Change the Way You Feel About Things and the Way You Feel Will Change

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How would you feel if over the course of two days, you poured your heart and soul into writing a piece for your blog that you thought could really help people improve the way they feel in their lives, only to accidentally lean on the alt key on your keyboard and have the whole two days worth of work vanish from your screen forever ?  I have to be honest, when this happened to me this morning my first thought was not a good one, but I quickly glanced up, read the title on my screen and took my advice.  Funny thing, the 1500 words in the body of the blog post had disappeared but the title stayed intact.  I guess it was the Universe testing me yet again.

The way we think and feel about things has a direct impact not only on how things look to us  but how we ultimately feel.  One of my favorite Wayne Dyer quotes is “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at Change”, nothing could be more true.  But as I thought about it, the same could be said for the way we feel about things,  If you change the way you feel about things or events in your life, the way you feel will change.   When I lost my 1500 word blog post this morning, I could have felt terrible about losing all that work, instead I chose to feel like there was a positive reason for losing that work.  Had I chosen to feel terrible, I could have spent the whole day angry, upset and taking out my feelings on the world instead, I feel great, I figured out a way to prevent losing work like that in the future and I am taking a different, more refined approach to getting my real message across to you in this version 2.0 of this blog post.

All of us can feel great 100% of the time, it’s a choice we make as each of us are totally responsible for the lives we create.  I have seen great days turn into lousy days just because a friend or family member chose to feel angry about something that was totally a waste of time.   Road Rage in particular is one of those things,  whether I am riding with people, listening to people on cell phones or driving myself it never fails that when someone else does something stupid on the road, it causes most people to get angry, and that anger usually burns up a good hour or two of what could have been fun and happy time.  I used to be incredibly guilty of the road rage thing, so much so that I would not only get angry, I would transform into a stalker who had to show that person how wrong they were for their lousy driving decision.  Today, I keep in my mind, another Wayne Dyer quote that I repeat to myself as I take an extra breath when these situations on the road happen  “When faced with being right or kind always choose kindness”.  Repeating that quote to yourself and choosing kindness makes you feel totally different then choosing “Right and Anger“.

The way you feel and this “KNOWING” thing I always talk about.  Think about times in your life when you were uncertain about something, you were anxious, stressed, worried and maybe even feeling a little sick not knowing what the outcome would be.  Then think about times in your life when you knew the outcome of something was going to be exactly what you expected, you were happy, satisfied, joyful and confident.   Now think about how you would rather feel, Happy or anxious, Satisfied or stressed, Joyful or worried.  Think the choice is easy, and everyday you are faced with that same choice, only you can decide how you feel, no one else can make you feel sad, it is your reaction to what someone else has said or done that makes you sad or happy.  You are in complete control, and once you  absolutely “KNOW”  you are in complete control, you never have reason to not feel great 100% of the time.

Over the past 5 years when I lost my way from always “KNOWING” to questioning whether I could do it, my health suffered, my family suffered, I suffered, I wasn’t happy and I thought that what was happening in my world was making me unhappy.    But, I was creating my world and was choosing to feel unhappy about what I created.   For the first 46 years of my life, I was very good at creating exactly what I wanted and the only time I didn’t feel great was when I slipped up and thought the wrong way.  Let me give you a little insight into what I am talking about.  Throughout my life I have constantly heard people talk about me as being lucky, always being in the right place at the right time, that everything I touched turned to gold.   When I heard those things, I always told myself those people were right but I knew that I was creating my luck, and everything that went with it by choosing the right thoughts.  When I slipped into the dark days of the past 5 years,   I started thinking that maybe it was just luck and that my luck couldn’t continue since things had been so good.  I would sit through meetings with people who would tell me that I am too positive, too optimistic and that I have to be honest with myself, that I have to get real.  I started to believe those people and what they were saying for no good reason.  After all, my life went just as I had planned it for the first 46 years, it wasn’t until I started listening to people tell me that I wasn’t who I thought I was that things changed.    The most important thing to understand is that the people who told me these things weren’t responsible for my downfall nor do I believe they had any ill intent, they just didn’t understand themselves the power of “KNOWING” that I had come to master over the prior 46 years.   I was completely responsible for the past 5 years, I created it and I own it.   The biggest and most valuable lesson to date in my life is realizing exactly what happened the last 5 years.  The Universe has its way of providing lessons and clues for you along the way, you just have to understand  and learn along the way.

Now that you know how to make yourself feel great all the time, why not give this “KNOWING” thing a try ?   Let’s do this together, as I mentioned in my last post, this stuff is contagious and it is fun when we can all share actual experiences with these life creation ideas.  I know I am going to have another incredible day, I know things are going to fall into place with several different projects I have in the works, I know I am going to lose some more weight today and feel even better than I did at 40 when I was in the best shape of my life.   What do you know ?  Get out a piece of paper and right down the things you know and see how you feel.  Change the way you feel about things, Know the things you feel good about are yours and the way you feel will change for the better.

Related Articles

• Positive Attitude – 5 Steps to a Happy Life (thinksimplenow.com)
• Power Thoughts (momblognetwork.com)
• Waiting to Exhale (beyondhorizoncoaching.com)
• The Baietto Brothers: Make Gratitude a Game (huffingtonpost.com)
• A Way to Live Your Life (socyberty.com)
• Why We Judge (windandheart.blogspot.com)

The Worst…Brings out our Best !

Watching TV for me consists of flipping through the channels trying to find something positive and inspiring to watch.  The History channel, the Learning channel and the National Geographic channel seem to be where I end up most.   Last week while surfing the channels I ended up coming across a commercial from a company called West Bend.  The West Bend I knew growing up made small kitchen appliances and certainly wasn’t in the business of creating inspirational commercials that not only sold their products but left you with a strong message.   This particular West Bend is an insurance company and their commercials center around being your best when you are faced with the worst.  I think it is a brilliant ad campaign and to follow it up with their tag line, “West Bend” “The Silver Lining Company” is even cooler.

Terry Lyles, America’s Stress Doctor and Human Performance Engineer, likes to say “Expect the best but prepare for the worst” . There are the practical applications of this thinking that we can apply to our everyday experience that helps us better cope with what ever we are facing and then there is the deeper and lasting application that can change your life.

I like to think that I have spent most of my 51 years life looking for the good in everything, that certainly was the case for the first 47 when I enjoyed incredible success and happiness in just about everything that I took on.  But over the last few years when my guard was down, I let the opinions of others influence my thinking.  When I was faced with what anyone else would consider a major issue, I no longer tackled it myself, I tried to tackle it by committee, unfortunately the committee wasn’t on the same page with me.  While I was saw the cup as half full, those that surrounding me always saw that cup as half empty and worried about all the bad stuff they expected to happen.  I had done a poor job of inspiring the troops and bringing them to the level that had always served me well.   All of sudden my knowing every situation would work out was outweighed by an army that expected it not to work out and worked hard and ultimately convinced me that in their opinion I was  not in their words a “realist”.  Funny thing though, for 47 years, my definition of being a “realist” worked pretty well for me, I made incredible amounts of money, bought my dream home, improved my dream home with more funds than I purchased it with, travelled all over the world, gave my kids everything and experience they could want and it was all easy because I knew I could create anything I wanted.  For 47 years, everything flowed to me like magic,  friends would tell me that everything I touched turned to gold and that I always landed on my feet when ever there was a down turn and you know what they were right.  Those first 47 years were incredible but it wasn’t the best I could do because I wasn’t as disciplined in regards to managing my thoughts as I needed to be.  I let the outside world seep in to my head, I let well-meaning friends and associates try to bring me back down to earth and they certainly did.

So after 47 years of living an incredibly fulfilling life, the wheels came off because I did not manage my thoughts efficiently or did they come off because the Universe needed to find a way to tell me to “kick it up a notch”  to really bring out the best that I could be.  The past 3 years were pretty horrible by anyone’s standards, losing my home of 25 years, losing many loved ones to cancer and other diseases and losing everything I had created materially during those first 47 years.   I needed the Worst, to shake me up so I could bring out the Best !  and baby you ain’t seen nothing yet !

Truly bringing out your best requires massive action and when it comes to managing your thoughts and getting your head in the right place it calls for massive infusions of “The Right Stuff”.  In my case,  the first thing I did was to quit listening to talk radio and news on TV while removing myself from the political discussion of the day.  Once you do that you realize that the least intelligent life forms on the face of the earth are our politicians and elected officials and it doesn’t matter which party they are in, they are all small thinkers focused on advancing a personal agenda.  The next thing I did was to fill my car and Ipod full of the most positive and enlightening audio material I could find.  And finally, I keep a personal written journal and a video journal to record my thoughts and to remind me of the reality I am going to create.  The next 51 years will be hundreds of times more incredible than my last 51 years.  The Universe has so much to offer and you can find it anywhere.

Let me leave you with a little story from last night while having a conversation with my son.  Another part of my massive action plan is that I have taken on additional positions ( I won’t call them jobs because I don’t see them as such)  that pretty much fill up 20 to 22 hours of each 24 hour day, 7 days  week.  One of those positions happens to be as a night manager at convenience/gas station.  I took the position because I truly wanted the opportunity to interact with people and see if I could make a difference in the lives of people who visit that store when I am there.  I didn’t even care what the position paid, I am not even sure I asked.  I think the person who hired me wasn’t sure what to think as he told me I was way over qualified for the position and I told him that was a good thing that I wasn’t even considering this a job.  I think he thought I was nuts, but he hired me anyway.  Back to the conversation with son who couldn’t believe his dad was going to work at a gas station.  He told he could get me a job working at the place he does unloading trucks and stocking shelves overnight for twice the money.  He also told me that how much you make is much more important than whether you enjoy what you are doing…really ?  The wisdom of a 22 year old ! and an illustration of how one person’s reality is totally different from someone else’s.  The bottom line is I look at everything I do as an adventure, as new experience, as something that may take places I have never been before.  Life is all about experiences and finding new and interesting experiences is most of the fun.  I wonder how much more people would enjoy life if they looked at every single thing they do as adventure that may take them well beyond what most people would think.     Whatever you do, let “The Worst..Bring out the Best” and soon you will understand that the worst is what gave you the best.

Don’t Stop Believing !

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Sitting here this morning realizing I hadn’t posted a new blog entry in almost a week.  I had a pretty good run there for a while, the ideas kept flowing and I had more material than I had time to write.  My mind was totally blank trying to figure out what to write this morning when just like magic, I am looking at everybody’s daily facebook updates and I see a status update from one of my kids ski coaches “start shopping for airfare now for fall ski camp” and immediately nostalgic thoughts of following my kids to ski racing camps swept over me.  Of course with the personal financial crisis of the last couple years my first thought was feeling bad that I couldn’t do that any more because I couldn’t afford it, then suddenly the song starts playing in my head…”Don’t stop believing…hold onto that feeling” and I immediately was reminded that, “that feeling” is what it is all about.  When you truly believe and know that you can do things, you can !.  I know it sounds simple but doing a thorough analysis and having the opportunity to spend some time with a recent college graduate and incredible entrepreneur I met at Target Field, I know it had worked for me in the past and I know when I focused on “not losing everything”  I lost everything.  When you proceed confidently and know you can do something without a doubt, it always happens exactly the way you visualize it.

Crazy thoughts started popping into my head as ‘Don’t stop believing” continued to play in the background.  I thought about taking a trip to the Caribbean this fall like my wife and I always used to do to celebrate the anniversary of our first date on November 1, 1975.  I thought about going to Colorado in November to watch my son train for the upcoming ski racing season and for some strange reason, a thought came to me to look up the address of our home that we lost to foreclosure in December of 2009 on Google earth.  Now the home issue has been particularly sensitive for me, I haven’t been able to drive by the house we lost and lived in for 25 years, I get physically ill when someone mentions it and for the most part I just had been trying to completely erase it from my mind.   But for some reason this morning, something was telling me to look up the house on Google earth, so I looked it up and there beside the satellite photo was an ad from a realtor saying to look at this listing… so I clicked on it and up popped the listing for the home I lost.  Unlike the last 12 months when mentions of that house made me feel sick, this morning thoughts of hope were rushing over me.  I read the ad for the listing and took a look at all the pictures they had posted.  I think something amazing is happening, first, I thought someone had bought the house and moved into it, second, I thought even if we could have stayed in it I couldn’t afford to fix all the problems that had cropped up with the house over the past few years but when I looked at it, no one had bought it and someone had fixed all the problems with it.  It has a new roof, new windows, the theater in the basement has been restored, the ceiling in the kitchen has been redone and the light fixtures that needed to be replaced have been replaced.  It looks brand new inside and out and my yard that I worked so hard on for all those years still looks great.  Can you guess what my next thought was ?  It was  an unbelievable, I should buy it back thought !  Once again….”Don’t Stop Believing” started blaring in my head. How I could I possibly buy this home back before someone else gets there hands on it ?  To pull that off I would have to come up with millions of dollars to dig myself out of debt, pay everyone back and pay cash for the house because no one is going to give me a loan.  Millions of obstacles, huge barriers and the words impossible haven’t even crossed my mind.  Am I back to being my old self where I could make the impossible happen ? am I going nuts ?  Should my family find some serious psychiatric help for me ?  I choose to think that I am back and better than ever. 

Dreams can become reality, you just have to really believe and know they are going to happen.  I spent the last few years worrying about and focusing on trying not to lose things, trying to keep my business alive and trying not to lose my house.  You might think those were admirable things to focus on but in fact by thinking that way (trying not to lose) I was doing exactly the thing that made me lose everything.  If I had focused on growing the business, improving my home and setting goals for new things to attain, I can guarantee that I wouldn’t have lost everything.   I don’t like to make excuses but it is important to find the cause of your issues, I believe mine all started with a CFO I hired, we would have weekly meetings where he would present spreadsheet after spreadsheet, projected on the wall, showing me when my company was going to run out of money.  Guess what ? we ran out of money and got into a mode of never having any money.  In 27 plus years of being in business I had never taken the approach of looking at when I was going to run out of money and I never did run of money until our focus became “when are we going to run out of money”.  We should have been focused on the things we needed to do to generate money and looking at spreadsheets of what were going to do when the money came in.   A very successful mentor of mine once told me that there are only two things in business: Growth or Liquidation either you are growing the company or the company is going out of business.   I think the same can be said for people as well, either you are learning and growing in your personal experience or you are liquidating everything preparing for things to shut down.  It all comes down to what you think about most.             

As we head into the fall of another year are you heading into the fall of your life ? or are you focused on building yourself up and preparing for another Spring ?  My little journey of the past few years that took me down the wrong path is being quickly corrected, it just took getting the right mental GPS turned on.   No dream is too big, no dream is impossible and fixing the past (including buying your foreclosed home back) is not only possible it easily could become reality if you “Don’t Stop Believing” !