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What’s the one thing that, if you can change it immediately, and that if you did it it would make all other things in your life better? Today I’m going to share with you what that is. It’s something that, if you take it to heart, it will undoubtedly improve your life today. If you commit to living in a beautiful state going forward, it will help you have more beautiful relationships, a thriving business, and an all around happier life. You ready to get started? Perfect.
I just want to recap. We’ve talked a little bit going through the VBAR method and I’m bouncing around a little bit here, but the V in VBAR is vision, and there’s also underneath vision is values and purpose. Then underneath the B is, B is for belief. Then below that you have programming and state. Then under the A is action, so I use acronym TEA is thoughts, emotions, and actions. The R stands for results, which is an acronym there is ARC, which is assessing results and changing. Okay?
In this particular area I want to talk about the one thing that can improve your life immediately. That, literally, you can change with the snap of your fingers, on the drop of a dime, whatever your kind of statement is there, like, you can change it immediately if you work on it. The first when we talk about, you’re going to be like, “Oh, how can you change that immediately?” It’s something that takes practice. Now, if you jump right in and just kind of go all out, like, you can do it pretty immediately.
One of the most important things in your life is your state, and what I mean by that is your overall mental and physical state that you’re in. Think about how important state is. Your state determines how you’re going to respond to others. If you’re in a bad state and you’re agitated and you’re not feeling well, are you more likely to kind of snap at someone or do something like that? Yeah, of course you are. Now, if you’re in a great state where you’re kind of top of the world, you’re smiling, you’re happy, how are you going to respond to somebody in that state, right? We don’t, most people, the majority of the world doesn’t really look at their state as something that they need to actually manage to improve their life.
Your state can, you know, like top athletes know that their state is a critical component to their performance. If you’re going to go into a basketball game or an Olympic athlete, your mental state is a critical component to the performance. That’s something that we’ve known for years. Well, for us, every day, whether you’re an Olympic athlete or not, you can go out and actually just live in a beautiful state.
You can live in this beautiful state and enjoy life if it’s just something you practice on. Really, our life is all about, are we enjoying what we’re doing? Not just enjoying it, but what is the state that we’re living in? Are we in an enjoying, beautiful kind of state that we’re in where we’re appreciating everything? Or, are we in this negative, kind of agitated state where everything bothers us? How much of your life are you actually spending in those states?
I’ve always known the importance of state, and that’s why it was in kind of this method that I built. I had never been to a Tony Robbins event. It was actually on my wife and I’s bucket list to go to an event, and we wanted to go together. We went recently in March, we went to the Unleash the Power Within event in San Jose. I can tell you first of all, it was one of the best investments of my life. I can say that with 100% confidence, just knowing one of the best investments that we can make is in ourself, and I’ve known that for a long time. I’ve actually read Tony Robbins’ books and listened to tapes for a long time, along with a lot of other great people that are really focused on reaching a level of achievement and a level of happiness within yourself and how to do that.
A lot of it’s psychological and physiological on how we achieve these things, so I’ve just been studying a lot of the different people who do that. One of the things I can say I know with 100% confidence is because I have seen direct benefits from just this one area. I’d say the biggest takeaway I got from the event, now, there is a ton of great information and great experiences. You know, we walked on hot coals and hugged strangers and all that kind of stuff. It was, I’m sure, uncomfortable for some. It was probably a little bit more out of my wife’s comfort zone than it was out of my comfort zone. One of the biggest takeaways that I brought back from that is the importance of our state.
Now, I, as I mentioned, already in my mind thought I knew the importance of it, but I was grossly underestimating really how important your state is every day. What I wasn’t doing was, I had my little methods for kind of improving my state, but I wasn’t taking it as more on as like, really, this is one of the most important things. It was just one of the things that, “Okay, yeah, I want to be in a good state and I can do that by changing my focus,” and I knew some different little things, but some of the things that, I think he taught at the event, and you got to experience at the event, were really kind of pushed home the importance of state.
One of the things that Tony asked us, he said, “Hey, if you want to do this,” he said, “you know, this is something that if you decide to do it could change your lives forever,” was to choose to live every day in a beautiful state. Now, I really like this idea. I watched the Netflix, I think it was I’m Not Your Guru that Tony did. I think he mentioned that in there, and I said, “You know what? I really like that,” because I already had kind of that mentality, but not necessarily those words. I said, “You know what? I already decided that, so I’m here, so yeah, let’s do that.” That was making the choice very easy.
One of the things he asked us to do was to write a letter and to send it to two people explaining our decision to live in a beautiful state. You know, kind of a way of holding yourselves accountable. For me, instead of writing a letter, I am just sharing that with you. My mother always told me, “Act as if the whole world is watching,” so I am just putting it out there so the whole world can watch or listen if they want to.
I guess, here is my statement to the world and to all of you, that I’m making the decision to live in a beautiful state because I know how important it is for the impact that I want to have in this life. I know if I’m not living in a beautiful state, my impact is not only going to be less, but it could be negative in some ways. I’ve talked about some of that in my past podcasts how certain things trigger me and maybe I get into a bad state when I’m driving or different things like that.
For me, I want to live in this, as much as I can, if something happens, you know, I want to take the quick time to address it. I think I want to be clear in saying that, what I’m doing is I’m not kind of ignoring problems. That’s not what this means. It means, yeah, problems happen, but I’m not going to let those problems, external things going on impact my internal state as far as how I’m choosing to feel.
I can sit there and focus on all the negative things, but if it’s something I can’t change, why sit there and focus on it, right? Why not just be positive, enjoy the day I’m doing, and just be like, “You know what? Yeah, things happen like that, unfortunately.” In the past, they have happened, and then at the end of the day a couple months later I realize, “Wow, that actually really had a positive impact once I learned this from that challenge,” or whatever it was, or, “this new person came into our life or our company because of that experience, which was challenging at first,” right?
It’s something that I think a lot of people look at and they go, they think positive thinking, like that term has kind of gotten a bad wrap. Which, I think it’s mainly because people think positive thinking and they’re thinking, “Oh, that means you’re not looking at the problem,” and that’s not true. I prefer the term beneficial thinking. If we’re going to live our lives and enjoy it to the utmost that we can, we need to really have strategies to think thoughts that are beneficial for us.
Part of that is addressing, like I mentioned in one of the past episodes, the kind of crappy reptilian brain that we’ve been dealt, we need to know about that and we need to be able to deal with the mind and understand when some of these thoughts come into your head, how to just either get them out or to deal with them and process them in a way that doesn’t negatively impact our state in an ongoing manner. For me, I’m doing this not only for myself but for my wife, for my kids, for my business, for the community and ultimately for the world, because I know that my state that I’m in is going to affect how I impact the world, and I want to make sure that I give the most of myself that I can. I think that that’s one way that I can enhance what I’m doing there.
I want to talk a little bit about how it’s impacted me personally, so that you can think about, “Okay, well, those are areas that either I want to improve in my life or different things.” Some of the things that immediately I noticed improved because of my state was my relationships. It seems pretty simple, but I noticed for, like, my wife and I, we both have our own businesses with a family, two beautiful kids, we have a house and then we have a couple rentals, and life is busy. You have sports and activities and PTO meetings and I’m on a board, and just life can get a little hectic.
What we were both doing to some extent, is we were letting some of our busyness kind of impact our state, and then in our lowered states, that was in some areas, like some times it was impacting how we interacted with each other. It makes sense, right? If you’re in a state where you’re just like, “Oh my god,” you come home from the day, you’ve worked really hard and you come home and you just lay down on the couch and you don’t want to do anything. Then, you’re not going to interact with your spouse the same way, your husband or your wife if you don’t have the energy to put into that, one of the most important things in your life, it should be at least, in my opinion, then you’re not going to get as much out of it.
A lot of your state is kind of your energy level that you’re at. I think we don’t enrich ourselves kind of on a daily basis as far as keeping our energy levels up. For me, I noticed right away as I was improving my state, my relationship with my wife improved greatly. She noticed the same thing. Like, we talk about it a lot, and we are both kind of doing different things that we focus on our state each day.
To me, my wife’s happiness and joy is one of the things that impacts my life the most. If she’s not in a good state, it’s hard for me to … I’ve gotten better at it, but it’s hard for me to not be in a good state. As she’s been in a better state, it brings me so much joy to see her happy. Her smile, her eyes, just everything about her, when she’s full of joy and happiness, it’s like the world is a beautiful place for me because that’s a huge goal of mine is just to make sure that she’s happy. Now, I know that that’s her decision, that’s her goals to make her happy, but I still feel a strong desire there to make sure she’s happy, and same for her to me. Right? We both feel that.
This has been a huge area for us, just improving our state to improve our relationships, not only with each other, but with our children, how we react to them, whether we kind of snap at them or whether we actually take the time. One of the things that I noticed right away was, I think a lot of people either tend to really focus on past, like, there’s a lot of people I know that their mind’s always in the past. They have all these memories of the past and they think about the past. That’s the majority of their mind. Then, there’s a lot of people who kind of think about the future more often and they don’t really think about a lot of things there. I used to be more that I have my mind was mostly all in the future.
Well, part of the problem with either living in the past or in the future is, hey, you can’t control the past, you can’t change the past, and the future is really the way you impact the future is in the present. If you’re not living in the present you’re often going to miss things, opportunities that come up in the present if your mind is so far in the future and you’re focusing on all these things that you’re not actually conscious in the present.
That’s something I noticed right away is that I was much more present with the people that I was interacting with, whether it be my family, my coworkers, my clients, just people in the community, strangers in a coffee shop. I felt as I was in this more beautiful state, I was much more connected, I guess, to people. That was something that allowed me to be in the moment, and really also understand and experience their feelings, their emotions, their state a little more effectively.
Because I’m in the moment, I’m listening, I’m active, I’m really engaged with them and my mind’s not three years out in the future and processing all these different possibilities, which is something that is both a skill of mine but also can bring a lot of stress when you’re thinking about all the potential things that could happen, both positive and negative and trying to go through all of that. That’s how my mind works, unfortunately.
From a business standpoint, it’s been a huge impact. I mean, for any of you that are business owners, you know that it can probably be one of your greatest sources of pride and just happiness, but it can also be a big stress. Problems are going to happen. That’s just part of a business. You’re going to have things that don’t work one day. You’re going to have someone that takes in the position of someone else and you’re going to have to fill that role. You’re going to have some problems where it’s like you have so much business that you have to hire someone. Right? Those are the better problems to have. There’s generally two problems, either you have too much business or not enough, and generally you want the too much.
You know, there’s people that, if you have a lot of employees, you’re going to have some times when there’s strong emotions around certain things. Then you’re going to be thinking, “What if this happened?” There’s a lot of potential stresses around that. When you’re in a heightened state, in a peak state, then you can actually process those so much more effectively. Instead of spending so much time with anxiety over these different things, you can actually process them with a much more clear mind, make decisions more quickly, and not carry that weight as much when you’re living in a beautiful state.
For me, it’s really improved my outlook tremendously, not allowing a lot of these other things to impact me on an ongoing basis. What I would want for you and for everyone else is to really understand the power of the state that they’re living in and how it impacts their performance, how it impacts their relationships, how it impacts their body. Let’s talk a little bit about some of the tactics to improve your state.
Now, I think for anybody, it doesn’t really matter how comfortable you are with out of the box thinking or anything like that, some of this still might feel weird to you. You have to kind of open up your mind and really allow yourself to do things that may feel weird to you, or whatever it may be. Not too weird, obviously, but just, like, there’s a few things that really impact your state. One of the big things is physiology.
If you’re sick, if you have a fever and a flu, that can impact your state. I didn’t realize how much before, I guess it’s always one of those things that men are really bad when they get sick. Yeah, like, I actually got a little bit of, I’m not sure what it was, a fever or something at the time, but I actually felt better while I was sick than I used to feel on an ongoing basis. I thought that was the weirdest thing ever for me, but a lot of it was because of the state I was in.
Before when I got sick it allowed me to just put myself in this lower mental state and I wasn’t allowing myself to do that. I was in a beautiful state. I was going to have high energy as much as I could. I was going to work through it, all that kind of stuff. I was able to deal with that sickness or that illness better. Generally, when you’re already living in a beautiful state more often, you’re actually going to have a lot less sickness in general.
You can probably notice when someone’s in a bad state. Right? If you see somebody, I want you to in your mind imagine somebody who, they’re in a coffee shop, and maybe you can tell that they’re depressed or something is really weighing on them. Do they have a smile on their face? Probably not, right? Is their head up and are they bright eyed, or is their head kind of leaning down a little bit? It’s leaning down, right? Are their shoulders, do they have a good posture about them or is their shoulders kind of slumped, are they leaned forward a little bit? Immediately, you start to notice that when you see somebody in this state, you can tell.
That’s one of the many reasons why your interactions with other people, when you’re not in a good state, people can tell the state you’re in to some extent, and that comes through in what you’re saying, so it’s part of the communication. Then, there’s a lot more to that aspect as well. The same thing, now imagine somebody who is sitting there in a coffee shop and they have just realized this idea that they want to achieve and they’re so excited about moving towards this idea in their mind, and they just have so much happiness and so much energy. Now, is their head leaned down or is it up? Are their eyes beaming? Are they smiling? They’re smiling, their eyes are beaming, their shoulders are up, they have all this energy. They’re breathing is probably not shallow, they’re probably breathing fully and they have all this energy because they’re excited, because they’re in this peak kind of state is what they’re feeling.
Physiology, how you actually have your body, your breathing, all those kind of aspects affect your state significantly. If you have a frown on your face or if you have a smile on your face that’s going to impact how you feel. I want you to just try something. I want you to start smiling, think about something that makes you happy, either something silly or whatever it is. You start smiling, you immediately feel the difference. You feel the difference in probably my tone of voice as I start smiling.
As you start smiling thinking about something silly or funny or whatever it is, you notice all of a sudden, you start smiling, or you continue to smile. That smile is no longer just something that you’re kind of just making. It’s like, “Okay, I actually feel this way.” Physiology is a big part of what affects your state. Now, we could drive down this a lot more from how we breathe on an ongoing basis and not getting enough oxygen and how we take care of our body and exercise and all of those things. Those are all important parts of your physical and mental state.
Then there’s also focus. In the next episode, something I’ve been saying since I was about 20 years old is, what you focus on is what you find. It kind of goes along the similar lines of what we think, I forget who said the quote, but it’s like, what we think, therefore we become, or what we think kind of determines our world. It’s a similar kind of idea is, your focus. Where are you putting your focus?
If you are, I’ll give an example of like, motorcycle racers. One of the things they teach people who ride competitively really fast around those tracks on motorcycles, is if they are hitting these corners at, gosh, 150, 160-plus miles an hour going around some of these corners, and they see someone just crashed in front of them, if they actually even kind of keep an eye on that person and watch what they did for a second, it’s highly likely that they’re going to crash too. Its similar, like, back in the days when I used to snowboard and you’re flying down and you see a cliff or something that you’re like, “Oh gosh, I don’t want to go off that cliff.” Well, if you keep looking at that cliff and focusing on it, you’re going to go off that cliff. You have to turn and focus on where you want to go, not where you don’t want to go.
For the motorcycle rider, they train themselves to not see that where they might end up looking, crashing like this other person. They tend to focus on the track where they want to go. That’s something that is a big part of your state as well, is, are you focusing on what you don’t want to do or what’s not working, as opposed to focusing on the vision of where you want to go, what you are achieving, and what you are grateful for and all those kind of things. That’s a big part of what impacts state as well.
Then there’s of course the words we use. Which, that’s a big thing I’ve always been very passionate about is, I hear people using words that are either self-demeaning or restricting to what they can achieve. All those kind of things reinforce certain patterns that can either be positive or negative. We want to make sure that we are looking at our physiology, we’re looking at where we focus, and then ultimately the words that we’re using to help improve our state.
Now, I want to give you, I had never done this exercise before Tony Robbins’ event. I was normally just kind of doing more of like a thing where each morning, and I shared this with you if you listened to some of the previous episodes, my routine as far as reading some of the things I’m grateful for, I go through my goals every morning, and some different things that I kind of really focus on. I’m choosing to focus on where I’m going, choosing to focus on what I’m grateful for, so a lot of this stuff was already in line with what I was doing, so I was kind of priming myself and you kind of ultimately for something like this, which I think is a great exercise.
Now, again, this is one of the areas where you need to open yourself up a little bit, but I’m going to put some links in the description below that you’ll be able to visit, and you can hear basically how Tony Robbins walks people through a priming exercise. What I’ve been doing, because it aligns so well with what I was already doing, is I just basically take this audio, and each morning rather than reading what I’m grateful for and doing that, I actually just listen to this each morning, and it walks through about a 12 to 15 minute kind of audio.
It’s kind of a combination of a guided meditation and more of a guided focus, and little bit of a breathing exercise to kind of get your grounded, and he calls it priming, so primed for the day, and to really think about the things that you’re grateful for and just kind of focus on also the things that you want to see happen, and really walking through seeing them happen. Really, when you do that and you believe that and you can conceive it in your mind and you can kind of believe it, then you know ultimately you can achieve that.
It’s a great kind of experience each morning to realign, refocus on what you’re grateful for, and where you’re going, these goals that you’re moving towards. It just is a phenomenal way to start the day. I would say if you don’t think you have 15 minutes to do this, then you need to do it more than anything, because this will ultimately allow you to have more time and will allow you to kind of be more present with the people you’re in and really ultimately achieve a lot of your goals and just live a more happy and abundant life.
The micro-action today is to look for the link that I shared in the description below, click it, and what I want you to do is either just, you can download the audio from one of the links, the Tony Robbins site you can download the audio and basically put a shortcut on your phone or have the link in a reminder or however you want to do it so that you can listen to it. I want you to try this for at least five days. Try it for five days, and I think what you’ll notice is that it really changes your state, your outlook, and kind of just enjoy life better.
That doesn’t mean when things pop up that, our triggers or negative things that you’re not going to change your state. It’s about living more often in this peak beautiful state, as opposed to letting yourself get down into that kind of state that’s more painful and miserable, and ultimately something that you want to be out of. It’s about looking at that and saying, “You know what? I’m not going to let myself be in this state more than 90 seconds,” is I think one of the things Tony Robbins said.
I found that I can usually pull myself out pretty quickly of the state, but I think it takes practice. If something happens and the mind is heading down this kind of path, there’s different tips and tricks and things that you can do to kind of get your mind focused off of that and start focusing on different things, things you are grateful for. That’s probably one of the easiest things for me, is to really just start focusing on the things I’m grateful for and focus on more of love and just that outcome as opposed to these other things, and what I can give as opposed to something that’s either I feel like is being taken from me, or whatever it may be.
I tend to try to focus on those things and it pretty quickly just lets that other feeling go away. Again, I want to thank you for your time and taking this journey with me. Yeah, if you have any questions feel free to either comment on the blog below or shoot me an email. Have a great day.
Thanks again for listening to the Give, Grow, and Be Grateful podcast. If you received value from today’s episode, please share it and comment. Also, make sure to subscribe so that you’re updated when new episodes come out. Remember, every day you have a choice how you live. It’s not about what you get, it’s about what you give. Work on growing each day and getting out of your comfort zone. Then as you grow more, you’ll be able to give more and have an abundant life. Develop the habits of happiness by starting every single day with a focus on the things that you’re grateful for. I’m glad that you’re on this path with me and make sure to choose to have a wonderful day.
