Do you ever wonder how you can make more progress in life? In this episode Jimmy shares three powerful areas of life that you can control for the benefit of your daily progress in life.
Episode Keys
- Recognizing the opportunities that are discovered in your life and how to capitalize on them.
- Why your attitude determines your altitude in life!
- When is the best time to start thinking more positively about life and decisions in life.
- Who you spend your time with determines your ultimate lifestyle. Choose your friends wisely!
- Why you must make your future vision bigger than your current level of life.
Podcast Transcript
Good morning! Hey, this is Jimmy Williams with Live a Life By Design, your Monday morning moments of motivation, and may I say, Kris Kringle’s biggest fan. I’ve gotta tell you folks on a serious note, I’m getting a lot of pressure… You know, I always come to you being very truthful. I never want to take a moment of your sincere gratitude that I understand and receive every week by listening. I thank you for listening to the podcast, our entire team from engineering, transcriptionist, content creator. Everybody on this team is outstanding in what they do, uh, except maybe for the host, but he’s working on it. It has been a crazy year this year. I’m sure each of you has at least 10 stories to tell us about your crazy year, but today I wanna share with you a few things to take a little craziness out of the year.
These are items of life that I know you can use to help make 20, 22, the best year you’ve ever experienced so far on this planet. But before we do that, let me just get a few housekeeping matters outta the way we are going into 2022 with this podcast, with some changes coming that I know you will enjoy. We are going to change a little of the format. We’re going to change a few of the topic items that we utilize in producing this podcast. But these are things that are needed now because like all things in life, we must adapt to what is going on in our environment. One of those things that I wanted you to know is we can always be counted on to be here for you with a great deal of positivity, with a smile on my that you can hear through the microphone and to let you know that every Monday, your week can and should start out by listening to these few moments of powerful, positive messages so that your week can be the best it can be. Thank you, you again, for listening, it has truly been an honor to spend these nearly three years, uh, with our, our biggest subscribers and listeners across the globe. I’m just still amazed at 57 countries, listen to this podcast and it is very humbling. So thank you so much. That’s more than a Christmas gift could ever be to me at this time of life. I do wanna say a couple things though about Christmas, and I hope you take this to heart.
I do not need anything from the great listeners of this podcast. So don’t go buying me gifts just don’t even stress over it and if you’re gonna get me, what I deserve, would you please have the dump truck? Leave the coal in the back of the yard this time, not the front yard. I’d appreciate that. Well, they say you get what you deserve folks. So I guess that’s what I’m gonna get. I wanna visit with you. I said just about a few areas of life that you can utilize and control for your benefit to help you gain more in life and more satisfaction in life. And these may seem like they’re out of control. Now, I’m gonna give you our approach to how you can gain control of these three areas of that will help you immediately. But you have to have authority.
You have to exercise your authority, your control of your mindset, your physicality, your spirituality. You have got to take control of you. Zigler said it best when he said, you know, must be a meaningful specific and know what you wish outta life versus a wondering generality. That simply goes by which way the wind blows. So the first area that you must gain control of, and you should starting this morning. Don’t wait till the first of year. What’s the best time. Start something today. Start it. Now this first area of life that you must control is your attitude, man. There’s a lot of stinking thinking going on in this world. And it is nowhere more present than that TV. If we were to watch less TV and read of the good books of life. And I don’t mean those, uh, you know, Harlequin romance books, I’m talking about biographies of great people, women and men that have changed the world for better for mankind.
If you’ve ever read any of the books written on mother, there, you will real quickly. As I did realize how little I have contributed to my fellow, man, I felt like I had been only working toward life for my family, myself, but mother Teresa gave all that she had and lived a life of poverty to help those in India that were the least supported by anyone in society. These would be the children that had nowhere to go, no place to stay, no food, to eat, no clothes to wear. And she saw it as her mission and calling in life with an attitude that could have said, I don’t want the heat, the bugs, the stench. I don’t want any of this, but instead she faced each day as if she were the most blessed person on earth, smiling and passing that infectious smile to ever every one of those children.
You see attitude is that thing in life you control between your ears, a good attitude will determine your altitude in life as Ziglar. So eloquently stated it. One method of protecting your attitude is first by being grateful for what you, you currently possess your health career, family, spiritual, your location, where you live, where you work, where you get to travel. You know, we live in the greatest country on the globe. We have so many freedoms as Americans. We have risk as well. And one of those is, is to help those that are in greater need than ourselves. One of my favorite reminders of how our attitude directs our happiness is this quote from Oscar wild. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Oh, I love that. We all came from the same area of life. Some were just born with a little more help than others, but most of life’s wealthiest and most philanthropic individuals were born into life of poverty. If they weren’t in poverty, they had very limited means, but they achieved greatness because they found something in their mindset, their attitude that gave them hope that there’s a bigger future ahead of them.
Where are you focusing your eyes today? Are you looking down at the ground, staring at your feet with no vision for the future? Or are you seeing that future that will occur because of your attitude? And you’re gonna discard all the worry of the past because you simply can’t change yesterday. I’ve gotta tell you. I would change a few things in life if I could change yesterday, but I can’t. So why waste the energy physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, don’t waste your time today trying to say I wished I had, but I’d rather you focus your eyes on the future and say, I know I can and build that bigger, better, bold life for you and your family. So attitude to me is one of the things in life. I feel like I have mastered. I genuinely and I mean, sincerely, I’m not bragging here because as we say in Oklahoma, it’s not bragging if it’s a fact, but I genuinely have a very good attitude.
I came from a means of the youngest to children. We had far more love than any other family in town, but we had probably far less money than most of those families in the small town I was raised. I love the fact. I had the best fun playing with toys that other people may have discarded. We actually had the wherewithal take those giant corrugated, cardboard boxes, you know, coated with all that nice plastic to make ’em nice and hard. And so they could transport a washer or dryer or a refrigerator in. We turned that into the super, to Bogan sled on the winner’s day. Oh, I tell you I had more fun than was allowed by law. But the point of it was, was the attitude to seek out what I could control and how I could use what I’m given that day. That 1,440 minutes of time.
What can I do with that time? I wanna make certain, I don’t waste any day of my life. Cause I’ve got some news for you and it’s not good. You cannot reclaim one of those days. And I hate to even be the bear of even worse news, but there’s gonna come a time when you’ll have no more days. So it is vital and important that your attitude play chief role in how you face each day as the blessing that it is another area of life that you must control is your vision for the future. Now, wait a minute, Jimmy, you just told me I need to live each day. Why should I worry about the future? Well, I didn’t say worry. I said cast your vision for how you, the future to be now a gentleman by the name of Franklin Delino Roosevelt. The only president in the history of this country to have successfully run and won election to the office of presidency four times, this man could have come to the point in his life.
He said, oh, I am nothing more than a cripple. I can do nothing on my own, but instead, after being smitten with that crippling disease, that his legs could no longer support that he had to use braces just to simply stand and was in a wheelchair. Most of the hours of the day, still rose to be the most powerful person on the planet. For the period of time, he was president. He had a vision that he had for himself. He had even bigger a vision for this country. And at the end of the day, coming out of that depression that so badly broke families in this country, S that had gone into disillusion. These people lost, literally everything. He helped them gain one thing that could never be taken away from them, but they had failed to remember they still owned it. And that was hope. And a vision for a better future. See, no one can steal your dreams. They can only delay your realizing them. If you create a desire in yourself to achieve a goal in your future, you will make it happen with focused thinking and working in a manner that you see daily progress being learn from the past, but don’t live there. Learn to be wiser today than you were yesterday. That is a habit for which one can create a bigger future by simply learning from the mistakes of the past.
AR Bernard had another great quote. If you don’t have a vision for the future, then your future is threatened to be a repeat of the past. Man. I think that’s an outstanding quote. You know, they say one is, uh, destined to repeat history. If you don’t learn and learn well. So work on your vision for your future. Do you even have a written vision statement? I know it’s gonna sound done can, but I do. I always maintain goals in written form and I maintain a vision statement for how I wish to see life lived for myself and family. The next area of life that you must control is confidence. And this is something that takes continual feeding and fostering to be maintained. Now I hear you, Jimmy, listen, I don’t know what I have enough energy left in me at the end of the day to even work on my confidence, much less us keep it fed.
Well, I understand we’re all given the same 24 hours. Now I agree that some of us have roles in our life that it may be more stressful. May exhaust you more than some of others, but each of us is the master of his own mind and his own body. If you come home from work and you plant your behind on the cushions of that sofa and you grab that remote in hand and you grab a nice cold soda pop in your other hand and a bag of chips, and you just sit there and you eat the bag of chips all the way down and drink all of that soda and watch that boob tube. I got some news for you. You’re not feeding your confidence, but you’re killing it. Instead of feeding it, you must have confidence to conquer the challenges of life because folks I’ve got news for you.
They will come for the last nearly two years. We have focused some challenges of which we were not really prepared. Some of us without confidence. You’ll find yourself in a mindset of scarcity, afraid to even T of the important challenges that create the best growth in your life. One of my friends suffers from a horrific lack of confidence, very talented, intelligent. She’s afraid to make a decision that it’s so bad. It’s holding her back from realizing her for greatness. Your idea for a better strategy, product or service is given life by the confidence you maintain in your mind. Victor Hugo, the famous French poet novelist is credited for another of my favorite statements of life else in the world. Not even all the armies of the world is so powerful. As an idea whose time has come, you see the best ideas that help make life better for all of us are only born from the persistence and the confidence of the I inventor.
You see, they had that vision for life. What did they wish to attain in life to make mankind a better world for all? And in the time that they did study and worked on their confidence, they had an attitude of, I can, and I will no matter what. So attitude, vision for the future and your confidence to achieve will empower you to have in 2022, the best year you’ve lived on this planet. If you only work on these three areas of life, you will noticeably be different. You’ll talk differently. You’ll act differently. You’ll work differently. As a matter of fact, I promise you, people will come up to you that have known you for 20 or 30 years and say, there is something different about you, but I do just can’t put my finger on it. That is one thing that I have been accused many times.
It just happened about two weeks ago, I was at a local restaurant and I was just, as I always do thank people for coming to our small community and spending their money here from outta state. We certainly appreciate all the visitors that come to town. And this gentleman looked me in the eye and he, his eyebrows kind of furled down and he said, now, wait a minute. He said, uh, you either a politician or a preacher nobody’s ever that happy all the time. When I explained to him that I’m neither, he just laughed and shook his head. And he said, well, the world needs more of whatever you’re drinking. So at the end of the day, folks, it’s all about the attitude that we show others. It’s about the confidence we maintain between our own ears to conquer that that has yet to even be considered and a vision for the future. That must be so vivid that, you know, it’ll be accomplished with a smile on your face. So maximize the benefits of your days that are giving you by facing each one, with that great positive attitude and smile, a detailed vision for how you wish to live your life. And most importantly, the confidence to reach the desired results. You see, these are the ingredients to 2022. As I said, becoming the best year of your life. And may you live it bigger, better, and bolder.
