Listener Q&A
Today’s topic: listener Q&A. .Now, this question comes in from listener Keith. Keith asks, “Hey Doug. I love the podcast. I’ve been listening to it since the very beginning and I’m all caught up. I listen to them during my workouts and absolutely love them. Keep them going.” Thanks, Keith. “My question is, I am actually wanting to get my family involved and have them listening to this, but I just can’t get them engaged. I recently found that you have these videos on YouTube and they’re actually extremely dynamic. I want to get these videos to them, but I don’t know how to show them other than getting them all around the computer. Any suggestions?”
Stop Lying to Yourself
What do I mean? Stop lying to yourself. When I say that, what I’m talking about is all the lies that we tell ourselves on a daily basis. These are lies that come from previous stories. Stories about our past. These stories become records playing in our head over and over again on some kind of crazy loop. Now, what these stories do, is they disempower us. Now, these stories are things that we’ve made up based on past experiences, or things people have told us, or things that have happened.
The New You Under Attack
As you’re developing this author of your own story lifestyle, as you’re evolving here, you’re doing these daily growth hacks and hopefully, you’re putting in the work. I really hope you are. As you’re doing this, you’re going to start noticing the change. What you may start to notice is something that many of us notice. That is the people around you start to push back. They start to subconsciously sabotage what you’re doing.
This could be negative comments, “You’ll never do that,” or, “You shouldn’t be doing that,” or, “What the heck are you doing?” These types of comments come naturally. It should be understood. People are comfortable with the old you. They’re comfortable with the you that doesn’t have a voice. They’re comfortable with the you that didn’t take control and be the author of their own story.
What’s Your Financial Legacy?
The topic of finances and money causes a lot of stress for most people, and we haven’t talked about a lot in these daily growth hacks, but we’ll be talking about it a lot more, and the reason is is because I want you to have the freedom that I’ve experienced around finances, and it took a long time, but one of those things was determining my financial legacy, and I’m going to ask you what yours is.
When I talk about your financial legacy, I’m not talking about a lump sum of cash that you leave behind after you pass this world, not at all. What I’m talking about is what is the legacy you want to leave where you’re able to do things with other people and the people that you love. You see, we just had a newborn. My wife wanted to get out of town, just to get out of the house. Here we are at a beautiful beach house overlooking the ocean, and we’re here for a week.
Self-Sacrifice
Now today I had an interesting conversation. Just like I coach people at high levels, I have my own coach that I work with. Now, this coach allows me to see the forest from trees and often in conversations a lot comes up. You see, I always am interested in canceling because I got it all handled. In this conversations, what came up for me was the topic of self-sacrifice.
I was talking to my coach, and we were talking about what was going on. I’m building a new business. I’m here in Santa Barbara traveling with my family. I have a lot going on, and I’ve been waking up early in the morning to answer other people’s questions, to answer your questions for the daily growth hacks, to help Author of Your Own Story University not only get off the ground but excel and make it the best program possible.
Taking Small Steps To Make A Big Impact
Now a lot of times when I’m working with somebody or talking in a group, I often hear somebody talk about you know, I want to go to Africa and end hunger there. Or end poverty in Uganda. Or maybe it’s somebody talking about something they want to go to Columbia and put in a program in place. Or clean water wells. Or whatever it may be. And oftentimes, they have this huge goal, and I support them fully. But what they don’t realize is they could start today in their own communities. You can take small steps now at a local level to get your self-started. So maybe it is you want to give back, you want to help the women of the world. Go to a local shelter for women in your local community. Reach out and start there as you’re building this big dream of yours.
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A Thousand Beautiful Now Moments
Today I’m gonna focus a little bit more on relationships and talk about a thousand now moments and how you could possibly be one of those people missing them. You see, often times we focus on the future, on a future problem and we miss the now. And I’m gonna give you an example. I had a client call me to tell me that they are really stressed out because their wife had been unfaithful a year ago. And they were worried that their wife was gonna do this again. See, their wife was going on a girls trip and although they had reconciled their marriage, their wife was leaving and now he was having an abundance of anxiety and didn’t know what to do. He was stressing and he would project and take that out on her. He would lash out on her, everything she would do. Maybe she didn’t do the dishes right, he would get upset. He was just being mean and he knew it.
Abundance and Success
Abundance and success. Abundance is talked about all the time. There are books on abundance. There are podcasts on abundance. There are videos. The Secret talks about Abundance. There are all these things about abundance, but I think it’s so commonly misunderstood. The reason I say that is how do you define abundance? How do you define success?
Are you defining success on my terms? Are you defining success on somebody else’s terms, or are you defining success and abundance on your own terms? Do you have an abundant amount of energy? Do you have an abundant amount of love in your life? Most of the most successful people I know in the world aren’t always financially successful as others. What I mean by that is, they’re not the richest people financially, but often times, they’re successful because they’re the richest people in their relationships, in their holistic environment, in their five to thrive.
You Can’t See Point C Unless You Get to Point B
Today I’m going to answer a question that was put in the Author of Your Own Story group by Barbara. Barbara essentially is asking, “Hey, look. I’ve been going really hard towards this solution, or towards this direction, but now it’s just not filling me up. I’m not finding that this is a viable path for me, and I just don’t think this is the way I want to go, but how do I know that I’m not just giving up because it’s getting difficult, and moving onto the next shiny new object instead of actually pushing through and finding something? Or, finding my other passion?”
The Digital Lifestyle
Now, I just got back from the beach out here in beautiful Santa Barbara, California and we’re staying at a beach house overlooking the ocean and it’s absolutely magnificent. I’m running up here to shoot this Daily Growth Hack because I just got off the phone with an old client of mine. When I got off the phone, I related the conversation to a colleague of mine who said, “You know what? That’s a perfect Daily Growth Hack because Doug you get asked this question all the time,” and they were totally right.
Begin With The End In Mind
Beginning with the end in mind is something I learned from Stephen Covey from his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Now this is an older book, but its application is still very valid today. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend picking it up. Today my wife and I are traveling. We’re in beautiful Santa Barbara and I’m sitting overlooking the ocean and when I was talking to a client of mine I was talking to him about his goals and his dreams. We started to go through this exercise, which I’m about to share with you.
Visualize Yourself Before Bed
I want to talk to you about something that’s really not a secret, but something that most people aren’t utilizing, or are at least under-utilizing, and that’s the power of visualization, and more important, the power of visualization right before you go to bed.
When you think about it, CEOs, athletes, people from all walks of life that have been successful have utilized visualization as a success tool. One way that they do this is, right before bed, they’re going to visualize themselves being successful at whatever endeavor they’re embarking on right before they go to sleep. Why is this important? Well, this is important because, when you go to sleep, your mind’s subconscious is going to process the last thing that you were thinking about. The last thing that was in your mind is something that you’re going to be thinking about while you’re sleeping.
Expand Your Network Before You Need It
Oftentimes I’ll wake up in the morning, and I’ll look at my emails after I’ve done my hour of power, and in those emails, I have lots of emails from subscribers of The Author of Your Own Story email. In there they’re telling me about their journey. They’re telling me about their struggles. They’ll also reach out to me on social media, and I absolutely love it, so thank you, but one thing I’ve noticed is about 90% of them are having issues where they’re currently unhappy in their current position. They’re feeling unsatisfied with their work, or they’ve been let go, and now they’re rapidly needing to expand their network.
Remember to Breathe
Now, today I want to talk about something that happened the other day as I was talking to a client of mine. I could actually feel it through the video conference they were getting tense. I stopped and I asked him, “Are you breathing?” All of a sudden, you just saw something clear up on them. You saw visually them actually lose about five to 10 pounds of weight. They took a deep breath and just exhaled and they just relaxed their bodies.
What I was talking to them about was a trigger that happened at their work. See they’re a high-level business owner. They run a seven-figure business and they were being stressed out about some of their employees in situations that were going on in their enterprise. Now, when I was talking to about it I could see them getting more and more tense, but I also noticed that they were holding their breath.
That Was A Bad Idea
So, in the circles I’ve run with – business gets talked about a lot. And oftentimes you’ll hear people talking in social settings about bad ideas, “Hey my cousin had an idea and it was a horrible idea.” “I’ve started a business and it was just a bad idea and that’s why it failed or “I have an idea for a business but I think it might be a bad idea so I’m not going to start it.”
These kinds of conversations come up often and I hear them a lot. What’s really interesting to me is I don’t think there’s a bad idea. I just don’t think there’s a bad business idea. Now, what Imean by that is I can take any business idea you can think of and I can show you someone who is making millions of dollars on that idea. Whether it’s digital, retail, brick and mortar, manufacturing, service-based, you name it. There is somebody out there doing that successfully. And maybe that idea hasn’t been thought of yet.
Falling Out Of The Raft
Just yesterday, my brother and his family and I decided to go whitewater rafting. They’re visiting my wife and my son and me here in Central Oregon. We decided it’d be a great excursion, and it was. Now we got to the destination at the foot of the river and we met our river guides. There, they went through the typical safety check, telling us exactly what to expect and what we could be doing. Now, most of this float was gentle, you know, class one to two Rapids, so nothing really to worry about. Nonetheless, you’re still going down a wild river.
If You Don’t Speak the Language You Don’t Get What You Want
Earlier this year, I went down to Columbia. I went down to Columbia for a spiritual experience. Went down to Perodua Yage in the middle of the Amazon jungle, an amazing experience that I recommend to many people, not to everybody, but to many.
Now while I was down there, I was trying to communicate with my broken Spanglish the best that I could and oftentimes it would lead to miscommunications and I wasn’t able to actually get the end result that I wanted, because I couldn’t speak the language.
