If you want to start to feel happy
it starts with you wanting to feel happy.
We like to sit and dwell,
We like to sit in our own sadness.
Make sure you’re spending time every single day
whether it’s 15-20 minutes, whether it’s an hour - two hours.
Take time to allow your mind
separation from the stresses of your day.
If you expect to fail
you will fail.
On the other hand if you expect to win, you will win.
And he’s right, because doctors and psychologists both alike
they agree that worrying actually does shorten your life
and it does damage your body.
We need to clear our thinking before we go to sleep.
We're talking about a book that Norman Vincent Peal wrote
“The Power of Positive Thinking."
Let’s kick this off with golden nugget number one:
Creating your own inner happiness.
That you are responsible for your own happiness
because unhappiness is usually the byproduct of you thinking sad thoughts,
you having these negative feelings,
you having resentment towards others
and just having an overall crappy outlook on life.
So if you think those things
what do you think is going to happen?
You have to force yourself to not think those negative thoughts.
Peal says, we have to get into the happiness habit
by thinking upbeat cheery thoughts throughout the day.
We like to sit and dwell.
We like to sit in our own sadness.
I don’t like to do that
but I just know that sometimes my brain forces me to do that
and I don’t know why.
So I have to force myself
to not do that.
I have to put on upbeat music,
I have to do something productive, I have to get in the gym.
I have to go hang around friends that are gonna make me laugh.
And it’s tough. At first it doesn’t feel right.
It feels like you’re forcing it because you ARE forcing it
but eventually it starts to make you feel better.
There are miracles happening all around you.
There is beauty all around you.
Open your eyes and look.
Can you see the sun shining?
Great.
Can you hear the birds chirping?
Great.
Can you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin?
Awesome!
There’s simple beauties all around us.
If you want to start to feel happy,
it starts with you wanting to feel happy.
So short circuit those negative thoughts.
And when you start to feel bad, when you start to find yourself gossiping
feeling guilty, feeling angry, feeling...
whatever it is you’re feeling that's negative,
turn that around,
force yourself to think positively,
do positive things
and while it doesn’t feel right at first,
keep going!
You’re on the right path.
Golden nugget number two:
The antidote to anxiety
is that people waste a lot of their time, a lot of their energy
fuming and fretting about things that they cannot control.
Go back to Covey’s principle:
circle of concern, circle of influence.
Focus only on those things in the circle of influence.
Everything else in the circle of concern, you can’t control.
You can’t affect that.
So move on!
Don’t allow your mind to just spend time in that space.
You’re wasting your mind’s energy.
So as part of this antidote to anxiety,
Peal says that we need to slow down
to relieve our anxiety and to attain peace.
And he suggests meditation.
He suggests that we devote at least 15 minutes daily
to calming and relaxing ourselves
by thinking peaceful thoughts
or not thinking anything at all.
So something he shares in the book, is to help get rid of the tendency to worry
and get angry,
we need to relax
and spend a few minutes thinking about beautiful, peaceful settings.
Hearing the birds chirping, feeling the sun on our face.
All these things that I was talking about before
where it's just a matter of you actually thinking that in your mind.
Wherever you are.
If you're at work,
if you're in your house, it doesn't...
Close your eyes
and open your mind to
maybe a place where you're on vacation before
and go there for 15 minutes.
Smell the smells
feel what the sand feels like on your feet,
feel yourself plunging into the ocean.
So the antidote to anxiety
it's all about clearing your mind.
However you choose to do that
make sure you're spending time every single day
whether it's 15-20 minutes,
whether it's an hour - two hours if you're working out at the gym,
whether you're doing yoga, whether you're going to cycling class,
whatever.
Take time to allow your mind
separation from the stresses of your day.
Golden nugget number three:
Expect the best.
If you expect to fail
you will fail.
On the other hand, if you expect to win
you will win.
So, what seeds are you planting in your mind?
Are you planting seeds of positivity or seeds of negativity?
Guess what?
Your life is going to give you back more of that.
Are you planting seeds of oh, doubt and
oh, I’m not gonna make this work
or something bad is gonna happen?
If you're planting seeds of that
guess what you're gonna get? More of that.
Start focusing on the positive.
Start focusing on how things can go right
and guess what, when things go wrong say, Hmm
there's a lesson in that for me.
Because life doesn't happen to me, it happens for me.
So everything that's happening
is there to teach me a lesson.
This isn't a setback, it's a set up.
This thing that's really bad, it happened for a reason.
I'm gonna learn from it. I’m gonna get better.
Golden nugget number four:
Worry not.
And he's right because doctors and psychologists both alike
they agree that worrying actually does shorten your life.
And it does damage your body.
We need to clear our thinking before we go to sleep
and we need to imagine our worries
flowing out of our body like water out of a glass.
So don't think that my path is the right path. No, no.
This path is good for me.
I replaced worry with hope
by putting together goals.
I put together three goals:
a financial related goal,
a health related goal,
and a professional related goal.
Something that...
what I was going to do with my life.
And back in the day when I was going through those stresses,
I was worrying a lot.
A lot. I was having a tough time sleeping, I was having chest pains,
my heart was palpitating all the time
and I really just could not get
you know, a high level of satisfaction in life
and you know if you were saying on a scale of one to eight, Ryan again,
nines and tens are reserved for
very special times in our lives that seldom happen.
I was sitting at a four consistently.
Where I would wake up and I'd all of a sudden feel the stresses of the day.
I'd pass between three and four all the time.
So what I did was to replace that worry,
that anxiety, that fear
I built myself a plan that gave me hope.
Goals that gave me hope.
Something that got me excited,
something that I wanted to work towards,
something I wanted to achieve
because I knew that if I did it would get me out of this mess
and my life would be better as a result.
Golden nugget number five:
Problem solving.
I had problems that I needed solutions to.
I had desires, I had wants,
I had dreams, I had goals that I needed a solution to.
The Cut the Crap show was a solution.
Create Your 8
was a solution
but what I did need to do was take myself out of the busyness of the day
and allow my mind to sort of free up
and look for inspiration all around me.
And know that
whatever solution I’m looking for it's going to come to me
and this is where in this
golden nugget, in the book, where Peal talks about, you know, problem solving,
he gives us 10 problem-solving techniques which
many of them I'm going to leave with.
The first one...
believe that for every problem there is a solution.
So yes, believe that your problem can be solved.
Yes it's hard, yes it's difficult, yes you don't have a solution right now
but there IS a solution.
And oftentimes there's more than one.
Two:
Try to maintain your serenity as you address a problem.
So, don't feel anxious,
don't try to... don't try to- to get angry
and say, ah you know I’m not getting this. I don't understand. No.
You need to be calm,
you need to be hopeful
that there's going to be a solution to this problem.
Number three:
Don't try to force an answer
more so don't try to say like,
Oh my God, I need an answer by Saturday at noon
if I don't get it by Saturday at noon then it's too late.
Sometimes you can't force it.
Life often happens for you.
And so you just need time
for that to reveal itself to you.
Number four, gather all relevant information.
Pretty simple.
Do as much research as possible.
Number five, write down all facts about the situation.
Again, get an understanding for the problem, what's going on.
You need to get clarity on the problem
so you can get clear on what solutions you need to solve it.
Number six:
Spend time praying about the issue you are confronting.
Listen, if you're praying about it, that's fine,
if you're not praying about it, maybe you're thinking about it.
Always make time to think about it.
When you're walking in nature
yes, take time to think in nature and allow your mind to flow
but when you separate yourself
from the stresses, the anxieties, the busyness of the day
allow your time to think about solutions.
Number seven,
believe in and seek God's guidance
on the promise of the 73rd Psalm:
Thou wilt guide me by thy counsel.
Again, if you believe in the religious aspect of that, that will talk to you.
That necessarily doesn't talk to me.
So I, I maybe won't be using that one.
Number eight, rely on your inner gifts of insight and intuition.
There's things that we believe we should do
and then there's things that we know we should be doing.
So you gotta listen to yourself
but it takes time, it takes...
it does take time, it takes patience, it takes some maturity
for you to realize what you're great at.
And sometimes you're doing something just to make a living,
just because it's my job, it's my career,
it's what I believe I'm great at.
But you have other gifts within you
that maybe you're not exploring yet, that you should be.
Number nine, attend religious services where you can
and listen peacefully and let your subconscious work on the problem.
Again you can go to church or you can just go for walks.
I love going for walks.
Period.
I’ll put music on my ears and allow myself to think.
Pretty simple.
Number ten, the answer that develops in your mind
or comes to pass is the right answer.
So, I just allowed the thoughts that came in my mind,
whenever I had a thought, an inspired thought I wrote it down on my phone.
Pulled up my phone, opened up the notepad and just wrote it down.
At the end of the day I would think about it, ponder on it
and say you know what this idea is something I want to go further into
and dig deeper into that.
That's exactly how this show happened,
that's exactly how Create Your 8 happened,
it's exactly how you're going to find solutions to your problems.
Last but not least, gold nugget number six:
How to handle heartache.
Now everybody at some point in their life experiences heartache
and it's tough.
And so Peal says, that for us to get over heartache
we need to resist the heartache by staying busy.
So if you're getting a divorce from your husband or your wife,
if you just broke up with your girlfriend or your boyfriend,
if you just lost a loved one,
if a loved one passed away,
a friend,
a family member,
doesn't matter who it is
he says that in order for you to get through it you need to stay busy,
you need to return to your normal activities
as soon as possible after a loss or a defeat.
And you need to resist the temptation to brood
and feel sorry for yourself.
I gotta get back to work,
I gotta get back to my goals, get back in the gym,
get back to eating right,
get back to hanging out with my friends, my family
listen to the music that I was listening to.
We have to return to life
but sometimes we just have to be sad
and we have to work our way through it.
But the key here is to not allow your mind to dwell on it for too long.
That's not handling heartache.
That's allowing heartache to take control of you
and to win.