So when I’m talking about modeling, what I want you to think about are those times in your life when you’ve found yourself modeling somebody else. You see, often times we have these subconscious actions, or things that we do, in our daily lives that are a result of modeling something we took from a parent, a sibling, a coworker or usually somebody early on, even a teacher.

Now to give you an idea of what this is like, there has to be a time in your life, if you’re like me, where you’re like, “Oh crap, I’m growing up just to be like my dad.” Or, “Ah shoot, my mom used to do that.” These are subconscious modeling behaviors or things that you’ve learned along your way by dealing with your parents. Now we all have hundreds, if not thousands of these types of patterns.

So what I wanted you to do today is write down these patterns that you’re noticing. Are you making sarcastic jokes like your father does? Are you noticing that you clear your throat like your mom? Where are these subconscious patterns? A lot of these patterns are running the show and only show up when they’re really in exaggerated amounts.

Now that you’ve written these patterns out, that are occurring subconsciously, the cool thing is you can actually have patterns and make them conscious. So what I mean by that is you can pick role models, or ways of being that you want, and then pattern a model after those people. So for example, you could find somebody who really embodies your health and wellness, the health and wellness of the body you want, and pattern them, see what they’re doing and model what they’re doing and make it your own. You can also find relationships, maybe you’re married and your relationship isn’t working out well, find couples who’s relationships are working well and model their behaviors. Model what they’re doing. So, for me as a husband, I would find another husband who’s doing a great job, who’s got a great marriage, maybe he’s a great father, find out what he’s doing right, what are his thought patterns, what are his belief systems? I would then model myself after those and make sure they fit for me and then see how I can make those work.

So what I’m going to encourage you to do today is two things. One – go ahead and write down in your journal all these subconscious patterns that you know are occurring. So again, these are the times where you think, “Crap, I’m growing up just to be like my brother.” Or, “Ah shoot, my sister says this just the same way.” Go ahead and write those down. Once you look at those, see which of those patterns you want to keep but also note which ones you want to change about yourself.

Now go to the other side and look at your 5 to thrive, so it’s mind, body, soul, relationships, and business and look at patterns that you want to have and people that embody that ideal pattern. Who are those people that you can model yourself after?

Now in our Author Of Your Own Story group, there’s a guy named David Rachford who had a great saying and what he said is, “You know what, what I do is I model my patterns of the ideal me, so when I catch myself working at my optimum in my 5 to thrive, I model myself after my optimal self.” Also a great tactic. Find out what works for you, I encourage you to go over to The Author Of Your Own Story Facebook group and share your results, we’re happy to work with you there.

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Today I’m gonna talk to you about relationships and what it has to do with mowing the lawn. I have a very successful coaching business and they give me the best material.

So what does this have to do with going to mow the lawn? Well, I was just talking to a client of mine, an extremely intelligent, successful man, and we were talking about what was going on in his life and just catching up, which is what we do for the first five minutes or so in a coaching call, to see what’s happened between the last call that we had.

He was talking to me saying, “My girl, she’s just nagging me to go mow the lawn.”

And so I asked him, “Well, why aren’t you? I’m just curious.”

He said, “I’m just being lazy.”

So we started talking about other things, and you can pick up on these patterns when you’re coaching for a long time, but we started talking about the rest of his life. What we were talking about was him working on his house, his business, then what he was doing with his meditation practice.

Always his answer is, “Oh, I’m just being lazy.” See, he had built a successful business and he built it to a point that allowed him not to work if he didn’t want to. That’s fantastic. That’s great. It’s something that I worked with him to get to. But now he’s being lazy. No one is just being lazy.

So going back to the grass, we’ll call this guy Ken. So I was said, “Alright Ken. So why aren’t you mowing the grass?”
“Oh, I’m just being lazy.”
“Okay. So break it down for me. What happened? How does the grass come up?”
“Oh, my girl she’s always telling me, ‘Go mow the grass’, and the next day it’s, ‘Hey, the grass is looking really bad. I drove by. Our neighbors are gonna start complaining.’ And I’m always telling her, ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’, or, ‘Oh yeah. I got that. I’ll do it today later’, or, ‘Oh, the weather’s not that great. I’ll get to it.'”

It had nothing to do with the grass. Really, it had to do with what he felt was his manhood as we broke it down. Now he didn’t see this. He saw this as just being lazy. “I’m just being lazy not to mow the grass.” Mowing the grass would take him 20 minutes, he can listen to a podcast like this, multiple ones, get great insights and ideas while mowing the grass, or just spend time enjoying the moment of mowing the grass. It wouldn’t have taken him much time. He doesn’t have anything on his schedule. So is he being lazy? Yeah, but that’s not the real reason.

So is he being lazy?

Yeah, but that’s not the real reason.

The real reason is he was really saying, “F you” to his girl. He was saying, “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m the man. I’ll tell you what to do.”

But you see, he was a coward. He was too scared to say that to her face so what he did say was, “Yeah. Yeah. I’ll get to it”, “Oh yeah. I’ll do it tomorrow”, “I’ll do it the next day”, and after several weeks she felt bad, I assume, after continusouly asking him to do this basic thing for their family.

Just go mow the lawn. She was the breadwinner. She was taking care of the kids. He was just laying on the couch being lazy. But the reality of it is he didn’t feel man enough because of other things that were going on in his life. So then when she asked him to please go mow the lawn, he took it as her telling him what to do and taking away his power.

You see, in relationships, there can often be a power struggle.  Especially in what we call a level-one relationship. Now some people call it a level four. It really depends on what you want to do, but anyway, the bottom of the barrel relationships where it’s really horse trading which is similar to, “you do this for me, I’ll do this for you”, that’s not a relationship. That’s not love. That’s a commerce. That’s, “I give you money, you give me my taco, my car”, whatever. That’s not a true relationship built on love.

So every time she asked him to go mow the lawn, what he was hearing in his subconscious was, “You’re not man enough to do your things. I’m in charge and I will tell you what to do.” Now, that was a story he made up. And the truth is he was backing that story up by not being man enough and having a conversation. So instead he was passive aggressive and simply just said, “Yeah, yeah. I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll do it the next day”, and it never got done.

At the end of our phone call maybe 20 minutes later I got a text message, I looked at my phone and say that the yard was mowed. The text message just said, “Reclaiming my manhood. I’ve never felt better.”

Why do I tell you this story? I tell you this story because in relationships, often times the things that upset us aren’t the things that we’re seeing. There’s stories that we’re creating on the outside. You see it had nothing to do with mowing the lawn. He could’ve mowed the lawn. It had everything to do with the way he was feeling inside so he projected the way he was feeling onto his girl and when she said anything, she could’ve said, “I love you” and he would’ve projected something totally different back on her of not feeling enough, not feeling manly enough. It had nothing to do with her.

What I want you to think about is: where are these things happening in your relationship? Where in your relationship is a boss, coworker, spouse, sibling asking you to mow the lawn and really you’re saying, “F you” in a passive aggressive way? Look deep because it’s happening. It happens with most of us and it certainly happens with me. I catch myself in these patterns.

Luckily I’m married to a woman that helps me break them as well. She’s a coach too so we’re often catching each other in these things. It’s human nature and the more you practice, the more often you’re gonna catch yourself doing this, or catch yourself quicker I should say.

So today what I want you to do is open up your journal, think back on the last two weeks. Where have you been in a position where someone’s asked you to mow the lawn and you said, “F you” in any way, shape, or form?

That’s it from me.

We’re opening a retreat that’s going to be coming up here at the end of the year and if you want a chance to get on that I think we have a couple slots still open and would love to have you with us. If you’re interested, email us at team@brandedinnovation.com to apply.

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Let’s talk about relationships. Let’s talk about patterns in particular. I’m actually looking at a screenshot of something that I wrote out, a pattern one of my clients have.

Patterns are certain things that we see coming up in our lives over and over again. What I’m going to talk about today are patterns specifically in relationships. When you think back on your life, think about the relationship you’re currently in or were in recently. If you haven’t been in a relationship, think of a friendship in particular. That is a relationship, but it’s easier sometimes to think about romantic relationships. My guess is each relationship that you’ve had has a very specific pattern that we could break down together.

Now, that pattern could be that you meet somebody and they end up being the wrong guy. Maybe he ends up being an alcoholic or a drug addict or abusive, or maybe he’s just lazy or doesn’t like the outdoors, or whatever it is. You find that person and you don’t find out until months later and you’re just in too deep. Patterns come in all shapes and sizes, but let me give you a very specific example of a client I was just talking to.

This individual, a successful businessman, was having so many problems in his relationship and he was so down that we got on a phone call. During that phone call I quickly sketched out on my pad what he was saying so I could then show him the pattern. You can see the screenshot below.

He was telling me, “Ugh, I just don’t get it. I’m getting so jealous. This girl that I love, I just love her so much, Doug, and what happens is I get so jealous of her and then I’m just scared she’s going to leave me.” His story went on and on and on. This woman was very open with her friendships with other people. She was, in his eyes, flirtatious. What he wasn’t getting is this pattern he was in. Once I walk this pattern through for you, you may see some of your similarities in there, but when I walked it through for him he went, “Oh my God. This is something I’ve been doing my whole life, not even my adult life, but I’ve been doing this since a child.”

These patterns, we all have them. I have my patterns and you have yours. Most of us started forming these patterns as protection mechanisms so we could socialize in the environments that we are in. We’ve been doing these patterns in some way, shape or form since we were really little. Oftentimes it gets traced back to, you know, roughly around five or six years old. You start to formulate your meanings of life and things that you see, and you create stories in your own head and you fall into these patterns. Oftentimes as we get older as adults we actually start stacking patterns on top of each other.

Let me describe what his pattern happened to be. What happened was, he’s a great guy, I mean phenomenal. Any woman would be lucky to have him, but he falls in love with somebody quickly. He falls deeply in love. Now when he falls in love with another woman, what happens is he just wants to give himself so much. He’s a lover. He just fills them up. He just takes everything he has and pours into them, pours himself into them. Then what he ends up doing is not pouring love into himself.

What I often talk about with my clients is the need to fill your own cup first. If you don’t fill your own cup and you’re filling somebody else’s cup, your cup is empty. He got into this pattern where he would fill his partner up and then he’d be empty. Now he was in a cycle where he needed his partner because he needed his partner to fill him up since he hadn’t been filling himself up. Now he’s in a cycle. Then, when he’s needing his partner to fill him up, he dumps into another cycle. That cycle is called not enough.

He’s not enough because he needs her around him. He feels like less of a man. He needs her to be there, and so because he needs her so much he gets jealous. Now, when he’s getting jealous he starts really seeking something else. He seeks other women. He starts going out there. She’s doing something and then he starts seeking other women to fill him up because he’s not enough. Now, of course, when he’s getting jealous he also starts judging himself as well. He’s getting into yet another pattern of judging himself, which then spins off again to not enough, in which he then seeks the other person to fill him up, which brings him back to the original pattern of seeking somebody else and dumping so much into them in the hopes that they’ll return the favor, and then he needs them even more.

Then, when he needs them, even more, he’s pushing them away because he’s so needy. Then he feels even more like not enough and needs more of their love. Then he starts seeking it even more. Then he goes back into judging himself because he’s not enough. You see all the circles around. He gets in this downward spiral. This actually spills over, as it does for all of us, out of relationships and into his business.

You see, now he was in this downward spiral and his business, he just couldn’t focus on it. His business started going into a similar cycle. His business wasn’t enough. His business wasn’t growing.

This also went with his soul. When you’re not filling up your own cup, you’re stressed because you’re worried. You’re worried about the other person. Is she going to leave me? Is he going to leave me? Are they going to be with somebody else and I just don’t know? It starts playing with your mind. When you get in these multiple patterns, these patterns actually feed themselves. They’re protection mechanisms.

He wasn’t filling himself up first because he was scared. He was scared of what he was going to find. He was scared that he wasn’t enough, he wasn’t enough of a man that if he filled himself up and focused on himself, first of all, that was bad because he’s being needy. Second of all if he was filling himself up, he wasn’t paying attention to the other person. When he got this and flipped the script…remember it’s a pattern so it’s going to keep coming up, but you’ve got to keep working on it.

He flipped the script and started focusing on filling himself up. That doesn’t mean being selfish. I mean, it’s selfish, but not overly selfish. Doing what made him happy, filling his soul. The woman he loved was more attracted to him. She wanted to spend time with him because that’s the man she fell in love with.

She didn’t fall in love with a guy who was just dumping himself into her. She fell in love with the man who was being the man he was, the man that did the things that filled him up. For him, it was yoga, meditation, going outdoors, spending time with his child. You see, in relationships and relationship patterns you see these things over and over and over again.

One of the keys I see to breaking these patterns, and this happens nine times out of ten if not ten times out of ten, spend time filling you first. Fill your cup.

Many of us just don’t even know what that means. Today what I’m going to ask you for your homework is sit down with your journal and write what makes you happy. If you haven’t been happy in a long time, first I’m sorry, and you really need to get in our community and jump on board and maybe work with one of our coaches to get you on that track, but hopefully you have and hopefully you can see those things that really fill you up.

Maybe if you’re having a hard time, you’ve been married for many years and the relationship has kind of gone dead and instead of having a marriage you’ve got a roommate or somebody else. Think about what you did when you first met, not just going to the bars or what have you. What are the things you did? Did you go hiking? Did you go bike riding? Did you meditate? Did you do yoga? Did you really enjoy the arts? Did you go to art galleries? What were those things that filled you up then? Chances are they’re very similar. Chances are the things that filled you up as a child are very similar to things that fill you up today.

I encourage you to write those down. Also, on a separate piece of paper write down those patterns. Recognizing the patterns is the first step to breaking them and replacing them with something great. That’s it for me today. I hope your relationships are phenomenal. Take time to do the homework.

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