Jeff Howell: Live The Lessons!

Hello, everybody. This is Jeff Howell coming at you with another edition of Mindset Mondays. I just wanted to drop in here and talk about a few things that we can kind of assess about how we react to different situations that we’ve had in the past, different situations that we’ve had in our personal and professional lives, business opportunities and relationships, etc., and kind of identify maybe some programming that we might have around those things that have happened to us and how we can reprogram that into something more positive. So for me, I like to start every day with gratitude, and I’ve been using the five minute journal that I went over in a past video recently. I haven’t done it every single day, but I’ve done it most days and most evenings, and I find that to be very helpful and just continuing to tune in to what I’m grateful for and to continue that flow of energy of being like, Yes, I’m grateful. And then in the mornings I say, and then at night I’m like, Oh, well, here’s, here’s why I’m grateful. Here’s what I was grateful for today. And then the next morning, here’s the three things I’m grateful for. Here’s how I can make today an amazing day and really tailor it to what I want to accomplish that day. And then it just makes it that much more relevant in the moment. So I think that for most of me, at least in the past, I had a lot of negative reaction to different things that I had been through in my past, not necessarily from a victim mentality, but more from a traumatic mentality of just being like, I hadn’t fully processed the situation or what had happened to me.

So then it was just very much like a stress response that I had. So this can come up, like I say, with personal and professional things like in your your significant relationships with your significant other or maybe situations where you didn’t make the best decision for yourself and things didn’t turn out the way you wanted or lost opportunities that you may have had that you weren’t able to take advantage of or didn’t take advantage of for whatever reason. I think it’s really kind of like a default for us to to when we think about those things is to go into this default situation where of regret and, you know, beating ourselves up over lost opportunities or poor decisions. And even if it’s not like you’re super consciously telling yourself, you know, really negative things like, oh, that was stupid. I mean, people do that all the time. Oh, that was stupid. Aw, man, I was such an idiot back then or something like that. You know, I think a lot of people do kind of default to that type of programming and that just reinforces it. So it’s really important or it has been very important in my life to go back and think through those things, process some of that trauma, and then find ways to reprogram myself for to be more positive.

So one way I’ve learned how to do that is to really go back and think through the experience. So on a piece of paper you can and I’ll write these prompts in the, in the descriptions of this video is like ask yourself the first question, like, what is it that’s coming up like any time during your day? If you have a thought that were you feel a negative reaction? Was it a thought about something in the past, then this is a good opportunity where you could really explore that thought, explore that situation a little bit deeper and figure out how you can kind of reprogram this reaction to it that you have in your system so that you can eliminate that drag. That’s just friction and drag for you to move forward in your life where you are now and the positive things that you want to see and do in your life. So the first thing is just briefly describe this experience that is causing this reaction or that you want to improve upon or an experience that you want to learn from. And so just describe that in one or two sentences and then the next thing you would want to do is determine, first of all, what was working, what worked in that situation, whether that be, again, a relationship with a significant other, whether that be a business relationship, whether that be a business opportunity or some decision that you made, what worked? What were the good things? So think about the good things first and then you can take that and think about what didn’t work.So what didn’t work from that relationship, that business opportunity or that decision that you made? And then third, you would. Kind of set out if you could do the whole thing over again, knowing what you knew, what you know now, it’s a lot easier to think about the best case scenarios now that you already have the information and you’ve already kind of learned the lessons, this is an exercise more to anchor it in than anything else. What would you do differently? So how would you approach that relationship? How would you approach that opportunity? How would you approach that decision now and think through what you would do different? And you can make a list of things, you can write it in a paragraph or whatever makes sense to you. And then. You can finally take the information that you’ve kind of set out with these three questions or four questions, rather. And then create a series of actions that you would that you would do to create a more successful experience from something like this in the future. So it would be like if you had a relationship that went bad or something and you kind of set out what will what worked was we got along really well when there weren’t extraordinary challenges on our time or on finances or whatever. And then you say what’s, what’s, what didn’t work was, well, we didn’t get along. We fought about finances and we fought about not spending enough time together, something like that.

So then number three, if you could do it over, what would you do differently? Well, we would have better communication. We would maybe have a budget, or we would keep our finances separately or we put our finances together or whatever the situation might be. And then finally create a series of actions to produce something that is more successful in the future. Well, I would really have that communication upfront with any one I was going into a new relationship with, and I would say, hey, here’s here’s where I’ve struggled in the past in relationships and in these ways. And here’s how I think could be a good way for us to approach it so that we don’t experience those those issues in our relationship. And so that’s one way to do it. But you see how this series of questions kind of lead you to that. And then you’re like, it kind of diffuses the past and what happened in the past so that you can free up all that psychic energy so that you’re not. You’re not hung up on what happened in the past. You you can learn the lesson from the past and create a strategy that you can use to move forward with that lesson into the future relationships or situations that you find yourself in. And that’s going to give you a lot more confidence. So then when you think about that going forward, once you anchor this in with this exercise, once you when you think about that in the future, instead of going into some negative cycle, you’re going to go into the positive cycle and be like confident.

Yeah, I know how to deal with that now because I’ve already dealt with it in the past. So if you don’t do this kind of exercise most of the time, most of us, most of the time are just going to have that in our head and running this program automatically without much thought or much real learning that came out of it. Even though you may intuitively approach a relationship differently or a situation differently based on your past experience, I think anchoring it in this way is so powerful because it gives you, again, that confidence moving forward that is going to create a much more successful result overall than you would otherwise. And so then the second part of this is kind of thinking where you’re at and there’s not a right or wrong necessarily, but thinking about where your mindset is as like we’re again, if you like, had these negative experiences in the past and you’re in this mode of regret or judging, judging yourself harshly about poor decisions and lost opportunities and all of that. Well, what do you want to do? Where do you want to be? Do you want to do you are you in a phase of your life where you have maybe a lot of personal child, maybe you have small children or there’s an illness or whatever. So you’re like, Hey, I’d be good if I just maintain where I’m at into the next year because that’s just where, you know, that’s all I can really show up for and do that.

That’s okay. But no, that’s where you’re at. Where are you? Would you like to grow your company or your business or what you’re doing? Would you like to grow your income? How much? Like if you’re like, Oh, I’d love to. I’d love to to to increase my revenue by 10% or 20%. Like that’s not a huge amount, but it definitely gives you something to strive for and it gives you something, a goal to hit. So is that where you’re at? And then the last one is like, do you want to go like over the top and like the Grant Cardone? You want a ten X, you want a ten year company, you want a ten extra revenue. Is that where you’re at? Because all of this mindset is going to affect your ability to do any one of those things. So again, once you get out of this kind of regret and judgment phase, then you can start striving into, okay, well, I want to grow or I want to grow a lot, and you can take that energy and those lessons and apply it in a way that’s going to allow you to achieve those things that you are putting as goals for yourself. So anyway, that’s kind of a shorter Mindset Monday than I’ve been doing, but I think the main takeaway here is the tool.

Again, the questions. I’ll put them in the description for this video and you can use that on a consistent basis. What I do is I have a running Google doc in my Google Drive and I just have these questions in a table. I set up a table with a bunch of cells in it and I just put those questions, you know, one after the other. And then whenever something comes up, I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s stressing me out. Or This thing came up, this memory came up from this past relationship or whatever, and it’s kind of like has me fearful or I start to move into a situation where I might have a new opportunity. And it brings us like, Oh, but last time in this kind of an opportunity, this this other thing happened that was negative. Well, I want to go and filter through that and do this exercise so that I can get that free up, that psychic energy that’s being basically siphoned away through this negativity and make it something more positive so that any time in the future when I have that thought, it’s like, Oh, yeah, here’s the lesson, here’s how I’m going to do it better. So it’s not something that’s holding you back. It’s in fact, something that’s that’s moving you forward. So that’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed it and I appreciate your feedback and the comments and I look forward to talk to you soon. And I’ll see you on the LeadSnap Facebook Live on Wednesday. Take care.