Now I’m fortunate enough to actually be a mentor and coach to some of the best life coaches in the world. Now people as me, why would you coach coaches, why do they have a coach? Well of course, if you are a coach you need a mentor. You need somebody else to keep you accountable and to coach you and to raise the bar. I have coaches myself and mentors as well, but the point is when I was talking to one of these coaches, this is a woman who trains people at the highest levels, and I asked her, how are things going?
Just typical intro conversation you have with anybody really, right. I asked her how things were going? She said, “Things are great Doug, things are absolutely great. Business has never been better. Relationships are good.” And she said it in this monotone tone. I said, “That’s interesting, you’re saying things are great but your emotional state that I’m getting from you isn’t the same.” She paused for a second. She said, “But things are great. Business has never been better Doug and all these things are amazing in my life.” That’s what I told her. I said, “Do you really feel happy?” There was a pause and the answer was “No.” I said, Look, when we look at things, your state of life begins with an emotion, emotion equals meaning. Emotion equals the meaning we apply to life. It’s the foundation. If you’re not happy emotionally, then there are issues.
You can be as successful as anybody in the world. I train and coach and mentor some very wealthy people, so I can tell you, money does not equal happiness. You’ve heard it before. I can tell you again. Now it’s nice to have, but the happier you are the more success you will have. That I’ve seen time and time again. Meaning equals emotion and emotion equals life. This is a formula I got from Tony Robbins a long time ago, and I’m not sure where he got it. Maybe he came up with it on his own, but it works. It’s the meaning we associate to things right. We can associate different things. For example, I have a business partner and we lost a big client and it was one of those things, it’s like wow, that’s horrible, but we saw it as an opportunity. We said, “Wow, that frees up so much time.”
And in a conversation in a course of two hours, he and I, going back and forth, we took that and made it mean that there was more opportunity for us to grow and we launched, catapulted I would say, a new program that we’ve been wanting to do because now we had the free bandwidth to do it. It was such a weight lifted off our shoulders. He turned to me and said, “Doug, wow. This is the best things that’s happened to our business.” And I agree. The reason we were able to do that is we took what it meant, what it meant to lose this client and changed it to opportunity. Now we could’ve got depressed, in fact, in my early twenty’s I would’ve been pulling my hair out, stressed. What did I do wrong? Trying to figure it out. Making myself wrong for the situation. In fact with this particular client, we reached out and said, “Hey, why? What happened?” And they said, “Well actually there’s a couple services that I need that you can’t offer,” and they were right. They did need them and we don’t offer them and never will.
So it was actually nothing to do with us. Again in my twenties, I would’ve made it mean that I was bad, I wasn’t as good as I thought I was and I wasn’t providing the service. My company wasn’t as capable as we wanted to be, but the truth is it had nothing to do with our company and nothing to do with me and nothing to do with our capability. Now fast forward to today. I just changed the meaning to mean something that I wanted it to mean. Something that fit into my story and out of that came a new product or a new service that we’ve already launched, that’s already successful. This has only been a week. It’s an amazing story. The point is, just like I was asking this coach, or talking to him, how are you doing, what meaning are you applying to your life. So what I invite you to do is grab your journal, write out your five to thrive and look in those areas. Are there any areas in there that you’re not excited about? What does that mean to you?
Maybe weight loss is a common thing that people reach out to me about and tell me, “Hey I wanna lose ten pounds.” Or fifteen pounds, or whatever it is. Then they write down and their zigzagging. They’re going up, they’re going down, they’re going up, they’re going down. What does that mean to you? When you step on the scale, and you see that you’ve gained a pound or two pounds or whatever it is, what meaning? Are you making yourself wrong? Is that bad? What meaning are you applying to it? Now I’m gonna invite you to change that up. So if we’re saying that emotions equal life, and the meaning you apply to things equal your emotional state, then what you wanna do is change your meaning. By shifting the meaning of things, you’re able to change your emotional state which means you can change your life.
That’s it for me today. Share this with at least three people that you want to have conversations that matter. If someone shared this with you, just know that they respect you and want you to grow with them. They’re on their path and they believe that you are on your path. Congratulations to you. This is a huge, huge compliment. Of course, go over to authorofyourownstory.com. Get on the newsletter so you can get the latest tips, tricks, and techniques delivered right to your inbox. Go out and have an amazing day and remember your meaning actually dictates your emotion and your emotion dictates your life, so whatever happens to you today, make it mean something that actually serves you.
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