The power of the human mind is such that it has the potential to create your life for you. It is therefore in your best interest to take that power in your hands and use it to be able to live with emotional freedom. If you are a stuck healthcare professional, corporate executive or small business owner, chances are you have experienced the confidence erosion that comes from the day in day out demands of trying to do more with less. But what sets confidently successful people apart is that they are not even focusing in these things. Instead, they put their full attention to what they enjoy, what they do well and where they can add the most value to. In this episode, award-winning pharmacist of 30 years and bestselling author of “The Successful Thinker” Corey Jahnke shares his story of struggle and explains the 7 Steps of going from Mindfulness To Confidence that he uses and has coached thousands of people to use as well. Life can be simple; it is just us who complicate it. Listen in to learn how to break free of this mind slavery.
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7 Steps To Emotional Freedom
How To Go From Mindfulness To Confidence By Corey W. Jahnke
In 2008, I found myself in a desperate situation because of the stress and strain from overwork, overwhelmed, and underappreciation was killing me. I didn’t know what it was at that time because I had spent many years working as a community pharmacist and pushing and trudging through every day, all day. That’s what we do. We think that if we go to work and we do our best, the world will somehow take care of us and life will somehow work out well. What happens is that you get beat up. You take hits along the way and you begin this confidence erosion.
The corporate entities, the government entities, the life debt that you take on and the difficulties that you have in your relationships. What happens is that you begin to feel like you have no power. When you start feeling like you have no power, there begins to be this feeling of hopelessness that no matter what I do, it doesn’t matter. I can’t get ahead. I can’t win. What happens is it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You start creating the life that you didn’t want to live and we’re going to change that here.
In 2008, I found the answer that I was looking for, which said, “This is costing you and your family. Do you want your family to have to get by without you because you’re going to let some job or some life situation win over you?” The human mind is prone to incredible distortion. If you’re not careful, your thoughts become your life. That being the case. What you want to do is learn how do you direct your thoughts and how do you direct your environment even when it seems like you have no control. I believe the way to do that is to develop the capacity for greatness.
I believe most of us believe we can’t do that because of this confidence erosion that I talked about. What I’m going to do for it is I’m going to give you the seven steps for developing a life of confidence so that you can live emotionally free. Doesn’t that sound fun? If it does, keep reading because you’re going to find that there’s going to be some useful information here. Everything is free. I want to share with you what I’ve learned along the way that has helped me maintain my sanity. It’s 2020 and I’ll tell you, it’s been a crazy year but some people are doing better than ever.
I want to put you in the boat with those people and I want to get you out of the ocean of drowning, stressing out, and feeling like you’re getting killed no matter what you do. Fair enough? Let’s get going. What I want you to always recommend to yourself is that you think through simplicity. I want you to ask yourself, is my life more complicated than it needs to be? What have I said yes to if I had to do over again, I would say no to? A large part of what stresses us out is that we have too many obligations, too many plates spinning in the air and too many things that we’re trying to do.
We’re nice people and we want to be all things to all people but successful people don’t do that. Successful people focus on, what it is do I enjoy? What is it that I do well? Who can I add the most value to if I focused on the 1, 2 or 3 things in my life that I could be world-class at? I write books, podcast and I make videos. Those are the three things that I do when I’m not working. I outsource or delegate nearly everything else. Do I plow my driveway? No. Do I mow my lawn? No. I find other people who can do that at a fraction of the cost that you think it would be.
What I do is I free up my time to focus on the things that I do well. I want you to email me if you’re not clear on how to outsource some of the things in your life or how to simplify your life. I want you to think about it. Is your life more complicated than it needs to be? If you started with that question, you’d find that you could cross off some things on your list and be okay. Many of us think that there are all these things we’d have to do, have to be or have to have.
The human mind is prone to incredible distortion. And if you're not careful, your thoughts become your life. Share on XIf you start chopping down that list, it’s amazing how much pressure can be taken off of your chest, your neck, and your lungs. Who am I? I’m Corey Jahnke. I am a human being like you. I’ve been a pharmacist for 30 years. I’ve worked with customers that are out there killing it and getting killed. I’ve worked with employees, colleagues and professional circles. The same thing happens everywhere you go. Some people are killing it and some people are getting killed.
I want to share with you what I’ve learned over the course of my 30-year pharmacy career, 500 books I’ve read on success and leadership, and the dozens of interviews that I’ve done for The Successful Thinker Show because the only thing that matters to me is that you wake up with a feeling of chance, hope, and tomorrow you’ll wake up feeling even better. We take you from a space of getting killed to killing it.
Personally, I believe that life is phenomenal. I believe that you deserve the life you were meant to have. I also believe that most of us aren’t living the life we signed up for. What I want to do is teach you the seven steps to take you from mindfulness to confidence. What I believe is that most of us have had this confidence erosion because we’re playing in a world that doesn’t make sense to us. The bureaucrats give us the direction we don’t believe in. We’re forced to work longer with less help and under circumstances.
We would never impose upon other people. A lot of it seems foolish. We’re working for multibillion-dollar companies that won’t even give you the help that you need to adequately support your customer flow and all the tasks they need you to do. Every time you turn around, they’re tightening the ratchet and yet you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it because you have no confidence. The only time that your life ever changes is if you get sick and you can’t work, or if you walk out in pure frustration.
When that happens, oftentimes you think I’m going to a better situation but you end up in the same situation with different people involved. Why? Because you’re not creating your own life and your own environment. We’re going to teach you how to do that by doing these seven things. We’re going to ask you to adopt mindfulness as your core behavior. We’re going to ask you to develop consciousness so that you’re asking yourself what it means to be a functioning member of a powerful community, a community of workers, neighbors, relatives and somebody who’s driving their life.
We’re going to teach you to experience awareness. This is the simplification process I was talking about where you’re saying, “This is what my life looks like.” It doesn’t have to look like that. We’re going to help you to find effectiveness. What does it mean to be effective in your life? We’re going to teach you how to master balance so that you’re arranging your life in a way that you have some form of your life, work life and the life you share. We’re going to help you feel empowered so that you don’t feel like you’re a victim of your situation and circumstances.
What we want you to understand is that your situation and circumstances do not define you. They’re only the total of the decisions you’ve made, the actions you’ve taken, and the things that have happened to you thus far. You can create a mind map and turn that into a roadmap for the future you want to manifest. We’re going to teach you how to become the best version of yourself as you inhale kindness and exhale confidence on a daily basis. I hope that sounds like fun to you. I have worked for twelve years to master this system and I believe it’s the way to live life so that you get to wake up every day feeling like, I didn’t recognize that this is what I was born to be. I am happy that I figured it out.
What it is is that there are mental constructs all around us. What we have are mental filters that take everything that happens to us and everything that happens through us and filters in a way such that we begin to have this world view. This world view is tainted based on our experiences and our emotions at the time we experienced it. I want you to recognize that the way you feel about things is what drives your life. Often times, the way you feel about things is derived from the way you physically feel.
Emotional Freedom: You have to develop an understanding of what drives you and why this drives you so that you know why and how the things that are going on in your world affect you the way that they do.
In the pharmacy profession where I work, many of us are working hours without going to the bathroom, without drinking any water, without eating a very nutritious supplement to get us through these crazy afternoon hours. We’re making decisions, we’re taking actions, and what we’re doing is absorbing input from external sources. What I mean by that is you’re getting emails from your boss and you’re getting customer feedback that oftentimes rubs you the wrong way because you’re in no position to take those things.
We also have to understand that our customers have mental filters. Our family has mental filters based on the way they see the world. The simplest way I can explain it to you since this is an election year is you have two candidates that are drastically dividing the country into people who think one way and people who think another way. What I’m seeing is that people are filtering the performances in the debates and the advertising through their own filters. If you’re for candidate A and he says something, you might be willing to give him a lot more room than you would if you were for candidate B.
Grounded Mindfulness
The opposite is also true because what I see in the media is a lot of justification based on your own perspective and how you think this candidate is most likely to affect your life. That’s what happens in the workplace. You’re busy, you’re stressed out, you’re malnourished, you’re dehydrated and you’re angry in a lot of cases because you don’t get the chance has to take care of yourself that you think you should have. Things then happen and you filter the information in a way that serves you best at the time. Often, it serves you best at the time with long-term negative consequences.
In other words, getting fired up because this is not fair and this is uncool will give you the energy to get to the end of the day but then you’re left with the feeling that you work in an unfair, uncool environment and there’s nothing you can do about it. Let’s talk about what you can do about it. Step one, you need to adopt grounded mindfulness. What this means is you need to accept your viewpoints and paradigms and look at them and say why do I believe what do I believe?
You have to develop an understanding of what drives you and why this drives you so that you know why and how the things that are going on in your world affect you the way that they do because oftentimes you are somebody who is absorbing all of this external input and you’re not able to see that you’re able to direct that input in a way that creates power for you. You’re not able to say I am doing a good job in this particular area because you’re feeling the weight of it all. What you want to do is become a participating witness in your own life, thoughts and emotions.
As things are happening to you, you are recognizing that the results come through you. What that means in English is that when something happens to you or something happens in your environment, there’s a space between what happens and how you respond to it. If you can lengthen that space and ask yourself, “How do I feel? What is this making me think? What emotions could I share versus what emotions should I share?” If you can link in that space between stimulus and response, what you can do is you can respond in a way that makes you proud instead of reacting in a way that further erodes your confidence because you’re like, I wasn’t going to say that versus this thing happened, I put my head back, took 3 or 4 deep breaths and then I acted responsibly.
All of a sudden, I felt wonderful versus shame and guilt. How many times if you left work, left a relationship or left an argument with a family member feeling, “I said it and I didn’t mean to say it. I didn’t even mean it. It came out because I was caught up in the moment and I was caught up in the way that I filtered things that weren’t fair.” What you have to do is you either have to live with the guilt or you have to justify your own behavior, which is what most of the have us do. However, successful thinkers do something different. They take action. They say, “This happened, I messed up. I’m going to make it right.”
What happens is that you can only do that if you’re participating in your own life and witnessing your behavior and the way in which you respond to the problems and crises that are coming up at the time. Ask yourself, “What is happening? Why do I feel this way?” What we do is we want to resist anything that makes us feel less of ourselves instantly and what that causes us to do is to act in a way that makes us feel less of ourselves permanently so we create this resistance.
The best people surround themselves with the best people. Share on XBuddha said that the stress in life is in the resistance. What happens is your boss says something and you immediately tighten up. One of the customers says something and you immediately tighten up and go into this justification behavior. All of a sudden, you feel worse about yourself. Ask yourself some key questions. Who are you? What is your current state? Have you eaten enough? Have you drunk enough? When was the last time you took five minutes to stretch or wash your face? What position are you in to respond to the matter at hand?
If all things were equal and everything was perfect according to your own value system, what would you want to do? Who do you want to become at the moment? This is called self-reflection. Mindfulness and self-reflection go hand-in-hand. What they help you do is they help you assess the situation closest to as it is as possible. What I mean by that is sometimes, we distort what happened and we’ll never get back to reality. I remember a time when I was sitting at an intersection and two cars in the lane in front of me smashed into each other.
It was such a surprise that I didn’t see what happened but I could tell my brain was wanting to understand what happened. I could feel my brain trying to fill in the information that was missing from what I saw and heard. I could feel my brain trying to figure it out and trying to fill in those pieces. When my brain is doing that, that information is going to be incorrect. It’s going to make me feel better because I have an actual picture in my brain of what happened whether it’s fact or fiction, but the reality is that the accident was what it was.
Functional Consciousness
Our life happens a lot like that. Something happens, you pursue and receive it one way, your co-workers, your family, your customers perceive it another way. If we’re not careful, both sides begin this justification behavior and the result is a third view of what happened. Probably, none of those three views are the actual truth. Ask yourself, is the way I’m behaving congruent or in alignment with my values? If it’s not, what can I do to make the situation move closer to that? Number two is you develop a functional consciousness.
What this means is that you breathe in the space of your constraints. It’s not saying that your environment is perfect. It’s not saying, I love that I’m short-staffed without enough people to process all the customers. What it’s saying is, this is what I have to work with. It’s not going to change at the moment but what can change is the effect it’s having on me. What you can also do is saying, what is going on around here? What is affecting the moment? What is affecting the people at this moment and how am I affecting the environment?
I’ve worked with lots of pharmacists and technicians and opposite to a lot of pharmacists and technicians, I noticed there are some similarities in the way that they create the environment they’re in. What that means is that if you’re angry and hostile, you’re in an angry, hostile environment. If you are loving, forgiving, and willing to be flexible, you end up in a loving, flexible environment that can still be stressful but you’re not creating more of that stress than unduly necessary. That’s a big point here. Your situation is inherently stressful but what are you doing to make that better.
What are you doing to make that worse? What I want you to do is to notice who is good at putting the fires out, who is good at throwing gasoline on the fires and what are you good at. Ask yourself. Did I make the situation worse? Was I neutral? Did I make the situation better? If you get good at noticing what you do and how it affects your situation, you’ll want to start doing things that are affected in a positive way because the reality is you don’t have much choice. Unless you decide to get in a hot air balloon and fly away, you’re stuck where you’re stuck but you don’t have to be stuck if you choose to pull your feet out from cement and act in a different way.
I want you to get in the habit of stopping, looking, listening, and breathing because what we do now as we trudged through our life is acting and reacting and what that is doing is disabling our lives. It is making us feel stressed out, anxious and angry. What you can do at the moment to say, “I’m going to figure out how I can make this worse, then I’m going to do something out.” Sometimes it gets stressful like I’m at the pharmacy, the phones are ringing, and the drive-through is ringing. If I start reacting to that, start running around, grabbing everything and say “Hi, this is Corey.” All of a sudden, everything is worse because I create this frenetic energy that is absorbed by people.
Emotional Freedom: The more you understand your triggers and the more you understand how you’re tripping other people’s triggers, the less it can happen.
If I pick up the phone and I say, “Blank-blank pharmacy. This is Corey, how can I help you?” What happens is that energy is transferred to the person on the other end of the phone and to me. That person says, “Don’t worry. I was happy to wait.” That’s all great. I observed their energy and life is good but if that person jumps on me because they had to wait, I have a choice. I can say, “We’re busy here, blah, blah, blah,” or I can say, “I’m sorry to keep you waiting. I was busy working with another customer, but you have my full attention now. How can I help you?” It changes everything.
What happens is that we don’t want to believe that we’re creating a negative environment but inevitably, we are if we don’t stop, look around, and listen. Sometimes, you know what you got to do, you got to take ten seconds, put your head back, breathe through your nose, get your head clear and make a wise decision. Your many levels of confidence are such a situation that you have to recognize that you have confidence in a lot of areas. What happens is that you have varying degrees of things that you’re confident about.
You have various degrees of things that you’re not confident about. You might feel like you’re a good patient counseling pharmacist, a good brother, a good sister or a good spouse, but you might feel lousy as a computer tech or as a parent. You might have areas that you don’t think that you can do good. What that does is that causes you to undermine those areas of your life that you do well. What I ask people to do is make an assessment of themselves. Where do I feel the most confident? Where do I feel the least confident? How are those areas that I feel the least confident affecting my life?
Instead of trying to be great at something you suck at or do things that you hate, I want to ask you who do you let work with you to fill in those areas of under-confidence? For example, in my pharmacy, I’m terrible with insurance, writing schedules and administrative tasks. I love working with customers, empowering employees and working with medical professionals to find solutions for customers that increase their outcomes. What I do is delegate those things that I’m not good at to the people that love doing it and are good at it. A lot of times, we don’t feel confident doing that because we feel that we should be responsible for everything. Therefore, we have to have our hands in everything. Wise people know that the best people surround themselves with the best people.
The other thing that wise people do is they only let people speak into them that bring them up and they don’t speak with people that bring them down unless it’s mandatory and in short, doses. I will ask you, who do you surround yourself with? At what level of confidence are you at in given areas of your life? How are they undermining you? We put this here because we wanted you to see that you are a sinking, functioning, breathing, human being. As you let people talk into you, as you think through the tasks that you don’t do well, what you’re doing is you’re pulling the plug in the things that you do well. I want you to hear this part. There is no one that does everything well. Tiger Woods was known as the World’s Greatest Golfer and that’s it.
Lance Armstrong is the World’s Greatest Cyclist and that’s it. He had other things that he was marginal at and things he could do, but he was only world-class at one thing. What are you potentially world-class at? What if you focused all of your effort in that area and surrounded yourself with people that can supplement the areas that you don’t do well and what trajectory with your life take on if you started living in the space of strength and confidence? The next thing that I want you to do is to experience complete awareness. Start asking yourself some difficult questions, because you don’t have to be afraid any longer. Much of our life is run by fear. We’re afraid to get fired. We’re afraid to find out who we are because we’re afraid we can’t take it.
Understanding Triggers
I’m going to tell you a little secret, there are times when you can’t take it. I’ve been a pharmacist for many years. I fill prescriptions for everybody and I want you to know that to some degree, everyone is a mess, everyone has had problems in their life they couldn’t fix without other people’s help. What you can do is you can ask yourself what is affecting my emotions at this moment? What are affecting the emotions of the people around me? How am I affecting both? What I’m talking about here is when you become aware that you’re working with people and you’re not working with employees, subordinates, people that report to you, and everyone in your environment has something going on. You don’t have a pharmacy tech, for example. You have Kathy, and Kathy is somebody’s mother, spouse and child.
The more you fix things, the more you like yourself. The more you like yourself, the more you want to fix things. Share on XShe might be worried about one of her children. She might be worried about how things went awry with her husband or an elderly parent. Everybody’s got financial issues from one time to another and everybody’s got pain pains, aches, anguish and memories from their childhood that makes them feel sad. When a person reacts in a certain way, instead of judging them based on the specific action, ask yourself what’s going on here? When you react in a certain way, ask yourself, what is this about? What’s going on here? I want you to understand that the way you act directly affects the way that people around you act. A lot of times people would say, “What’s wrong with her?” Sometimes it could well be you. You are wrong with her. A perfect example is my wife is out visiting her mother for her mother’s birthday.
My son comes home from a mandatory work meeting that he’s at he’s so proud. He’s holding a Lego set that a co-worker gave him for his birthday. He sits down at the table and begins to open the box. I know that my wife has told him that she wants him to scrub the moss off of the white plastic fence that surrounds our backyard. I know she told him this four days ago, he hasn’t even touched it and she’s going to be home within the hour. I looked at him with love in my eyes, kindly and softly I said, “Son, could I give you a piece of advice?” The short version is fifteen minutes later, he was out working on the fence but had she come home and he was standing there putting together this Lego set at the kitchen table, there would have been an explosion.
He would have asked himself, “I don’t understand. What’s wrong with her?” You and I both know what was wrong with her. If that were the situation, she told him to do it, he didn’t do it. He’s playing when she wants him to be working. He’s going to come up with some lame excuse and the whole thing blows up instead of saying, “What’s going to make mom happy? What’s going to make mom upset?” At eighteen, he is not in touch with other people’s emotions at this point. Hopefully, we’ll work on that. It’s the same thing in your environment. Sometimes we do things that trigger the other person and then we go, “What’s wrong with that person?” Let me ask you, did you contribute?
It’s the same thing with us. The other person triggers us. We get all triggered and we think, what’s wrong with that other person for triggering us? They think, “What’s wrong with you for being triggered?” The more you understand your triggers and the more you understand how you’re tripping other people’s triggers, the less it can happen. The more you can do to avoid being triggered and triggering others. What happens is you’re starting to create an environment for success and you’re no longer creating an environment for failure because what I want you to understand is that we are responsible. A lot of people want to say it’s not my fault. If you do that, what happens is if you don’t take responsibility for your own environment, reactions and emotions, then you’re a victim of the world and you have no chance or choice in fixing what’s going on with you.
You have to accept things as they are. If you say, “This is my fault.” I’m responsible for everything that happens at my pharmacy, in my place of business, or with my family. What you begin to recognize is that if it’s your fault, you can do something to fix it. Why? Because responsibility is freedom, gives us options, allows us to act, defeats our fears and drives performance. What that means is that the best way to beat your anxieties, fears, and burnout is to take action of some kind. People who feel responsible for what’s going on are much more likely to take action, pursue that action for longer periods of time, and fix things.
Strategic Planning Initiative
The more you fix things, the more you like yourself. The more you like yourself, the more you want to fix things. The more your confidence begins to take an upward swing. The opposite is also true. The more you let yourself be a victim, the more your confidence erodes and become a victim. Life is a vicious cycle and you want to create an incredibly fun cycle upwards and not an incredibly nasty vicious cycle downward. Step four is to define true effectiveness. When I’m coaching people, what I talk about is, how do you start your strategic planning initiative?
Let me tell you what that means. A lot of people think that life shouldn’t require planning and work. Things should happen to me. My ship should come into me and no one’s coming. No one is coming to help you. I was talking to someone who says, “These people don’t appreciate me.” I said, “These people don’t even think about you.” What you want to recognize is that you are spinning ten plates in the air. Everyone else has spinning ten plates in the air. Other people are not interested in making your life better. You are the one. You’re in charge of your own life. What you have to do is you have to recognize that you can create change in your world if you say over and over and you adopt the mantra, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”
Emotional Freedom: Successful people do the things that unsuccessful people don’t like to do. Successful people don’t necessarily like to do them, but they do them anyway.
What I want to ask you is, what would it look like if you stepped into your greatness? What would it look like if you stepped into the real you? What would it have to be true for you to know that you are stepping into your greatness? Let’s suppose that at New Year’s Eve at 11:45 PM of the year 2020, you and I get together for drinks and we’re like, “This year was rough but I stepped into my greatness.” What would it have to be true for you to be able to say that to me? What would you have to weigh? How much money would you have saved? How many relationships would you have improved? What does your bank balance look like? Who do you owe less money to? You make a list for yourself.
What would it have to be true for me to know that I’m finally stepping into my circumstances and coming out well? Who should you surround yourself with? How can you help them succeed if you want to be the best version of yourself? The motivational speakers, Zig Ziglar, said before he died, “The thing is that you can have anything you want in life if you help enough people get what they want.” That doesn’t mean a scorekeeping thing. It means a mentality that, I’m here to add value to others because if you want to increase your confidence and job satisfaction, you start coming from a place of service.
Who can I add value to? A lot of times, we forget that there are so many people we can add value to that aren’t our actual paying customers. A lot of people forget to add value to the people that work right beside them, directly above them and to themselves when they’re working. Who can you add value with? Who are people that you could surround yourself with that would help you be better at what you do and help you feel like a better version of yourself? What most people miss is that you can only create greatness in your life if you define your own purpose. What am I here to do?
Salvador Dali, the great painter, was here to express a different way to look at the world. Great philosophers like Aristotle, Confucius and the Buddha, they were here to explain the world in ways that other people hadn’t thought of. Who are you? What is your mission? What would make you happy to do that you would do it for free, you would do it eight hours a day, every day and would make you feel like you were put on earth for a reason? There’s no billboard in the sky that says this is Joe’s purpose. This is Jessie’s purpose. When you start recognizing, I’ve got a mission. My best friend, his mission was to make sure that he lived his life in such a way that he paid for his daughter’s college.
I visited him and they still have money left from the money they put aside. What was fascinating was the habits that they had to enact to make sure that they were in a position to pay for his daughter’s college when the time is right, helped them save money so that they could pay for their dream house. When you learn how to do greatness in one area, you start ratcheting up greatness in other areas that you may not expect because life comes down to this. Most people are trying to do something but successful thinkers are trying to become something. Who do you had to become to live the life you truly want to live? The world won’t know for you. The world thinks about itself. It’s up to you. Teach the world.
Change Your World
Who are you and why are you? Most people spend their entire life complaining about the way things are instead of changing the world and their world into something they want it to be. I’m going to ask you to decide what do you stand for? What are your core values? My good friend, Gary, runs a clinic in Virginia and he was brought in to turn the clinic around. He did a great job doing that because what he did was he said, “We’re going to run this clinic based on five core values.” Every decision that they make, every action that they take is reflected back onto those values. If it’s not a match, they don’t do it. What I want you to understand is that your life works the same way. When anything happens to you or anything happens through you, it’s a reflection of how you value whatever you value.
There are no right or wrong values. Right or wrong are human constructs. There are differences between moral, legal, ethical and right or wrong but when we’re talking about your passions, your dreams and the goals that you want to achieve, there is no right or wrong. There’s only what you value. I want you to start making decisions based on that. If you value kindness and service to human beings, don’t let your busy circumstances take you away from that. Figure out how am I going to add more value given these extreme express challenges? What you’ll find is that your confidence will rise exponentially if you do that. What I also need you to do is recognize that the human body is a machine. The human body needs to be maintained in the same way a farmer’s tractor needs to be maintained. The farmer is not going to let us track to rust out and die or the farmer has no business.
Only you can create greatness in your life. Share on XWhat I want you to understand is your body works the same way. We keep expecting that life balance will somehow fall into our lap, but your life balance has to be manifested by you. What I want you to recognize is that oftentimes, we allow ourselves to be put on the back burner because we have low energy and confidence. We don’t feel like we matter as much as the people that we’re taking care of. What is exactly true is the opposite. What happens is that the more we take care of ourselves, the more vibrant we are, the better we feel, the more we can add value to others.
The problem with putting yourself on the back burner is that what has happened to all of your customers will happen to you. You’ll need the diabetic medicines, high blood pressure medicines, heart medicines and recover if at all possible from the wasted efforts that you could have taken to maintain yourself in the first place. What you find is the more vibrant, enthusiastic, energetic and fun that you are, the easier and more fun your life will be, and the better you’ll be to the people you want to serve. I want to ask you what would you dare to dream if you knew that you could not fail?
It’s your dream to see your daughter at her wedding, walk on the beaches when you’re retired with your spouse and be able to putter around your yard and not have to use a walker. What would you manifest for your life down the road if you knew you could not fail? Whatever that is, start working towards that now. How can you implement some changes that will make you stronger? What people think is my life is a disaster. My health is in the garbage can. I might as well give up. What I want you to recognize is that our human body is an amazing machine.
It will give you lots of chances until it finally gives up. If you don’t already have a one-way ticket to the nursing home, you can improve things. You can drink more water, move more, find time to meditate, find time to read and find the time that you’ve been putting away for a rainy day before it starts to rain. I’ve been interacting on LinkedIn with a number of pharmacists. Many of them say, “I have two children and I have my job. That’s all I have. That’s all I can possibly focus my time on it.” I say to them, “I’m going to pray for you that you will figure out that if you don’t take care of yourself, you’re not going to be there for those two children the way you want to be there for them. You’re not going to be able to provide for them, spend time with them and be at their major life events. That’s what matters to them.”
I asked another guy who seemed to be doing well on his exercise. I said, “What’s your strategy?” He said, “You have to do it.” The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people do the things that unsuccessful people don’t like to do. Successful people don’t necessarily like to do them but they do them anyway. That brings a close to this point but ask yourself who else would benefit from a focused plan for your health and wellness? A lot of times we feel like, “I wish I would die. It’s terrible. I’m tired of the stress, negative news, everyone arguing, riots and protesting, wearing a mask and COVID.”
There are people that are counting on you, need you and who live for you. A lot of times we don’t feel it, but ask yourself, “If I left this world, who is going to take care of,” and fill in the blank? No one can take care of them in a way that you could especially if you felt good. One of the things that disempower us is that we have these things that we don’t know about ourselves. That’s where life-balance and mindfulness come together. You have to ask yourself what am I irritated by?
What am I motivated by? What am I frustrated by? What am I worried about? I got those nights that I’m lying awake. What’s that about? To fix your life, you can do only four things. You can do more of something, you can do less of something, you can start doing something that you weren’t doing before or you can stop doing something that is distracting you from your major definite purpose. I want to ask you, what could you do now that would move the needle in the right direction? Could you drink a couple of extra glasses of water? Could you sit for ten minutes with your eyes closed and focus on your breath? Could you walk around the block?
Emotional Freedom: Another person’s opinion of your dreams and goals doesn’t have to hold any weight with you.
Could you leash up your dog and take a stroll? Whatever it is that makes you feel more like you, what could you do? What’s happening is that your emotions are creating a vortex that you can’t break free from because you feel that you have to act in certain ways because you developed habits and patterns that aren’t healthy for you. What I want for you is to recognize, I don’t need to live in that space anymore. People are counting on me, I’m counting on me and I want to be the best version of myself because I deserve that. That’s the long and the short event. What we want you to do is we want you to recognize that the more you can feel personally empowered, the more you can become empowered. Successful people don’t ask for permission or forgiveness.
My wife said to somebody she cares about, “My husband and I have this piece of land. We want to build our dream house in about three years.” That person went on this huge tirade about why we shouldn’t do that and why that’s a bad idea. I want to tell you something about it. The thing is that people will tell you what you shouldn’t do and why it’s a bad idea that you take action in this particular effort. While it’s always wise to consider another person’s viewpoint, it’s not necessarily mandatory that you adopt their viewpoint. When you live based on other people’s input and value system, what happens is you disempower yourself. A lot of times, when our supervisors come to us with an evaluation, we accept that as the gospel.
Another person’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality. Another person’s opinion of your dreams and goals doesn’t have to hold any weight with you at all. When you’re thinking of taking major action, I want you to ask yourself an important question. If I fall flat on my face, what’s the worst that can happen? Dr. Joyce Brothers said this, I’ve always loved this and lived by it, “When you have a decision you want to make and you have a goal that you want to go after. If you have a dream you want to reach, ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen? If you could take the worst, take the risk.”
Many times, we’re stuck in this life for years then we get a diagnosis. That diagnosis says, “You’ve only got about six months to live. If you knew you only had six months to live, what actions would you take? How would you change the way you’re living?” I have asked this question to thousands of people and I’ve never once had someone come back to me and say, “I’d spend more time at the office. I’d stress more about projects that aren’t going to matter in five years.” It’s always about people. People say, “I would close the gap with this person. I would make up with that person.”
I’m going to tell you what. Whatever you would do if you found out that you only had six months to live, start working towards that. Pick up the phone and call somebody. Ask yourself, what actions would I take to enjoy my life? Would I go sit and look at the stars? Would I take a nature walk? Would I take a vacation to somewhere that I’ve been longing to see? Whatever it is, make a plan because at some point, you’re only going to have six months to live. At some point, you’re only going to have six minutes to live. Don’t wait. Your life is now.
I had a good friend and I miss her. She is 35 years old and she walked out of her house to go running and accidentally stepped in front of a car and that’s all there was. The story is tragic but the story is a reminder that that could be us. Most people live their life based on the concept of it could never happen to me. It’s only the other person. As a pharmacist, I can tell you it happens to everyone. There is nothing so staggering as seeing a person one day and then having them come back to pick up their refill in three months and seeing them wear that turban that people wear when they have no hair left from chemotherapy.
That’s Jan, Rick, William and Michael. That’s everybody. There will come a day when you’ll say, “If I knew I was going to live this long, I would’ve taken better care of myself.” There will come a day when you say, “Why didn’t I take care of myself?” I want you to recognize that now is the day that you can turn things around for yourself. When you start thinking about empowering yourself, taking the actions that you want to take, recognizing that you have the greatness to share, there are people around you who will benefit.
Stop getting killed. Start killing it. Share on XMy friend who put his daughter through college benefited her and everyone she comes into contact with because she’s brilliant. She’s good at what she’s learned. She is someone who is going to make incredible strides to make the world an incredible place and it all started with him. I started because my father started. My father put himself through college. My father put me through college and taught me what a difference you can make with your life if you put effort into it. Who could you impact inside of work, outside of work, in your community and in organizations that you belong to?
Recognize that you are a powerful individual if you focus your efforts. Don’t get fooled and think, “I can put this off for someday.” You’re not here on rehearsal. I personally believe that for each and every one of us, there’s something that only you can do. If you don’t do it, it won’t get done at all. There is a message you are here to deliver. There is an action you are here to take. If you miss that, if you don’t take those actions, if you don’t reach deep in yourself and find that greatness in you, that greatness will go on done.
All of the people who would benefit from the best version of yourself will miss out. Don’t let that happen. Start thinking about exhaling complete confidence. The day that you become a successful thinker is the day that you start recognizing that it’s not your situation and circumstances that determine the outcomes of your life. It’s the way you choose to live your life. It’s the story that you tell yourself about yourself. Ask yourself, what would my life be if I would know I was a magnet for success?
What if I believed that other people were ready, willing and able to help me? What if you lived your life in alignment with and you found the secret to inner peace? All of these things are available to you. Everything we’re talking about is learnable skills. They are exercises that I’m asking you to do to define yourself and to develop the life you want to live. Even if you’re busy, stressed out or struggled to take care of your health thus far, you can take actions that will make you feel better about yourself. One of my favorite actions is what they call positive expectations. A lot of people get into positive expectations through what they tell themselves. They repeat mantras to themselves over and over.
When I was struggling in 2008, I had to teach myself that I liked myself. I had got in a situation where I felt like I had sold my soul to the company. I had become something I didn’t want to become and I had given away my core values. The way I got out of that was I had to keep repeating affirmations and mantras to myself. I had to keep saying, “I like myself.” The more I started to believe that I like myself, the more I would do things that make me like myself better.
I was able to say with more confidence, “I like myself.” I had to start believing that I was a magnet for good things to happen. I started coming up with the mantra that everything works out for me because I learned something that if you believe that everything works out for you, what happens is that everything works out the way it works and you make the best of the way everything works out. I’ve had setbacks along the way. I got fired from a good job, ruthlessly fired two days after Christmas. What happened was because I kept telling myself I like myself, I felt better before I even got to my car and I’m working the best job that I’ve ever had.
You don’t know what life holds for you but you do know that you can and you should become powerful. You should like yourself because if you don’t like yourself, ask yourself what would it take for me to like myself again? Start taking action now. Keep telling yourself, “I like myself,” because it’s scientifically proven that the human mind only has room for one thought at a time. You can’t change a negative thought but you can replace it with a positive thought. Every time I start to tell myself how stupid it was that I made this decision or that decision, I changed it to, “I like myself.”
That decision worked out the way it was intended to work out. If that decision didn’t go the way it went, I wouldn’t have been at the right time in the right way place for something better to have happened. Life is about five things. It’s about strategic focus. How are you going to lead? It’s about developing your people skills, creating operations and systems for living and marketing yourself to yourself. That means telling yourself, “I can do this. I like myself.” It’s about making sure that you save more than you spend.
Emotional Freedom: If you want a better life, you have to tell yourself a better story.
We’ve become unconfident because what we’ve done is we’ve changed these five things into this mess that is driven by our situation and circumstances. We feel like we are at the mercy of the companies that we worked for, at the mercy of the government, the economy, the taxes and the environment and we are not. We’re at the mercy of ourselves and the systems that we use for life. The seven things that I listed all fit into each one of these five categories. What am I focused on? How am I affecting that so far? Why am I not doing better than I was before? What does my money say about my confidence?
Am I able to save money because I can say no to people? Do I always end up in debt because I always feel like I have to say yes? What do I say about myself to myself and the people that I love? How could I project an image to myself and to the world around me that shows that I am valuable? You are. No one ever tells you that there’s a system. When I have coaching clients, what I do is I work through these 5 things in every 1 of the 7 steps that we talked about. How would your awareness affect your systems for a living?
How is higher consciousness help you market yourself and give you better skills? What if you were personally empowered so that you felt that you were a moneymaking, money-saving machine? I want you to recognize that your life is up to you. You can live an emotionally free and confident life if you start recognizing that you’re attached to things that make you feel bad and you’re not reaching out for things that make you feel good. You no longer need to be stuck in a corporate environment or in a small business where you feel like you’re always going to struggle to find inner peace and work-life balance, the family you love, a way to practice your spirituality, you’re living in disalignment with your core values. I want you to step out of that lonely and dark space.
As a pharmacist, I know what it’s like to feel completely alone in a room full of coworkers and customers and not have any idea how you’re going to get through the next several hours. I’ve been there. I’ve stood in my house in the middle of the night and asked myself, “God, why do I have to keep living with the stress? I can’t take it.” The way it was answered to me was not only, “Can you take it?” You can help others take it too. I want you to be able to create that life of freedom, options and live with complete confidence that your destiny is in your own hands so that you can stop getting killed and start killing it.
Remember, it all begins with recognizing that it’s the way you think about your life that creates your life. Some people say the glass is half full and for them, there are many things that they have to be grateful for. Some people say the glass is half empty and for them, there are many things they have that’s missing from their life that they live unhappily. I’ll say, “Why settle for half? If your little glass is half full, let’s see if we can fill that sucker right up to the top.” I want you to always feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] with your questions and your comments.
If you want to find some of the resources and tools that I offer, visit TheSuccessfulThinker.com. Sign up for the free book and for the free report. Take the exercises that we have because it’s time for us to get to work. I want you to look at your life and your body as a whole system, a holistic piece of amazing brilliance where you can live with trust. You can be the creative, wise, loving, connecting, aware and spiritual person that you are meant to live and not be stuck in your own circumstances, not be crushed by life. It’s up to you.
If you want to become the person that you’ve always known that you can become, take the seven steps, reach out to me and ask me how do I create a strategic plan for putting all of this together? It seems like a lot but it’s not. It’s step-by-step, “How do I go from getting killed to killing it? I want to crush it, Corey, but I feel like I’m getting crushed.” That no longer has to be your story. Remember that in this Successful Thinker Law, number two is the Law of the Story. If you want a better life, you have to tell yourself a better story. I appreciate you and I believe in you. Thank you for spending this time with me. I’ll see you next time. God bless.
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