2023 January 31 Steps to starting your transformation

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about your life reimagined. Thanks for joining me tonight for more on recreating our future. So let's get started. If you'd like what you hear tonight, please leave a like, hit that bell, subscribe and tell your friends or drop me a note.

Today went way differently than I had expected. It ended up  a super positive experience, and it was all because I decided to see what the world was going to bring me. You can't change the world. You can only change your reaction to it. That brings us to tonight. I had planned to do a summary of the steps we had taken thus far, but as part of that, I had already gone back to generate the highlights of all the previous weeks' lives for the past few months, and we have covered quite a lot.

So tonight I'm going to do a quick index of sorts of some of the prior weeks' highlights. I'll try and get a real index put together, so it'll be easier to search in the future because we have a lot more stuff we're going to be covering. Don't forget we're going to put it all together in our upcoming course Your Future Transformed. Starting way back around Thanksgiving of 2022, we did an initial discussion of SMART goals and how to record them in a way that you're really likely to remember and internalize them. The following week, I answered a listener's question, how to set actionable goals and how to help yourself keep them.

Then the latter part of December, we started off remembering why exactly I'm even doing all of this, and then on the 20th we did a reminder of how to keep your own space over the holidays, 

and how to look out for your own wellbeing. The holidays can be stressful for a lot of people. Remember to give yourself some grace and give yourself some space.

We did our Christmas message on December 27th. We started with how to imagine your future in such a manner that your brain naturally wants to help you reach your goals, rather than trying to keep you stuck in your safe present situation. Remember we've talked extensively about how your brain is really afraid of change because you don't know what change might bring if you stay with what you're doing. If things are going okay, then your brain thinks,  Things are okay, what do we want to change? Who knows it might not be okay when we go a different direction. We talked about a way that, by imagining your future, your brain can buy into it, and will just pull you forward into the future that you want.

We continue in January, Happy New Year, by working to discover your life's purpose. This is a really important piece of the whole thing. It's great to have goals, but you want your goals to be consistent with your life's purpose. It's something that's easily overlooked. We're trained in Western thought about immediacy, that we want to try and set goals to get things done. Sometimes we forget to prioritize whether those goals are really leading us to where we want to be. I want to get a raise, but maybe you don't want to work in that company. Those sorts of things. 

Then we changed our mission to serve not just Baby Boomers, but everyone who was interested in transforming their lives by setting and reaching their goals. Equally important, we talked more about the power of immersing yourself in your future success and then working backwards to the present. It makes it much easier for your brain to visualize how we can get through problems as they arise. Then on January 17, we delved deeper into the envisionment habits and your brain's automations to handle the thousands of daily thoughts that we have.

Remember when we went through this the following week on the 24th. The world is always giving us various stimuli. It could be anything from a sound you hear, a voice, music playing, a color. You get a stimulus from the world and that stimulus then creates thought. Eventually,  there's a thought and then we attach an emotion to it. That emotion can be that I like music. I don't like that song.  There's always an emotion that follows that thought. 

How we eventually take those repeated stimuli, thought, emotion patterns, and if they've been consistent with each other, that becomes a prewired belief. . Every time now when we see that stimulus, it jumps over the thought and emotion process, and we are just matched up with a pre-existing belief.

Then very importantly, we also touched on how a belief, which may have even been formed in childhood, maybe has nothing to do with what we're doing now. But beliefs are typically stronger than short term goals.  That's why willpower is rarely able to overcome a belief. We talked about this in terms of how candy or dessert may end up being a very positive thing for us, because when we are children, and then now that we're adults, anytime our stressful situation arises, we look for that powerful method to relieve the stress. We end up associating food with stress relief. That’s just one example. There's an endless number of examples. 

That's what we covered since Thanksgiving. It's a lot of useful ideas and techniques in only a few weeks, and there's still a lot more to come. This is all being assembled into an introductory course, Your Future Transformed, which will cover this in a lot more detail, in much greater depth. We're just skimming the surface in all of this right now, and there's a lot of techniques here that you can use, not only for transforming your life on a grand basis, but even on a day-to-day way. 

We're going to go through all that a lot more over the coming weeks and then in our course. So that's it for the evening. I hope you find it useful. If you have any questions on any of the particular steps so far, you can always go back to those Lives from those dates. Take a listen or find the blog entry. If there's anything you have questions on, shoot me a note. I’d be happy to walk you through anything in detail.

So that's it for the evening. Of course, as always, UKR7.com is the site of links to pages to make donations. That is still up, still active. At the top of that list of course, is World Central Kitchen, WCK.org. These are all humanitarian organizations. WCK provides meals for people in need. They've served millions and millions of meals now across the world and also in the Ukraine in particular.

Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. So if you can and you're able, please check it out. Thanks for stopping by. We've covered things quickly, but I hope you found it useful.

If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. Please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week and remember that life gives you challenges, but those challenges are really opportunities, and it's up to you to interpret them in a way that lets you see the good things that are around.

So remember to live the life that you dream of because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thanks.