Do you ever wish your new year would turn out as you planned? Today is the day for a bigger, better, and bolder future! In this episode, Jimmy and Lori share five powerful, positive words that will bring focus to your goals for 2022.
Episode Keys
- The importance of daily focus on a motivating word that keeps you eyes on the horizon of your future.
- How you can start each day with a mindset of accomplishment by simply using a trigger word that empowers you!
- Why you must choose your relationships carefully.
- When you should begin to work on your new year and the best means of kicking it in gear!
- Why boldness is an important trait for you to accomplish greatness in 2022.
Podcast Transcript
JW:
Oh, 2022 is looking bright, it’s looking eventful in a positive way, and I am excited to start off this new year of Live a Life By Design with you good people. The subscribers and listeners of this show have power me to feel great about a new year. Of course, I gotta be honest with you. This is just Jimmy. As my wife said, this is neither caffeine nor drug induced on a Monday morning, just having this time of fellowship fun and just enjoying the day. And who better to join me today than that co-host with the most – good morning, Lori Few!
LF:
Good morning! 2022, how are we already here?
JW:
Oh my gosh. You know, it seems like as I get older, they get here faster and faster.
LF:
Very true.
JW:
Well, Lori, hey, today is a particularly exciting episode for me. I gotta tell you, this is our first show of the new year. It’s a great day. It’s a great show. And in my humble opinion, I think our listeners are gonna get a lot out of this. So today, Lori and I will share with you those powerfully positive words for sustainability success for all of our listeners today. So if you don’t have a word that defines what one of your goals will be for 2022 or how you wish to live a bigger, better, bolder life, then you come up with a word or use one of ours, we’re gonna share five of those with you today.
LF:
So we’re gonna start with the first word. The first word this morning is my word, and it’s one of my favorites because it allows me the freedom to completely ignore any limitations that may be invoked in my daily thinking. And the first word: creativity. So let’s talk about creativity. There’s a lot that you can do in everyday simple life. And as an adult, I am learning this step by step. Part of being creative is also – we’ll get to my other word in just a minute, I won’t give that word away – but being creative is giving yourself the ability to think outside the box. And if we’ve learned anything through our current COVID situation, and, you know, previously we’ve had to think outside that box, we’ve had to set realistic goals. We’ve had to be creative in our thinking, the way we communicate, the way we work, the way we play, the way we engage with friends, with family. And so creativity for 2022 is gonna continue to be a very important part of my daily vocabulary. And that’s why it’s such an important word to me, because I think we have really had to embrace that word in a different meaning, a different context in a different setting, and carrying forward it’s going to be a word that we continue to see evolve in every aspect of our life.
JW:
Man, I tell you that is exciting to me. Creativity is something, Lori, that I literally use every day. Love that word.
LF:
Oh, absolutely. And I think that it’s just gonna continue to be one of those words that get stronger and stronger. People who didn’t think that they were creative or myself included I can’t do that. My brain doesn’t work that way. I’m a very visual person, but I’m not – my brain doesn’t think in that creative way. And I’ve always loved watching people take something. And especially, you know, during these last two years, people have really had to reinvent themselves and have started small online businesses and boutiques and have started vlogging and blogging, which are words that I weren’t very familiar with leading into all this, but just watching other people and gaining insight, and borrowing, and taking their creativity, and molding it and shaping it into something that is completely different from anything that we’ve ever experienced before.
JW:
So you’re gonna be showing that creativity. Lori’s gonna be joining us far more often this year. We’re gonna try to do this tag team on a weekly basis. And she is very creative. So we’re gonna put her creativity to the test right here on Live a Life By Design.
LF:
Whew. No pressure.
JW:
Well, you know, my first word is transformation.
LF:
Oh, that’s a big word.
New Speaker:
That’s got a lot of syllables in it. Let me tell you, I looked it up in my Miriam Webster dictionary and I made sure I had it right. But you know, the outcomes of life, Lori, are largely dependent on the attitude and approaches a person employs to those daily choices. It’s not these big, hairy goals. It’s those daily small choices. And many of us will begin 2022 sadly in the same manner as we began every year before – ill prepared and unenthusiastic. But our listeners are different, Lori. They’re unique in their approach to life and they will not squander a single minute of the day dealing with minutia that does not help them reach their big, hairy, audacious goals. So why I’m mentioning transformation is that is the foundation for me, that is required so that I can reach those big, hairy, audacious goals. I can’t get larger goals with the same size person. So my growth in this year is thinking about physical health, I wanna be more physically fit. I wanna be like Lori, you know, hundred pushups don’t even break a sweat kind of person.
LF:
Oh, you’re too kind.
JW:
My spirituality – I want to have a deeper, meaningful relationship and grow in that area. My financial security and my family’s overall happiness. You know, these are some big, big areas. By transforming my mindset from the place I currently find myself to a new higher level of thinking requires that I transform, not just my thinking, but my physical body, my spiritual man, everything about myself. And the old phrase that insanity defined as you know, that same input seeking a different output is very true. When it comes to a lack of transformation, we find ourselves in the mud. I call it just sitting there, spinning our wheels, right? So true value creation to me comes from taking something of a lower value and adding your unique ability or other ingredients to create something of a much greater or higher value. The approach may be applied to anything in life, in my opinion. Let’s take the example of your career. If you continue to function in the same role that you always have functioned with the same level of expertise, guess what? You’ll most likely be in the same position at the end of 2022. Folks, you don’t sit in the same chair all the time. However, if you feed your mind that pure, powerful, positive message on a daily basis and supply creative methods like Lori recommended, then you can effectively change the value you bring to the marketplace. You will find yourself on a higher plane in which you will function at the end of the year. You will have transformed your role in the organization you serve to one of greater value and increase your importance to that organization. Me folks, that’s a win.
LF:
Oh, that’s absolutely a win. And I think that, you know, we start off with that big word. We wanna make sure we know how to say that word and that we can spell that word. Which, transformation leads into a couple of the things that you talked about, which is my second word. I love how we’re thinking on the same wavelength this morning. And that word is consistency.
JW:
Oh, that’s a biggie. That’s a biggie.
LF:
Yeah! While it’s important. And you don’t think about it, especially in, in your younger career, your younger, earlier more vibrant days, we’ll say since it’s early on a Monday morning. But you learn how to be more consistent as you get older. I think because you finally figure out what you want in life on a certain path, on a certain wavelength. I mean, from year to year, it changes. Some people will tell you that, you know, look out, you know, December 31st, we’re talking about new year’s resolutions and on January 3rd, we’ve already reverted back to our old ways and given up. So I think consistency is the key to that. And what I find as I am getting older and a little bit more wise, I think it’s routine. I think that people take that, you know, like, “oh, that’s so boring routine,” but being consistent, a lot of the people that I talk to, they start every morning the same, they start with, you know, a journal entry or they start with a, you know, a Bible scripture, or they start with some type of morning meditation. Obviously for me, it’s a no brainer, ding, ding, ding gotta have a cup of coffee.
JW:
I knew where she was going folks. I really did. I knew where that was going.
LF:
Consist and, you know, predictable, I guess.
New Speaker:
She’s consistently caffienated. That’s what it is.
LF:
yes! I need that on a t-shirt! Yes! But you know, to be consistent, you don’t have to make it complicated. I mean, you can make it simple, you know, it’s simply what you’re willing to set your goals for the day. I mean, every day we set something, you know. We make a list in our mind or we put it on our phones, we put it on a sticky note. Okay, today these are the things that I’m gonna get done. And if we make some of those choices consistent every day, I’m gonna take five minutes. I’m gonna get myself in order I’m gonna return, you know, an X amount of emails or phone calls or, you know, I’m gonna choose to do that. It helps us to be more efficient while we’re working on being consistent. And so if you’re like me and you’re busy all, all the time and you, sometimes you think you can control everything. Shocker – I know that I can’t, even though I really, really, really want to, some people just don’t see things the way I do. And it kind of derails my train a little bit, but we have to try and you have to be realistic. I think that that’s the other part of being consistent is that you have to be realistic with your expectations of how that day is gonna go. Sometimes the day just tanks completely. And you walk out thinking I absolutely got nothing accomplished today, or, you know, I really knock the wind outta my sales, but consistently saying to yourself that I will try tomorrow. I think that’s a big reminder that we have to be kind to ourselves and say, “tomorrow is another day to try to get it right.” And so consistency, it’s a big, ugly word. I feel like with most people, but we’re learning to embrace it and trying to just take it bit by bit and move forward every day.
JW:
Yeah, totally. So, I’m gonna say this. She is right on with consistency in our lives, but let’s take a little attitude check with this. So consistency to me, Lori can be a positive or a negative. So if we are consistently late for meetings, for example, that’s not serving us well. That’s a consistent negative. But if we said to ourselves, hey, we’re gonna set our watch on our phone or whatever to say, leave 10 minutes earlier than I normally would to be consistently early would turn that into a positive. So to me, consistency is a double edged sword. And that sword can go either way, cutting whether positive or negative, depending on what you’re attempting to accomplish. And I love your use of this word to be consistent on a daily basis with morning routines. For example, those of you that listen, no, I’ve got my routine down where I can tell you, I don’t even know which leg I put in the pants first now. I mean, it’s just habit, right? It’s just habit.Well, now, don’t visualize that. I’m just saying, but my point I’m making is, is the brain then can that power that it needed before to determine, what do I do next? And you can put this on a routine where you have these habits formed that your brain’s now working on much more creative in this term, as well as consistent things to do in your life, that it can spend its energy on. Right?
LF:
Absolutely.
JW:
I love it. Hey, my second word for 2022 is another polysyllabic word. Look that one up Lori.
LF:
Oh, that’s a big word. I can’t spell that word either. Spell check.
JW:
Yeah. The word is transcendence. Earnestly and prayerfully seek to develop a growing relationship with God that feeds my spirit that can grow immensely and create powerful change with me. And then resulting from that, I can make change happen for those in my community and family. You know, it, it’s one of those things that confidence to me is a gift and that gift can be utilized for good, or it can be utilized in a negative way, but I want to utilize confidence for good so that I can grow immensely and create powerful change. So during the pandemic, I became a little complacent in my Bible studying prayer life. But boy, you ought to read some of my journal entries. I mean, I was really getting tired and allowed the outward exterior circumstances to dictate my internal thoughts. Folks got news for you. That’s a loser from day one. You’ve got to control what you can control, which is your attitude. So the past few weeks that has been turned around and I look forward to building on this momentum from the last few weeks into 2022 and beyond in a gigantic humongous way.
LF:
Such big words this morning. Hey, but that doesn’t
JW:
I got a dictionary for Christmas. Okay. I’m using, oh,
LF:
That’s what it’s.
JW:
And I knew it, of those, the SOS things, one of these days, you know, where I can learn that.
LF:
That that’ll be more words for later. We are on a roll this morning. I love it. I love this topic. I think it’s really important. I don’t know that we talk about it enough about how mindset and attitude go hand in hand. And I absolutely think for 2022, we all need to start off with flipping that switch to have a positive attitude and outlook things are, things are looking up. We’re gonna be fine moving forward.
JW:
I think it’s gonna be a great year.
LF:
So the last word for 2022 is one that Jimmy and I share to inspire and invoke our inner greatness. The word – are you ready for this?
JW:
I’m ready.
LF:
We can spell this one, boldness.
JW:
Oh, that’s a big one. I love that one.
LF:
Big word, easy to spell. We cannot accomplish greatness by serving our family, our community, our team, or employer with a mindset of being timid. Big changes require boldness to be truly realized. And too often we are so close to the next level of growth and the old comfortable feelings of being timid arise in our mindsets to create a limiting in our life. But not this year. Let me repeat. Not in you. It’s time for me, superwoman or Jimmy –
JW:
Superman.
LF:
That’s right. To continue to shine. Greatness is within you and in each of us, the boldness is, is the byproduct. It’s a strong muscle that has become atrophied from a lack of use. How do you exercise boldness in a kind way, consider your ability for kindness as seeing others’ points of view and acknowledging their contributions, then take the solution determined by the team or your family or your friends and make it your own, align it with, with your principles and fire up your passion being bold doesn’t mean you’re being rude or selfish. Oftentimes it’s quite the opposite. Being bold means taking the leadership role when seeking to claim a new goal or level in life that others can’t reach without you being your best self.
JW:
Oh, Hey, I wish you could see this on video. I I’m getting goosebumps, Lori. That word is my favorite of these five boldness. You know, I think too many of us sit back and really don’t use our super power of boldness in a way that would really raise things for that family, that person to the next level of life. So often you hear the story we’re so close to the next level and we quit right before we realize the next level of life. So,
LF:
Well, I think there’s a, there’s a fine line there. I do. I think people oftentimes do confuse the definition of boldness. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re being ostentatious or that you’re being rude or that you’re being, you know, bragging or being boastful about it. It just means that you’re willing to step up and take the next step, you know, take life by the reigns. You only get one. And I know that sounds cliche and cheesy, but it’s so true. And that sometimes that’s all that someone needs is for, for you to step up and say that I’m ready to be bold. I’m ready to take the challenge. And those are the people that are willing to go and help lead in that direction to accomplish whatever goal
JW:
It is. It’s January 3rd, 2022, a brand new year given to all of us the same number of days with the same number of hours. The key to this one’s going to be to me, Lori is to focus on those big rocks. We’ve talked about it before on the podcast, the things that will really move the needle to get those goals realized one of those words, we talked about this boldness man that takes boldness to get those big boulders and move them out of the away, or have them better working for you by pulling you downhill, to make something work faster. Right? So to me, boldness is critical for all of us for growth for 2022. So this week is the beginning of a new year. So find a word or words that drive your ambition. You’re thinking you’re Howard to create a year that you achieve your greatest Heights of success. Go ahead, go ahead. Live your life by design.
JW:
We’re getting better at that. And we’ll see you next week, folks, here on Life a Life By Design, and we have some interesting information to you next week. Please join us!
