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Give, Grow & Be Grateful

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by Kevin Getch

4.8(4 reviews)

8 episodes

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Podcast Overview

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

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12/30/2017

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Recent Episodes

March 4, 2021

What You Focus on is What You Find

In today’s episode, I’m going to discuss the importance of where we put our focus. I’m going to share some tactics that work for me to change my focus, and then we’re going to finish by, of course, giving you a micro action to help you improve your focus going forward and maybe distract some of the negative or self-doubting thoughts that sometimes pop in your head. I want to start with a little story I once heard, and pardon if the details are totally different than what it is out there somewhere, I’m not sure, but I remember hearing this story and thinking it was such a great analogy for the power of focus. There was this gentleman. He’d never been skydiving before, and he wanted to go skydiving. He was like mid-30s, heading up there, and was a little scared, of course, but he was trying to overcome his fear of heights and all this kind of stuff, and he wanted to do it through skydiving, so take this big leap. Now, the day of, he got there. He got to the whole thing. They walked him through the instructions, and they did everything they needed to do. He got in the plane. He’s going up there, and he’s going to go solo because he’s in like Mexico or something. I don’t know. This story has some loopholes, obviously, but generally you have to go tandem in United States, but forever reason, wherever he was at, he was able to jump out of the plane solo. They were giving him the lesson, and as they were going up, they were explaining to him, and they were showing him a map of where he was going to jump over. He’s looking at this map and saying, “Okay, so I’m going to jump up here,” and he has this target area that they want him to land over in this area. The instructor says, “Well, whatever you do, don’t go towards the lake over here because you’ll end up in the lake, and it’s dangerous, and you could drown. Just don’t go towards the lake.” That’s what he told him. He’s like, “All right.” He kept telling himself, “Don’t go towards the lake. Don’t go towards the lake. Don’t go towards the lake. Don’t go towards the lake.” He’s like, “All right.” He gets up there, and he gets to the side of the plane, and he is scared, and more than he’s probably ever been in his life, but he takes the leap, and he jumps out of the plane. He said he looks down, and he feels this sense of joy feeling that he took the leap. He’s like, “Oh.” He’s like, “This is amazing. I’m flying through the air,” and he reminds himself. He’s like, “Okay, now, don’t go towards the lake.” He looks and tries to find the lake. He looks, and he sees the lake. He’s like, “Okay. Don’t go towards the lake. Don’t go towards the lane.” He’s looking at the, continues to look at the lake, and he feels like moving closer towards the lake. He starts getting scared. He’s like, “Okay, I can’t go towards the lake. I can’t … ” All he keeps focusing on is what he doesn’t want to happen, but of course as he continues to focus on the lake, ultimately, where does he end up? He ends up in the lake. Now, he was fine, and he ended up skydiving again, all that kind of stuff. He didn’t drown. Everything was okay, and he enjoys skydiving to this day, so all is well, but he learned an important lesson from this. Focusing on what you don’t want to do or what you don’t want to happen is a sure way to make that happen. Focusing on what you don’t want to do or what you don’t want to happen is a sure way to make that happen. For anyone who has kids, when you tell them, “Don’t touch that,” all they hear in their mind is “touch that.” All they’re focusing on is “touch that,” so it’s important the language that we use when we’re thinking about where we put our focus. If we tell ourselves … If we’re focusing on achieving a goal, and I’m a, you know, Olympic doing the pole vault or something like that, then whatever I’m saying is, “Whatever I want to do, just don’t hurt yourself or don’t go too far,” or whatever it is, that’s not going to turn that off, but you really want to focus on seeing it in your mind, focusing on what you want to happen and doing that. Had he been focusing on the target when he first jumped out … That’s one of the things he learned later is okay, and part of that was the instructor telling him, “Don’t focus on this,” which that’s a little thing as an instructor if you’re working with someone to use the right language so that they can really focus on the things that they want to move towards, not the things they want to avoid because focusing on the things you want to avoid, you’re going to end up there. When we focus on something, it determines where we’re directing our thoughts, our attention, and our energy, so ultimately, it determines our path. You’ve probably heard this saying, when someone’s really focused, they have blinders on. They do that for horseracing and things like that so that the horses only have that focus of where they’re moving towards, not all the other things on the side because they’d start getting distracted, they’re not going to run as fast, but when they’re focused on moving forward, that’s where they’re going to go. One of the things that’s important to understand is how our vision and focus work together. For some people, they don’t necessarily have something compelling enough to focus on. They don’t have a vision that will motivate them to put the blinders on to move towards what the singular kind of focus and determination towards that goal. It’s important that you have this crystal-clear vision of how you want to experience life. I try to look at it more as living each day as opposed to an ultimate destination, but I have both those in my vision as far as part of my vision is everyday living is just how I live life, but for some people, the vision is “ultimately, I want to end up at this point,” their goal. Well, if that’s not very compelling for them, if they’re saying, “Well, some day, when I’m 60, I want to retire and live on social security income.” That’s not a super compelling vision, so something that actually lights the fire inside you that you’re passionate about that really is going to motivate you because it’s going to take a lot of time. You’re going to spend a lot of time and energy on it, and when you have that passion towards that, it’s actually enjoyable. You’re feeling good about doing, then you’re actually moving towards that. That’s part of the marriage of vision and focus is that if you don’t have a vision, and what you’re focusing on is just, you can focus on a number of things, just change your initial thought to focus on something that you’re grateful for or something more positive, whatever it may be, and that’s definitely good, but when you’re thinking about ultimately where you want to go, you want to have that direction so that you can constantly realign your focus towards where you want to go and the type of life that you want to live. I’m going to give you some different tactics that I use that work for me and things that I’ve learned, I guess, throughout my life that allow me to change my focus. Now, the first one is I was mentioning before is first having a clear vision that I can focus on. It’s one of the things that I always realign with, and every day as I go through, and I talked about, in the previous episode I talked about the priming that you do is having a vision of where you’re going to go in your life. Each morning, I’m focusing on that, realigning on how I’m living my life, where my goals are going, and seeing that happen and feeling the joy that I get every day from just living my life like that, and ultimately, achieving some of the things that I want to achieve in my life and how good that feels, so focusing on those things, not negative, like, “Well, what if that doesn’t happen? What if you make a mistake? What if someone … ” You get embarrassed, and you make this big … I’ve done that already. I learned that things like that may still happen at some point, but I’m not going to sit there and focus on it. I’m not going to let them stop me from going out there and doing what I can do to improve the world to make it a little bit better. One of the things that happens, and I’m going to give you this as a micro action today as well, but one of the things that happens in your mind is, I’ll say, one of the things I heard recently, it was at the Tony Robbins event that I liked was basically saying that think of it as the mind, not your mind, and saying that there’s these thoughts that are million-year-old thoughts that kind of float in and out of, if you think of waves, like radio waves and lifeline and all this kind of stuff, there’s all these thoughts that are floating around. They’re these thoughts of self-doubt and these negative thoughts that just float into the mind. It’s part of almost that reptilian brain feeling where it’s like the problem, “What if this happens?” or, “You sure?” kind of self-doubting feeling, like you don’t want to get hurt, all those little things that continually pop in the mind. One of the things that you can do is if you’re seeing that happen, there’s a couple of different either visualization techniques or anchors that you can do to deal with those type of things. Some of them are both visual and auditory, kinesthetic, and different things that you can do to trigger yourself to get back into a good state, to stop focusing on some of the negative things, and to realign your focus somewhere positive. It’s important to understand that to master the mind takes a lot of work and a fair amount of trying things that might be outside your comfort zone. It’s that old saying, the definition of crazy is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You have to get out of your comfort zone a little bit and to deal with some of these things. For some people, it may be very easy. For you, you might be saying, “I never have self-doubt thoughts,” but for me, I know they still pop in, worries still pop in, and self-doubt still pops in. I’m not saying to ignore those, but I’m saying there’s times when you know that it’s not a beneficial thing you really need to address. Really, when you’re … If it’s putting you in that anxiety-negative state, you’re not going to effectively deal with the problem anyways. One of the things I’m going to have you do as a micro action, next time you have one of those fearful or self-doubting thoughts that float into your mind, I want you to try this exercise here at least once. First, I want you to visualize the thought physically floating across in front of your mind. Then I want you to start making it look silly. You can add long floppy ears to it, give it a big smile or a big butt, whatever you want, whatever makes you laugh where you start changing your state, you start laughing at it a little bit. The more boisterous, the more funny and the more you actually laugh, the better. You’re going to start visualizing this thought looking sillier and sillier and adding things to it. Then think to yourself, you want a stupid thought that the mind is putting out here. I want you to physically reach up with your finger. You want to flick away the thought with your finger, and see as it goes further away, further away, and it gets smaller and smaller until it disappears, and you can’t see it anymore. You’re already feeling better. You’re not worrying about the thought anymore. Now, I want you to turn your focus towards something that you’re grateful for. Visualize an experience, that moment, go back to that moment, something that you’re truly grateful for. Feel the joy that it brings to you, and just smile, and really enjoy it, and then go about your day. It’s something that you shouldn’t take more than maybe 60 to 90 seconds to allow yourself to be, have anxiety or worry or self-doubt over these thoughts. You can pretty much process them fairly quickly with this method, and it allows some of the visualization, some of the triggers. Over time, you can just use some of them like, “Ugh.” I often just go, “What a silly thought,” and it disappears out of my mind, like it’s pretty quick, or, “What a stupid thought. That’s so dumb.” There’s different things that I do that are just small part of that, but if you do the whole thing, I feel pretty confident that it’ll help you get past that focus and start to focus on something that you actually want to move towards. You can focus on what you’re grateful for, and then obviously, if you have a vision that you have already created, which you should have at least a basic vision, if you listened to some of previous episodes, of where you want to go, then you want to turn and realign your focus on where you’re going. Today, I just want to make it really simple and quick, kind of drive home the purpose for you as far as what you focus on is what you find and make sure that you’re focusing on the things that you want to find in your life. Thank you again for being on this journey with me, and make sure you have a wonderful day.

August 17, 2018

One Thing That Will Immediately Improve Your Life

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

March 12, 2018

Overcoming Your Crappy Reptilian Brain

You’re downtown late at night, you’ve just said goodbye to someone after a great first date. When you’re walking to your car, you somehow find yourself walking down a dark alley alone. You hear footsteps behind you, your heart starts racing. The footsteps are getting closer. That fight or flight feeling that you’re having is part of our innate programming in the reptilian part of the human brain. It’s one of the reasons that we’ve survived as a species so long, so why is it so detrimental to us? First let me address what is the reptilian brain? I’ve always been fascinated with human psychology and just how our brain works as a whole and there’s three main layers of the brain. The reptilian part of the brain being the oldest, which is responsible for basic survival instincts. Our limbic system, or the limbic part of the brain, is responsible for emotions and then the neo-cortex which is more thinking. The brain stem is one of the oldest and smallest regions of the human brain and it evolved long ago. One of the reasons people refer to it as reptilian brain is it actually is very similar to the current, present day brains of reptiles. So this part of our brain controls vital body functions such as heart rate, breathing, balance, as well as our fight or flight responses. The limbic brain actually first evolved in mammals and it records a lot of our memories and behaviors that were either positive or negative, so it’s responsible in large part for our emotions. Whereas the neo-cortex is responsible for much more of the critical thinking and the development of human language, imagination and abstract thought and our consciousness as we call it. So one of the things … I’ve been in marketing for many years, so we’ve referred to the reptilian brain quite often. It’s one of the reasons you see a lot of ads and content that targets fear, or sex, or scarcity, things like that, because we have our base survival instincts that we often refer to these as the four F’s. So the four F’s are fight, flight, food, and fornication. Fight, flight, food and fornication. Those are the base survival instincts that we have. If you go way back in time where we’re foraging for food and hunting for animals and things like that and we hear someone, footsteps, behind us, that additional adrenaline, that heart pumping, was there to help us survive those, to make us aware that there’s fear and we should be fearful and maybe give us a little more energy if we need to run and, “Do I need to run or do I need to fight?” Those are the base survival instincts there but then I also need to eat food to survive and then of course to keep the species alive you need to fornicate. So those are a lot of the reasons and when you talk about … hear marketers talking about, they’re really thing to get into some of our base thinking that a lot of the times, we don’t necessarily like to talk about but those are some of the base thought processes that go on for us. It is what it is. So obviously it’s been useful, it’s kept us alive for a long time. As a species it helped us continue and it’s responsible for keeping us alive in multiple ways, one is via the base survival instincts. Making sure we procreated and eat food and the other is … one of the reasons is why we stay alive when we go to sleep. We don’t have to keep thinking to keep our heart rate going or breathing. The reptilian brain is the natural process of heart rate and breathing and things like that is all controlled under that reptilian brain, so it’s just your overall survival. So, but why is it detrimental? So a lot of the times … So if you think about it, it’s actually a large part of the reason that we as humans tend to look for the negative and it tends to impact us and we remember it much more vividly than the positive. And if you … It’s one of those things that you think common knowledge, but if you’re not sure, look online, you can get all the information on it. Naturally as people, we pay more attention to what may cause us pain or take more from us. Or cause … or fear, things like that. So it’s why you see the news all the time. In the news, they’ve tried to do the positive news in some ways, they’ve tried to do different things, but then their ratings drop. So it’s unfortunate, but they’re doing what is actually getting them attention and what gets them attention is unfortunately all of the death … You know, when they say, “If it bleeds, it leads.” The death, the destruction, the fear is unfortunately what you see on the news all the time. I remember I was at 24 Hour Fitness, walking on the treadmill and I’m seeing multiple TVs with all these different headlines and it’s all, you know, “Death, Fear, Destruction.” You know, “Could this be the end of the world?” It’s just … It’s insane. So that feeds into it, when we’re seeing all that information, that feeds into the negative outlook that can happen with that standpoint. So if you combine that though, if you combine the reptilian brain with our pre-frontal cortex, which our … Our pre-frontal cortex is responsible in large part for forecasting the future. So if you take that and this fear part of the reptilian brain, you have all these possible “what if” scenarios running through your head of, “Oh my gosh, what if this goes wrong?” Or, “What if this goes wrong?” And you can just sit there and get so much anxiety and so much unhappiness because you spend all this time focusing on all these negative potential outcomes that may never happen, that probably will never happen. We can easily … There’s never a shortage of things that can go wrong, we can always come up with things that potentially can go wrong. But that’s part of why the reptilian brain, you have to consciously combat that. So you might have some friends that are Negative Nellies, and that can just be part of the human condition as a whole because we often look at those things, and we look and you hear statements all the time like, “Oh that’s just my life, that’s the way it is, it just seems to happen to me.” And it’s unfortunate but they’re just reinforcing, often, some of the negative things. So you have to actually combat some of our innate programming. You have to kind of understand that that’s there and then combat that in ways that will actually kinda balance it. You know and hopefully balance … turn the tables to more of the positive side. One of my next episodes I’ll be doing soon is called, “What you focus on is what you find.” And unfortunately, it’s a fact of life that when you focus on … It’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy, a lot of the times. If you think something bad is going to happen and you continue to focus on that, then you end up in that direction and I’ll go more into that in that episode, but it’s important to understand for this area, one of the reasons why it’s so important to not allow your brain to only focus on all the things that could go wrong. It’s okay to address and look at … You know, “Yeah, this potentially could go wrong. That’s a possibility. But let me also look at all the things that could go right.” So that’s one of the ways that you can combat the detrimental aspects ’cause your brain goes through all these “what if” scenarios. “What if this happens? What if this happens, what if we get in a car accident? What if that person decides they’re gonna steal all our money? What if they go out of business? What if this happens? What…” And you can “what if” yourself right out of any possibility of taking any risk whatsoever and that’s what happens for most people when they’re thinking about taking something that’s a little outside our comfort zone or a risk. They get into all those “what if” scenarios. Well ask yourself, “What if it works? What if I do get the promotion? What if she does say yes? What if I win the race?” Whatever it may be. I know for a lot of men, and I’m sure a lot of women, if you’re trying to talk to someone maybe you’re attracted to, of the opposite sex, there’s that fear of rejection. “What if she says no? What if she laughs at me?” You know, “What if I have all this embarrassment? What if …” You know, whatever it may be. But what if he says yes? What if she says yes? So it’s one of the ways you can kind of counteract the negative “what ifs” is by asking “what if this positive happens?” Because when you want to move toward something, what you focus on is what you find, you don’t want to focus on the negative, you want to focus on the outcome that you want to happen, the positive outcome. So it’s also important … One of the things I find interesting is … and I see it all the time, a few negative things happen. You have some negatives happen and then all of a sudden, oh gosh, it’s the end of the world, it’s the chicken … what’s the … The sky is falling. Running around, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling, oh my gosh, all these negative things happen.” But when you stop, and actually objectively look at everything, you can actually go through and count all these positives and the positives far outweigh the negatives. But because you’re focusing everything on these negatives, then that’s going to consume your whole thought process and hence, self-fulfilling prophecy, you head in that negative direction. So one thing I recommend is take extra care to count your wins. Count the positive things, count the successes. Spend time … When something negative happens, we naturally grab onto that and store that into us. Grab the positives and take those with you as well and they can be the simplest of things. I’ve been really focusing lately on trying to smile a lot more. I naturally am somebody who’s just happy and they smile a lot. A lot of times, I find myself focused on something like that, but when I see somebody else … I was speaking this weekend at the Impactful People Event in Vancouver and it was at a assisted living, kind of, so a lot of old folks home and it’s just amazing, ’cause when you give this big smile and there’s a lady out walking her dogs and you get that smile back, you see the joy that happens in that little interaction, take those little moments and say, “You know what, that was a beautiful moment.” And just talking to this lady that was there. So those happened all day long, but we tend to forget about all those things and we focus on the negative thing. Like, I got caught in traffic and didn’t make it aback to do my second session and speak on that. I can sit there and dwell on that, I spent a fair amount of time dwelling on that saying, “You know, what if I would have done this? What if I would have done this?” Fact of the matter is, I got caught behind an accident and it was unfortunate but it happened. So take extra care to count the positives. Count your wins, focus on those and please don’t watch the news. I’m not saying don’t be informed, I think a lot of people think that automatically when they say, you know, “Well, I need to be informed, I need to know what’s going on in the world.” That’s fine, most of your general news stations, though, your public kinda news stations, you’re gonna see nothing but death, destruction, despair in the world and you might see a couple nice news stories sprinkled in there for the good of it. Which I’m really … I think there are some great stations here locally that do a great job of addressing and looking at like what small businesses are doing in the community and some of those things, but then you go back right to the other station and they’re like, “Okay, five people were murdered.” And if they don’t have anyone locally, they will go to the other side of the country, or the other side of the world to find that news to grab your attention. You’ll notice the same thing when any snow starts to fall. They’ll, “Oh my gosh, snow watch. 24 hour snow watch and we saw a flake of snow in Portland fall, they may shut down schools.” So they’re trying to grab your attention and they know our base instincts towards fear, towards scarcity, towards potential pain. All these things that grab our attention and it’s innate for us that we pay attention to it. So you want to counteract that negative programming, try not to watch the news and then develop beliefs and patterns that help you counteract those innate programming. What I mean by that is sometimes you can get into a negative spin cycle, is what I call it. You get into a negative spin cycle where your mind starts thinking of all these negative things and then you start creating these negative potential … I’ll give you … Say you might have known or seen someone who’s worried about their significant other cheating on them and they get into this negative thing and they think every single potential thing is them potentially doing something to cheat on them. Or that they’re going out on them or whatever it is. And what happens is that in that thing they tend to start pushing away the other person because they have all of this fear and then the fear turns into a different kind of behavior where they’re actually pushing that person away. It’s an interesting thing but … So instead … and that’s just one example, there can be hundreds of examples, you could be like, “Oh, this person is going behind my back and talking to this other person.” Who knows? Some of it may be true but ask yourself some simple questions. Questions keep control, they guide you and then stories create impact. So as you’re telling yourself these stories in your mind, you have to ask yourself a question, say, “Do I know everything about this situation?” I had this recently where I had a team member, on our team, seemed really like something was wrong and my mind started going down kind of a negative path. And I asked myself, “Do I know everything about this situation? Maybe they’re having a hard time at home. Maybe they’re stressed, maybe there’s something at work that’s stressing them.” You know, “Maybe …” And so, rather than focusing on, “Oh, how can this affect me and hurt me?” I started thinking about them and saying, “You know, there’s potentially …” And so, I kinda tried to do what I could to maybe help to see if they were okay. Turns out, they did have a lot on their mind and it seems like just our little conversation and some help here and there kinda helped them get past that. So it’s important to ask yourself those little questions and those can come up in a lot of different situations but I do find a good question is, “Do I know everything about this situation?” ‘Cause chances are, there’s things that maybe you don’t know, so rather than jumping to this conclusion or jumping to all these negative possible scenarios, say, “Do I know everything about this situation?” Ask yourself some questions and often it’s … the majority of the time, it’s actually nothing, that’s the thing. Majority of the time, it’s nothing, and when it is, how much control do you have over it anyways? So don’t spend so much time stressing over it. One thing that can help, that if you do stress over things a lot, is to just take it to the extreme. Say, “Well what if that did happen, how would I move forward from that point?” And once you accept the possibility of that negative potential happening and say, “You know what, well I would still survive, I would be alive, and I’d be able to do xyz and I can move forward by doing this.” And now you already know, I can handle the most negative possible effect there, so that’s one way of dealing with it. But I’d also recommend, this is probably one of the most directly impactful things, is if you have people in your lives that are very negative, I recommend you creating space between yourself and those people. I was at a point in my life, my gosh, kinda little after high school, sometimes during high school, but little after high school as well where just some of the people that I was around, they were great people but the direction that their lives were going and some of the things that they were doing were not the direction that I wanted to go. And I know that as people we tend to become like the people that we hang around with on a consistent basis. So if you want to improve and become better, surround yourself with people that you want to be like. People that inspire you, people that, if you’re trying to be more impactful and have a positive impact on other people, surround yourself with people that are doing those things. And that’ll help elevate you because you’re surrounding yourself by these people. Rather than pulling you down, you’re going to lift you up. So those are just a few things on that. I can kinda go on this subject all day but I wanted you to … Today’s micro action, I just wanted you to write down one thing that comes to mind for you that is around kinda your base survival programming. So this could be something that’s around the four F’s, like some kinda focus there. Now, I know you probably just went and set yourself a goal around fornication, because that’s your reptilian brain at work, but seriously though, if you worry often, or you have anxiety over certain things, maybe you … So for me, one of the things that I’ve been working on and I feel pretty good about, because … My fight or flight mode, I used to react really poorly in traffic. When I felt like my family especially … When it was just me, it wasn’t as bad, but when I had family in the car or something like that and I got cut off, my reaction was like, you know, the typical as what you’d see as kinda like road rage. I would go into fight mode because I’m like, this person is endangering my family, ’cause they just cut right in front of my car, we could have got in an accident. And so I went into this fight mode and the stupidest part of that is I often would do things that would put my family in danger because I’m driving up next to them and I’m kinda yelling at them. Just stupid things but it was really hard for me to control that until I started realizing … consciously saying, asking myself in that situation, rather than saying … I realized that, yeah, they were endangering my family, that’s true, but my reaction was probably endangering my family and other people more. So it was making it worse, so how can I de-escalate that situation and just slow down and really back off of that person so I’m not focused on them? So it’s hard, especially for someone with a strong personality to do that, ’cause they feel like they’re almost giving in to that person, when that person is in the wrong, but for me, it’s less about my ego and more about making sure my family’s taken care of and that … I might even wave to that other person, or do a quick little honk or whatever it is but for me, that was a big thing. So depending on what you have that you determine is something that you wanna work on around that area, maybe it’s that you watch the news all the time and you have this anxiety about feeling like the world’s getting worse, and honestly, there’s been studies done and there’s so many things that are actually better in the world right now, whether it be crime rates, whether it be economic factors, there’s less extremely poor people in the world right now than has ever been. But when you look at the news, there’s death, destruction, poverty and all this kinda stuff and it’s in your mind all the time but one of the problems that you see there, is it’s we used to not have … The information that we got on the news was from a 100 mile radius maybe. Or even way back when, it was people directly in your community, that was all the news you got but now, it kind of expanded as we got newspapers and things like that, but now we have the whole entire world’s information and all of it, the majority of the negative being amplified, not only by the media sources but by our own minds and so we get all of that information so it can be overwhelming. So I call it the access to information effect, so we have a much larger access to information and therefore we often see the world in a more negative aspect than it truly is because we’re not also being all of that positive amplified to the same point, based on our own psychology and also based on the way the media sources pull out that information. So write down something you wanna improve around that area. Again, could be something as simple as controlling your temper in a situation, it could be as simple as not worrying so much and kinda controlling your anxiety around potential future outcomes and all those kind things, but yeah, write that down and just commit to working on that a little bit. So that’s all I have for today, but I really wanna thank you for listening and being on this path with me and making a great day.

8 total episodes available

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