Welcome Back! This week I want to talk about a model for personal growth that I believe works well for everyone who has used it. The four pillars we built this model for growth around are values, purpose, goals, and skills. Each one builds on the one before it, helping to establish a firm foundation on which to build a meaningful life.  One of the people I have called a mentor over the years is Dr John C Maxwell. and Dr Maxwell tells a story about sitting with a man who asked him if he had a plan for personal growth. Dr Maxwell said I didn’t know I was supposed to have one. I didn’t know I was supposed to have one until someone put a cassette tape in my hand and said listen to this and I heard Dr. Maxwell tell that story.  So if you’re looking for personal growth and you don’t know where to start here are four  ideas to help you get started.  Define Your Values Where coaching and where this podcast comes from is that everything starts from our value system. If you don’t know what you value, then how can you know what you really want? I think that deep down inside of us, we all have a set of values we live by. Whether we know them is not important. What is important is we live by them, whether or not we know them or not.  When you wake up in the morning and you decide to take a shower and go to work. The decision is based on your belief that the job is important. But why is that job important to you? Most of us do not know why. We just go through life one day at a time saying, “I’m just going to do the best I can” or “I’m just going to get through with this,” and we don’t know who we are. That’s the first thing I want you to understand is who you are at your core. From that point, you can develop your purpose, goals, and skills. Then you can, like Simon Sinek says, Find Your Why because you know who you are inside. Where Do You Live From? We don’t know who we are because we’ve been told from an early age that you need to get a job; you need to go to school, you’ll find a trade, whatever it is you do.  That is where we get our value from. School, job, friends, or our religion or whatever else it is. Today, I want you to take a step back, look at who you are on the inside, and then work from there. There is a longer version to help find your values and a list of common values on my website recaptureyour.life. But if you sit down with a sheet of paper and just list things that are important to you, you will start to see what you value.  From this big list, try to narrow it down to your top two. Then number one, which will be your main value, or what you really value in life. Then let this set for a couple of days and come back to it and ask yourself, is this what I really value? If it is then do it again in a month and see if it’s still what you really value. This is the beginning of making a meaningful life. Knowing what is most important to you and why you do what you do. Discover Your Purpose I believe we all have a supreme purpose, and that is to find our truth. Whether that is in a world religion, a cosmological argument, or in pure reason; I believe we all called to seek this truth as our first purpose. And this truth may be what your number one value is. Only you can decide that.  As far as the model for personal growth, we try to follow a pattern: values, purpose, goals, and then skills. Once you know your values, you can begin to define your purpose.

Transcipt Welcome back. This week we’re going to talk about dealing with failure and how our mind perceives it. Most people either don’t believe they will have a failure in their life, or deny that they could fail at something they are trying to accomplish. Failure is commonplace. Let’s be honest about it. Failure happens way more than success. What we do is we see people who have success and then develop a mindset that success is the norm when it’s not. We judge our insides by someone else’s outsides and assume that all we have to do is show up and we’ll be successful.  What I want us to see is that failure is inevitable. Every success came from people who rebuilt after dealing with failures. Look at all the corporations that have closed over the last year. Franchises that went out of business. A failure is not the end of the road. In the grand scheme of things, it’s just a setback if you have the right perspective. How we perceive the setback determines how we recover from it and how we approach our next opportunity.  At some point in time, everyone is going to fail. The problem starts when we look at failure as the end of the road. Marriages fail, businesses fail, books don’t get published, weight comes back, and jobs are lost. These things happen, but none of them have to be the end of the road.  So what are some ways we can look at a perceived failure differently Change the way we think and act Michael Bentt Is the most decorated amateur boxer in American history to never go to the Olympics. you see Michael Bentt had a habit of overreacting. His parents were Jamaican, so he could have gone with a Jamaican team, but he refused to give up his US citizenship to fight for the Jamaican team. He could have gone for the US team, but he was only going to be an alternate, so he refused to go then as well.  Michael Bentt turned Pro and lost his first professional fight by being knocked out in the first round. So he did what any reasonable person would do and walked away from boxing for over 20 months. After his hiatus, he came back and became Evander Holyfield’s sparring partner. He got picked up by a new promoter and after just 10 fights, Michael was challenging for the HeavyWeight Championship of the World. That’s actually a stretch, he was supposed to be a warm-up fight, but he won. Knocking out Tommy Morrison In the first round. Then, another strange turn happened in Michael’s life. The first time he went to defend the title, he was beaten so badly that he had to go to the hospital and the doctors told him he could never fight again or he would suffer permanent brain damage. Talk about dealing with failure. After some inner contemplation, Michael knew all along he didn’t want to fight. He never wanted to fight. That was his father’s dream, and he used Michael to fulfill his dream. Michael started taking classes in writing and was asked to write an article for a magazine about his experience of being knocked out. From that article came other opportunities. He became a boxing coach for movies and an actor and director. He has appeared in several movies and directed a couple of plays.  Michael had outstanding success and a huge public failure. For a boxer, getting knocked out was the worst failure that could happen. What he learned through the experience was that failure was not the end of the road. He learned to look at himself differently and realized he was more than a fighter.  How do you view your successes and failures? Do you only see the times that you failed? Or do you also see the times you pulled it out in the end? Do you look for someone to blame, or do you look for why it happened?

Most goals that we set, the desired outcome, isn’t the outcome we put on paper. The desired outcome is happiness. One of the best ways to achieve your goals is to work daily toward the goal and not worry about the outcome. Thanks for listening. If you like what you hear, please remember to subscribe and share this with your friends. If you want to stay up to date with all the happenings at Recapture Your Life coaching, you can sign-up on the website https://RecaptureYour.Life We also offer complimentary coaching sessions. You can sign-up through the website Here or directly by clicking HERE. You can read more on the Blog or listen on the Podcast Episode Transcript Welcome back! The last episode we talked about, knowing where you are going before you start and how having a roadmap will help achieve your goals. Today I want to take a step back and talk about letting go of outcomes.  Since the dawn of philosophy, philosophers have talked about letting go of the outcome. One of the earliest to say this is the Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu said, “By letting it go, it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.”  This sounds counterintuitive to our modern hustle culture. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying give up or don’t work toward a goal. What I’m saying is that the journey toward the goal is the prize. Your personal growth is worth more than any goal you seek. As you work toward any worthwhile goal, you will become a completely different person.   Many people who talk about success say striving for every goal you can hit is what everyone should do. Let’s look at the entire picture. If all you are doing is setting and achieving goals because you want more, isn’t that defeating the purpose of having more? If your motto is “I’ll rest when I’m dead” what good is achieving a goal if it does not satisfy you when you reach it or with who you are becoming as you move toward it? One of my favorite stories is about a Central American fisherman who goes out every day and catches two or three fish, sells one or two and eats one or two and then spends the rest of his day with his friends. either mending their nets or helping others with what they’re doing. They’re just talking and sharing life. Of course, Along Comes an American stockbroker or someone who’s in the money making field. He sees what the fisherman is doing and as he talks to him; the executive lays out this extravagant plan of how the fisherman could start making money by catching more fish. If he uses better nets, gets a better boat, hires other people, and so on. In the end, the fisherman asks, “what will I do after I make all this money?” The guy says, well you’ll retire and then you can spend your day catching a few fish and then spending time with your friends.  But isn’t that the way we are conditioned to think as Americans? Earn all you can so you can retire and live the good life. We don’t know what tomorrow holds, so why not live the good life now? I fully believe we need goals. What I want us to do is think better about the goals we set and focus on becoming better, not just having more. Most goals that we set, the desired outcome, isn’t the outcome we put on paper. The desired outcome is happiness. If I just had this thing or that person, I would be happy.

Life happens. When we know what our destination is, we can refocus if we get off track. A clear plan will allow us to make adjustments and corrections. It also helps us to grow as we travel to our end goal. If you want to stay up to date with all the happenings at Recapture Your Life coaching, you can sign-up on the website https://RecaptureYour.Life We also offer complimentary coaching sessions. You can sign-up through the website Here or directly by clicking HERE.

What is holding you back? Invisible fences are things that stop us from developing the life we want to live. In this episode we explore several ways to overcome these blocks. About ten years ago, we had the opportunity to live on some property with three other families. One of the other families was having an invisible fence put in because he had a dog that would not always respect people’s boundaries. We were driving out the back gate and my son asked what was going on. So I told him and explained all the dog stuff. He said, “I guess we all have an Invisible Fence.” He obviously thought at eight years old that we had Invisible Fence in our yards because none of us had fences in our yards. When I heard it, I said, “We sure do.” Not because we had an actual Invisible Fence in our yard, but because of the ones in our heads. Those keep us from accomplishing the things we set out to accomplish or be the people we want to be. This is one of the greatest obstacles for most people because we don’t know what we don’t know. Most of us haven’t spent the time developing a manner of living which requires us to look at ourselves. We just bebop through life saying, everything’s good, everything’s good, everything’s good. Then when it’s not, we don’t know what to do. So I wanted to take a little time today and just explore some of the Invisible Fence we all put up have in our lives. Number One: Take Responsibility For Our Self This may not be the number one reason that we have Invisible Fence in our lives, but it is the biggest I think. What we don’t want to do is to say I am responsible for any outcome that I like or don’t like. One of my favorite statements is, “If it’s always everybody else, it’s probably not everybody else.” That’s a very telling statement. If I blame everyone else for my problems, THEY are always going to be different people. If I change jobs and it’s everybody else’s fault, then I changed jobs again, and it’s still over buddy else’s fault. It’s probably not everybody else. When you choose to take responsibility for your life, everything changes. You take charge of yourself when you stop requiring people to make you happy. When you decide you love myself for who you are, you become comfortable and available to others. If you want to pursue a career that you feel fulfilled in, you take responsibility for the outcome. Taking responsibility for yourself, your feelings, your job and your relationships gives you freedom. As long as it’s somebody else’s fault, we give them control over our lives. When we finally take responsibility for our lives, the freedom that comes with that can be overwhelming. We’ve never experienced that kind of freedom and power before. So many of us spend our time blaming everyone else from the other political party, to the other religious affiliations, to other countries that we don’t have any idea what the freedom of making our own choices is or feels like.  Next Is Fear Living in fear is an awful feeling. Our addiction to news and social media multiplies the fear that we have today. We are fearful about everything that goes on around us, from the news, to our sports teams, to gas prices, and wars. It’s no wonder psychotherapy and counseling are growing as fast as they are. Franklin Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That wasn’t at the start of World War II. It was his first inaugural speech. He didn’t say that fear was gripping us because the Nazis were running through Europe like wildfire he said it was because we had lost our economy. That saying still holds true today. The only real thing that we have to fear is fear. We make up most of our fears. We fear what we’re told we should fear.

Welcome to the Recapture Your Life Podcast. My name is Steve Crenshaw and I’m a life transition coach. And the main question I help people answer is, what does success look like to me? If you don’t know what success looks like you can spend your whole life just making a living, not making a difference doing what you love. That’s what this podcast is about? It’s about real people finding out what genuine success looks like for them. Through coaching, speaking, and this podcast, I help people recapture the life they were created for.  What the recapture your life podcast isn’t about is hustle culture and making quick money. If you believe making a quick buck is success, more power to you. This is about living a life you create based on your values, purpose, goals, and skills. Only you can answer the question, and only you can decide how you are going to live your life.  What are life transition points? We often think of transition points like graduation, retirement, career change, family status change. These are all based on outward life changes. But Life transition can be internal as well. Addiction, burnout, realizing you don’t love what you do, or just deciding it’s time to make a change in how I think. Any number of things can bring us to transition points. Age doesn’t matter either. You can be in highschool or well into retirement and realize it’s time to decide where your next step in  life is going to be.   It took me until I was 44 years old, 33 different jobs, and a battle with addiction to wake up and find my purpose. My story won’t be your story, but I hope we can relate to each other’s story. Whether you’re just starting out in life and trying to find your place in the world, or if you’re in the second half of life trying to make a difference, this podcast is for you. If this podcast can help you take just one more step toward finding your purpose, it will all be worth it.  If this sounds like a podcast for you please like and subscribe on your favorite podcast delivery system.  I hope you will join me on this road to Recapture Your Life. Thanks for stopping by, if you like what you read and want to stay up to date with all the happenings at Recapture Your Life coaching, you can subscribe to get updates below. If you’ve ever thought about coaching, we are accepting new clients and offering complimentary coaching sessions. You can read more HERE or sign up directly by clicking HERE. You can read more on the Blog or listen on the Podcast

Thanks for listening, if you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with all the happenings at Recapture Your Life, you can sign-up on the website at https://RecaptureYour.Life If you’ve ever thought about coaching, we are accepting new clients and offering complimentary coaching sessions. No pressure and no selling, just a chance for you to see what coaching is like. You can read more HERE or sign up directly by clicking HERE.

Welcome back. This week we’re going to be talking about life domains, what they are and how they can help us live on purpose. This has been an eye-opener for me. In doing this research, I found that there are 5 basic life domains. However, you can track as many as you need to help you. There is freedom to choose how many or how few areas you want to focus on because it’s your life. What I want to do is share some of the life domains and then you can pick up which ones you feel you need to focus on. I also want to take it from the extreme and hopefully make it simple. Why Are Life Domains Important?  Knowing and understanding what our life domains are helps us understand how we are doing in certain areas of life. If we are honest, they can show us where we are being super successful and where we need to work. I went through exercise in 2018 and found that I was floundering in most areas of my life. In fact, according to that survey, out of the 9 areas it focused on, I was at the bottom in five and just above the bottom in two. I was only doing superb in two areas of my life. Spirituality and relationship. The funny thing is, those were the areas I had decided to work on at the start of that year. So I knew before I ever took it, there were things I could fix. And you probably know that too. You know there are things in your life that can use some work. Deciding on what life domains we want to focus on and sticking to them can help us grow in those areas. I would love to tell you I didn’t jump in and try to fix all of my life’s domains right away. But, that’s not true. I tried to fix them all at once and failed, so I started over and developed a set of life domains that fit me and my lifestyle. Because when we try to be something we’re not, we usually end up not being successful. Another thing I learned while doing the exercise is life domains are a lot like values. When we know them, we can focus on them and adjust them so that we can grow. Knowing what we value and where our values fit our life domains will add another level to our growth.  The brilliant engineer and inventor Douglas Engelbart said, The better we get at getting better, the faster we will get better. He knew that the more we know and understand ourselves, the more we can grow and become our true selves. What Life Domains Should I Focus On? The one more or less scientific study I found said there are five basic life domains: health, relationships, community, career, and spirituality. The list grows exponentially from here. Health becomes diet and exercise, personal growth and Mental Health. Relationships become spouse, significant other, children, extended family. Community. becomes volunteering, religious organizations, kids’ sports, and friends. Career becomes vocation, job, avocation, hobbies and leisure. Spirituality becomes faith and religion. Then each of those can have their own area. And you can add money as well money becomes retirement, finances and charitable giving. HealthRelationshipsCommunityCareerSpiritualityMoneyDietSpouse/Significant OtherVolunteeringVocationFaithFinancesExerciseChildrenReligious OrganizationAvocationReligionCharitable GivingPersonal GrowthFriendsKids SportsHobbiesRetirementMental HealthExtended FamilyLeisure So you can see how it gets confusing pretty quick. There are 26 things that I’ve just listed. If we try to focus every day or every week on each of those things, we’re going to drive ourselves mad.  Let’s try to keep it simple. Not use these things to beat ourselves up. God knows we get enough of that from the constant barrage of negative self-talk.

Episode Transcript If you don’t believe in yourself and the ability you have, you’re not alone. They paid me to be a public speaker, and I didn’t like the sound of my voice, so I shied away from speaking. I didn’t believe that I had the ability to write and develop ideas, so I didn’t do that either. Most people that you look at when you walk into your office or down the street or into the grocery store don’t believe in the abilities that they have. Maybe you were told that you aren’t supposed to believe in yourself. I’ll get into this later, but maybe your religious institution said that you can’t trust your abilities. They told you, you have to rely only on God. I’ll get into this later because that was me. I am a person who spent a lot of my life not believing in the abilities that I had because I was told not to. I want today to be the first step in trying to change that for you. Stop Saying I Can’t I can’t is the most limiting thing you can say to yourself. Thinking you can’t do something steals joy from your life. Even saying something like well I tried before and I wasn’t any good at it will rob you of doing something you love. As long as you tell yourself you can’t do something, you won’t do it. You may not even try to do it. If you think you can’t, you’re not going to.  Even if you don’t think you’re going to be good at a subject, just trying something new can open you up to other opportunities. If you’ve always wanted to paint but knew you were no good at it, going to and taking a class will open you up to what is possible. The more classes you take, the better you’re going to become regardless of the talent level. The next level is, do you want to paint for a living? Let me ask it this way: do you want to do something besides what you’re doing now for a living that’s creative? If you don’t think you can, you will not try. I’m not saying quit your job tomorrow and start doing something creative for a living if you’ve never done it before. What I’m saying is until you believe you can, you’re not going to take the classes you need and learn what you need to learn to start selling your stuff. Here’s the best advice I’ve ever heard: write what you want to read, paint what you want to see, create what you want to create. Whether you make money at it or not, you’ve done what you love and it will fulfil you. Stop Focusing On The Past If you’ve listened to this podcast before, you probably heard me say that I believe our purpose is to use the skills we were created with. Whether your skill is empathy, love, singing, riding, driving, engineering, salesmanship, or whatever else lies inside of you. BUT, For most of us, a parent, a teacher, friends, addiction, or any other number of things that crop up in our life have squashed these things. The problem is all those things happened in the past, which is where many of us like to spend our time. Your past got you to where you are today, but your future depends on you deciding to move forward. You are special because there’s no one else like you. You’re also part of humanity which needs you to be who you are created to be. One of my favorite authors, Brene Brown,  wrote this. “Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we will ever do.” Who wants to own their story when most of our stories are so messed up? Once we can get out of using our past and o hold us back, we can start loving ourselves and moving forward. Today,

I wanted to do this podcast for a little while because I’m interested in the effects dopamine and our technology has on procrastination. For me, my go to isn’t my cell phone but watching YouTube videos through Fire TV. Which is where I found a lot of the information I’m going to share in this podcast.  If you don’t know, dopamine is a chemical found in the brain that, when activated, gives us a micro High. It is the chemical that is released every time your phone rings or dings and also whenever you snort cocaine and do other drugs. When you use drugs, the high is giga-times greater, but the repetition is the problem with technology. What neuroscientists have found is humans can become just as addicted to behavior as they can to drugs, food, gambling, and sex.  Dopamine is also known as the chemical of drive. It can drive us to do things like complete a project or email. However, It can also drive us to procrastinate and get stuck on projects. Dr. Daniel Z. Lieberman talks about dopamine as the chemical of Desire. It can drive us to accomplish things and receive the reward that seemed to be just beyond our reach. But once we have the thing that is just beyond our reach, the dopamine level drops off and that desire is gone. Dopamine Over Stimulation  Think about slot machines. People love to play slot machines because of the intermittent rewards they give out. Your phone is like a portable slot machine because it gives you intermittent rewards, not in the form of money but of dings and beeps. Each time your phone dings and you look at it your brain releases dopamine and you feel rewarded.  Dopamine can drive us forward and give us the Boost to start a new business or change jobs or go after the person we believe we desire. We can also become over-saturated. When we’re always living at that peak and always looking for something more, we can become addicts with other substances like drugs and alcohol. When dopamine stops giving us the high that we want, we can seek something else to give us that high. This is when we lose motivation. When we become overstimulated and dopamine turns off, we can sit on the couch, binge Netflix, scroll Facebook or TikTok, and answer the dings on our phone. We can overeat to our heart’s desire and still not experienced any pleasure. Think about a time when you realized you’ve been scrolling Facebook for 30 minutes or an hour and it just wasn’t fun anymore. When we’re over stimulated and our dopamine levels drop, we can become lethargic and procrastinate. We separate ourselves from other human beings and we can not care. What it’s Like For me, it goes like this. I’ve gotten up in the morning with a plan for the day only to have that plan slip away. I start watching YouTube or 1970s cop shows and end up playing video games. That’s dopamine. All I wanted to do was catch up on a couple of YouTube videos while I ate my oatmeal. The next thing I know it’s 3PM and my wife is getting home from work. YouTube’s recommended videos are there to get me to click on them. I don’t know what the reward system is behind the 1970s cop shows, but I watch those as much as I watch YouTube. Video games are the same way. It’s the micro rewards you get every time you kill an enemy upgrade an ability micro hits of dopamine. What it all adds up to in the end is a wasted day and not getting the things done that I wanted to get done. No podcast has been written, edited, or uploaded for that day. The house isn’t clean, the laundry hasn’t been done, and dinner will not be ready. So how can we fix this procrastination and lack of motivation instead of binging Fac...