We have the ability to shape our dreams and reach our goals, but we fail because we don’t do it consciously. Stan Padgett teaches the right way of setting yourself up for success and programming your mind to constantly search for personal growth. He also shares tips on becoming a better partner in every relationship and being energized in everything you do.
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8 Words To Live By
In prior episodes, we have gotten heavy-duty into some of the challenges of relationships. Our last episode was Control is Relationship Poison. This time, I want to go in a different direction. I want to give you something that will strengthen you, build you up, and help you to be a better partner in every relationship that you have. I call it Eight Words To Live By.
I have attended a lot of seminars and read a lot of self-help books. One of the things I came away with is the idea that we have the ability as human beings to program ourselves for success or failure. Here is the problem with that. We don’t do it consciously often enough. We don’t do it at all too often. Think about it in these terms for a second. In your mind is stored every experience you have ever had, every emotion you have ever had, you’ve ever felt, and everything that you have ever heard, thought, said, felt, smelled, tasted, and touched. It is all stored. Think of it as the library of your subconscious mind.
In that library, there are rows upon rows of books, shelf after shelf filled with large leather-bound volumes. You can walk through that library anytime that you want. As you walk through it, you are going to find that some of the volumes look like they have never been touched. The spine of the book is perfect. It has never been cracked. If you pulled it off and looked at the pages, none of them are frayed or torn. The book is perfect.
It is pristine, and yet you go a little farther down, and you are going to find a different book on the shelf, and that book is going to be cracked, leather-bound, and broken. You are going to see every flaw on the exterior of that book. If you look at the pages, they are dog-eared, worn, coffee stained, torn, and may be highlighted, underlined, and there are notes in the margin.
The problem with the library is that you are the librarian, and you are the only patron of that library. The perfect or pristine books are the ones you have never taken down off the shelf and opened. The worn, torn, beat-up volumes are your favorites. They are the ones you look at every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Sometimes you even look at that more than you do your smartphone. That is a stunning thought.
The real problem with your library is that the worn, torn, battered volumes are almost certainly the most negative experiences you have ever had in your life. They are the hurts, pains, sorrows, struggles, and hopelessness that you felt. You pull those volumes down from the shelves in your library. You open and read them. As you read them, you experience all of those things again in your body and mind. You are training yourself to feel pain and hopelessness.
The volumes in your library that are pristine are typically the peak experiences in your life. They are joys, successes, passions, happiness, and fun. They are everything that you want your life to be. You have experienced that at one time or another, but those are not the experiences you go to your library to renew, review, restore, and reinstall in your mind, ear, heart, and body. Why not? You are the librarian. You choose every day which volumes you are going to pull off the shelf and read.
What if you begin tomorrow and you make a conscious choice to only pull down those pristine volumes, read those, and reexperience those peak times and joyful moments, family, friends, work, education, school, finances, whatever they were? What if you reprogram yourself by reviewing those to attract more of those experiences to you?
One of the books that you should read if you haven’t, or I certainly recommend that you read if you haven’t, is called The Secret by Rhonda Byrne. The Secret, along with many other books, teaches that you attract to yourself what you think about all the time. That is a scary principle because it puts you in control of many of the things you are going to experience in your life. You can program yourself for success or failure, as a victor or a victim, or to win or to lose in every area of your life.
Here is my suggestion. Program yourself to win, success, and joy. Make sure you are getting every last squeeze, every last bit of juice out of the time you get on this planet. No matter what your belief system is and where you came from or you believe that you came from, you came to this planet on a roundtrip ticket. You are going back.
The frightening thought is that you don’t know when. We don’t know whether we have a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, 20 years, 30 years, or 50 years. All we have is now. When you wake up in the morning and you realize that you don’t have six feet of dirt on your face, for me, it is already a great day. Everything after that is gravy. I wake up, and I’m like, “Another one? This is good. I’m ready. Let’s do it.” I don’t know how many there are left, and neither do you.
Here is my challenge and suggestion for you. Here are my words to live by. Starting tomorrow morning, get up ten minutes early and go to a quiet place in your house. If you have a place where it is reasonably comfortable to sit on the floor, I suggest you do that. No music and cell phone. Frankly, if you get up early enough, no lights. Sit there. If you can sit what my grandchildren called crisscross applesauce, do it. Close your eyes, clear your mind and give thanks. Give gratitude for the positive, wonderful things in your life.
For the first five minutes, do nothing but give gratitude and be specific. I’m grateful that I can breathe. I can see. I’m alive. I can hear, think, feel, call somebody that I love, touch my spouse or my partner, and let someone know that I love them and that I have sufficient health to get out of bed. Be grateful for all of the things that you have that you don’t think about often. When you live in gratitude, it is interesting. God of the universe will give you more to be grateful for because you have been grateful for what you already have. That is the first five minutes. Give gratitude.
God of the universe will give you more to be grateful for because you've been grateful for what you already have. Click To TweetThe second five minutes is to claim what you want and need. That is where the eight words to live by command. I will give you mine. Your eight might be completely different. I don’t know. I want it to be four words that you were going to feel that day and four words that you are going to be that day. Here are my four, and what I want you to do is write down your list of four. The four emotions you are going to feel now.
Mine are love, joy, gratitude, and peace. I give that in the form of gratitude. I am grateful that now I will feel only love, joy, gratitude, and peace. I repeat that in my mind a few times. Those are the things that I’m going to feel now. Love, joy, gratitude, peace, what your four are or yours. Pick them. Claim the emotions that you want and need, the things you need to feel. It might be to feel safe, valued, and loved. I don’t know what it is. Whatever you need to feel, claim it.
Next are the four things that you are going to be that day. Here are my four. I’m going to be excited, energetic, effective, and efficient. How many people do you know who are excited about life? It may not be any great reason for it, but they are excited about life. Have you ever watched what happens in a room full of people at a party? People gravitate to that person who is excited about life.
What do I want to be? I want to be energetic because energy is the power to move and do. Move faster. You want to be energetic. You have to have the energy to be able to work to take care of your family, to exercise, to prepare food, to clean your home, to take care of your property, and to work at your business, your job, your profession, whatever it is. You got to be energetic. If you are energetic about it, you will also find that it is less of a burden to do it.
That work will become play. It will become easier if you are excited about it and energetic about it. I also want to be effective and efficient. I want to be able to get things done in the least amount of time possible. Particularly the things that are work-related so that I then have more time to spend doing the things that I truly love doing with my family.
If you are energetic to do any task, it will become less of a burden and become play. Click To TweetLet me give you a couple of examples. As a parent, my first child was born before my junior year of college started. I was working from 12:00 midnight to 8:00 AM in a garbage bag factory. I ran the machine that put the garbage bags into the little paper box you buy at the grocery store. I was working from 9:00 AM to 12:00 noon at my father’s engineering company. I would go to college from 1:00 PM to 5:00 PM.
My schedule was I’d go to work at midnight. I get off at 8:00 in the morning. I go home, have breakfast, take a shower, and kiss my wife and new baby. I would go to my second job from 9:00 to 12:00. I would go home, have lunch, and kiss my wife and baby. I would go to college classes from 1:00 to 5:00. I would go home and have dinner with my wife and son. I would bathe him and get him ready for bed. I will go to bed at 7:00. I will get up at 11:00, and I will do it again. I didn’t have a lot of time with him. I tried to make what I had count.
Our second daughter was born four days before my third year of law school started. I was a third-year law student. I didn’t have a ton of time with her, but I tried to make it count. I took care of both of the kids when I got home from school. Linda would do dinner. I would take care of the kids, get them to bathe, and get them ready for bed. That was my time with my children.
My third son came along, my youngest son. I was a third-year lawyer, a young lawyer at a firm working crazy hours as a lot of lawyers do. I would come home. I would take care of him and all of the other two. We would have some time together at night. As a grandparent, I have a little bit more time and money. I have three of my grandchildren that live a quarter of a mile down the road from us.
I’m also blessed and grateful to have a little workout room in my barn. I got a StairMaster and Bowflex. During her junior and senior years of high school, my oldest granddaughter, that lived down the road, would come down 4 or 5 mornings a week at 5:30 in the morning and work out with me. That was my time with her.
The sixteen-year-old granddaughter is the best scratch baker you have ever met. Certainly, the best I had ever met, but that wasn’t something that interested her in those days. I used to call them daddy-daughter dates with my daughter. They were papa-daughter dates with my granddaughters. I would take them out one at a time. We would go to dinner. We would talk. It was our time together.
After I had done that a couple of times, my grandson, who lives down the road, asked his mom, my daughter said, “Mom, when is papa going to take me out?” We began to have papa-grandson time out, too. We went to a football game and a hockey game. We went to dinner together. We started doing a Pilates class because he is doing soccer. He wanted to stretch out and be more stretched and comfortable. He is a goaltender. We go to Pilates together once a week. We go take him to get a burger afterward, which I typically resist doing for me.
One day I asked the scratch baker, “Honey, I want to spend some time with you. Would you like to take a cooking class? Would you like to take a ballroom dance class? What would you like to do?” She said, “Papa, ballroom dance sounds like fun.” I thought to myself, “What have I done?” I signed the two of us up for ballroom dance lessons, and we are still doing it. I ask her every month or so. I said, “Are you still enjoying this?” She was like, “Yes, I like it.” I said, “Do you want to keep doing it?” She was like, “Yes, I want to keep doing it.”
The instructors tried to get her to come out and do a dance with other teenagers. She was like, “No, I just want to dance with my papa.” I can’t tell you how good that feels. Strangely enough, we were driving back from dance one night, and she said, “Papa, can I start working out in the barn with you? I want to get stronger.” I was like, “Yes, ma’am. What time do you have to get home to get ready to go to school?” She was like, “6:30.” I said, “That means we are going to have to work out at 5:30.” She said, “I will be there.” She has been.
That time is infinitely valuable. I want to be excited and energetic about dancing with her, being in the workout room with her, and about my work. I can get it done and do those things with my granddaughters, my grandson, and my daughter. Linda and I do date nights every week. For those of you who already are married in committed relationships, don’t stop dating each other. I didn’t understand that principle for a long time.
I had heard about date night. I am busy. We got lots to do. We were raising kids. We didn’t do that. Finally, we need to start. We need to do date night. I had an interesting experience about the third week after we had done date night on Friday night twice in a row. On a Tuesday or Wednesday, Linda said, “What are we doing for date night?”
It finally hit me how important that one-on-one time with her was. Even though we were raising children, we had 1 million things to do, and I had to come back after date night, a lot of nights and work, but it was okay. That was her time. She needed it, and so did you. If you haven’t dated your partner, do it this week. Commit to doing it this week. It doesn’t have to be fancy and expensive. It doesn’t have to cost anything. It is one-on-one time together. When you do it, turn off your cell phones and be together.
This is episode four of the show. I’m going to leave you in the show notes another of the talks that I did on the Board of Advisors of the Million Dollar Mastermind that I belong to. You will find some value in it. You’re welcome to share this content or any of the things that you get off the board of advisors. You can put it on your own social media if you like. You can share it with your family and partner. What I want is for you and as many of the people that you love and care about to get value from it. Have a great day.
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