, and you can add some to that as well, and then read your vision each morning. This will help reinforce it and help you continue working it and thinking about kind of what direction you’re going in life and where you want to go. As you continue kind of focusing on that, it’s a natural rule of law. What you focus on is what you find, so the more you focus on it, the more you naturally move in that direction. I want to thank you again for your time, and I’m glad you’re on this path with me. I look forward to chatting with you more.