Do you ever wonder how others seem so happy all the time? In this episode Jimmy shares hacks and strategies to create a more content and happy life for himself.
You will gain insight into:
- Recognizing and benefitting from the Principle of Reciprocity!
- Why it is critical that you limit negativity in your presence.
- How to feed your mind powerfully positive messages each day to keep you happy.
- Who you should spend your time with each day and who you should avoid for more contentment in life.
- When you should focus on finding gratitude through difficult times in life.
Podcast Transcript
It is a new year. It is a new day. It is time to find the new you that you knows well within you and you are capable of producing, but it’s time to execute. Hey, good morning again. This is Jimmy Williams, your host for the most here on Live a Life By Design. I’m saying that in absence of my co-host who couldn’t make it today. Laurie F is busy helping a friend of hers get ready to get married. And it’s a big, big extravaganza. It’s so big. I may have to get my tuxedo out dry, clean it and see if it still fits. But I doubt if it does. Hey, today I wanna take just a few moments of sharing some philosophy about life, sharing, some hacks of how I make life the way I want it to function. And then lastly, what you can do today, not tomorrow, not next week.
You don’t need to go buy a bunch of tools, don’t need to buy new clothes. You don’t even have to go out and talk to anyone. You can do this yourself today at the end of this episode, I want you to know you have greatness within and we want you to bring it out. True success and happiness is all within your own mind. One of the things that I’ve noticed, especially in the new 2023, I am not going to allow negativity to take a role in my life in any form. I have taken the stance that if I want to have negativity in my life, it’ll be of my own making, which will be very, very few moments and it will be a very slim chance I have any. I think you know me by now. This is neither drug nor caffeine induced. This is just pure Jimmy running on adrenaline that he creates himself.
You know, one of the things that I really wish that I could do is just take my mindset and thought and it transplanted into other individuals that I see that have so much capability. They have so much opportunity, but they are wallowing in the world of self-pity and they are basically holding themselves back from capturing the golden ring that life holds before them. I hope you’re not one of those individuals because right now I have to tell you, life does not get any better if we ourselves don’t get better at life. Now, that sounds like a tongue twister, but my whole point to this conversation is to say it that you, you are in control of you. So at the end of the day, I, I’ve just been doing some thinking. You know, I love to journal about my day and I love to think on paper.
It’s just part of what I do in the world and I get a lot of growth out of that type of process. And recently I found myself thinking about the progress I’d made in life during 2022. Professionally, our company experienced a challenging year as the stock markets dropped significantly in March of 2022. Continued inflationary pressure caused supply chain issues that impacted stock markets further decreasing those major indices. To explain my thought a little better, you know, we are certified financial planner professionals that specialize in retirement planning strategies for our clients. I want to give you our approach for creating income for our company. Unlike a lot of companies in our profession, we don’t charge commissions and these things, but we do hourly rate or we do an asset under management fee. So it’s just a fee based on how well the account does is how well we would do.
It’s a very independent approach that is fair to the client as well as to our company. And if the value of their account goes down, then obviously so does our fee, which then derives our lower income. So coincidentally, we grew as a company in revenue, but it was a difficult year with significant commitment from our team to reach the goal. Jim Roone said it best, you know, Jim Roone is one of my mentors. I mentioned, I don’t know how many times on this podcast I just I’ve been enamored with his capabilities and philosophy of life all my career. And he said it best when he said, after a period of great growth difficulties will always appear. It is simply the cycle of business. No one stays on the mountaintop forever. And it just came to my mind as I was thinking through what was going on in the world of 2022 and how we grew through some of that.
As, as my co-host would say, you know, you, you grow through it as you go through it when it comes to challenges. And throughout the year, I recorded many entries in my journal, literally almost a daily I’ll put my thoughts down and, and I go back and I’m reviewing these entries and I noted a significant common theme throughout all my entries for the year. Despite being good days, less than good days, cuz I don’t have bad days, but I have better days. I noticed we’re on theme. That theme was happiness. No matter how hard we worked, the less than planned growth in our revenue didn’t determine my happiness for the year. My growth as a person and a professional through personal development and education was the sustaining factor for my happiness. If you don’t grow as a person, you aren’t going to truly be happy in life.
You know, I’m a very proficient reader. I read a ton of great books, typically biographies. I love motivational books, those things of that nature. I can truly learn how to be a better individual, father, husband, community leader, whatever it might be. But a book out that was written by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy I read and it helped me sustain my happiness and success in 2022. The title of the book, and you can find this in your show notes, is The Gap and the Gain. The thesis of this book is how you should view your growth and progress in life to keep yourself from mentally finding yourself in that negative gap. You know that feeling in life that you just didn’t perform to the ideal of a specific task or level in life that you desired. However, to keep yourself in a more positive gain mindset, you should always measure your progress by looking backward.
For example, by measuring your progress from where you came a year earlier, you should see positive growth in your life. This is where you are feeding your brain those powerful positive messages that are truly making a significant movement in life. Happiness to me is a state of mind. You can choose it or you can lose it. And let me explain what I mean by that. I believe each of us must be responsible for our own emotional state. Now, I agree that sometimes life can throw something at us that we just did not plan on having to experience. And it may derive in us such as a loss of a loved one, a sad moment. But if in fact we dwell on that sad moment for too long, it becomes a daily way of life. Now, I’m not suggesting that you should not feel sorrow, you should not miss your loved one.
I’m not at all saying that. But if your relationship was one that you valued and that person that did die was someone that valued your friendship, your relationship your role in the family, that person most likely would say to you, and I keep moving forward. This is not the end of your story. And so I truly believe each of us can find contentment in the state of the heart and overcome the simple mentality of sorrow. You know, I’m always smiling and I’m not bragging here. I’m just telling you how I am. I am always smiling. I am one of the most blessed individuals on this planet. I get to help people every day in my career. I have a wonderful family that makes me just so proud of what they’re doing to make the world a better place. With our two daughters and my wife, I am honored to get to spend time with the most talented professionals in our company that I’ve ever met in my entire career.
So I’m always smiling. Now, I’m not doing this by artificial means, but I truly am smiling because I’m genuinely happy. 99.9% of the time, many of the people I meet walking in our small community or anywhere I go at a restaurant, I’ve noticed that if I meet them and they see me smiling, they generally reciprocate the emotion. Likewise, I would assume if I walked with a scowl on my face throughout the community, I bet you I would get the same response. A scowl will be sent right back to me. This is proof of that principle of reciprocity. Whatever you share with others will typically be returned to you. If you share happiness, kindness, a smile, these emotions or actions will be returned to you. To re surround yourself with positive people who wish to grow themselves is the ideal environment for me.
So one of the tools I use to learn from experiences in life that are challenging is called the experience transformer. This is a form that helps me by reviewing the facts and circumstances behind the actual experience. Then I ask what worked in that process, that environment, and what didn’t work? Then I ask myself on paper, what can I learn from the experience to turn it positive? What am I grateful for from the experience? And I want you to focus on that G word for just a moment. I just told you that we may have some difficult circumstances in life that we face, and I’m asking you to find some gratitude within that particular situation or scenario. Sometimes we must look very, very hard to find gratitude in a situation too often that glaring, shining bright negativity is what we focus. But I assure you there is a lesson to be learned by seeking a gratitude effect from all experiences of life.
Let me give you a case in point of a dear, dear friend of mine that passed. He was only 87 years of age and he was quite a mentor to me. I’ll never forget as his health was failing, he was always giving me tidbits of wisdom. And I sat down with him at his bedside as he was too weak to even get outta his bed toward the end of his terminal illness. And I told him how thankful and grateful I was for all of the wisdom he bestowed to me. Over the years. We reminisced about the great times that we enjoyed at certain dinners or playing golf or just simply being around one another’s company. He smiled quite a bit and he said, those are the times I remember most. He didn’t focus on the times that were heartaches in his life. He focused purely on those that carried him through these difficult days of illness as positive moments from the past.
He truly understood how to use the experience transformer in his own way. He maybe didn’t call it that, but at the end of the day he sought some form of gratitude in all of his experiences. Positive or negative, wouldn’t you like to learn a valuable lesson in just 10 minutes that help you grow as a person? Another approach is to feed your mind with positive information and images. Read books that motivate you to be a better person. Inspiration is a powerful tool to create the person you wish to be. Now, I am not saying that you can’t be content with you as a person yourself. You can be content. However, if we’re not growing then we’re dying. And I don’t mean that literally, but it could be physically so spiritually. So it could be emotionally. So it could be psychologically so that remember, there are no status quo limits in life.
There are only progress and regress. So what are you doing to make progress in areas of your life to grow as a person? Don’t be a copy of the person inspiring you, but rather be a student of what they do to make life better for themselves. Adapt that to you and your life so that you become the person you see in the future. Five, 10 years from now. Learn what works for the person that inspire you and convert it to your style. Live in the gain, that positive, powerful moment as described in the book, the Gap and the gain. And if you do, this is a perfect environment to help you create and maintain success and happiness on a continual basis. Every day you get up and you’ll have the smile on your face that you wish to see on the others around you. And as you start approaching them during the day, you’ll start seeing those smiles fired right back at you.
It’s an honor to come to you each week and share just a few moments of some powerful positive message, some motivating moments that you can take and implement immediately. But you know, here’s the catch. It’s so often that we can sit and listen to something but we’re not truly hearing. It is so easy for us to simply turn on the radio or listen on the phone to this podcast. It is much more energy required for you to put into action these ideas. So this week I got a couple of things I’d like for you to focus on. Your challenge is to think more positively and seek a means of true happiness within yourself through this experienced transformer thought process. What worked? What didn’t work? What can I gain of gratitude from this experience To turn it positive, look up our Live a Life By Design Community Group. Join that group and you’ll gain outstanding support each week from others who are living their lives. By design, you’ll see motivational postings. You’ll see recommendations of books you will see coaching tips to help you become bigger, better, and bolder. Until next week, go ahead and live your life by design.
