2026 March 10 A Transformation, (almost) Guaranteed

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me to talk about what I mean when I talk about transformation and reimagining your life. Let's get started. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

So this week we're going to talk about what we really mean when we're talking about re-envisioning our lives, transforming our lives, and re-imagining our future. We use that both as part of our tagline, we talk about it quite a bit, and I realized that I actually haven't really explained it very well recently. We did a long time ago, but I just wanted to go over that again. So this will be a real introduction, and we'll be doing a series of these in-depth examinations along with some webinars on the topic.

Although the concepts are kind of simple from a high-level standpoint, it starts to seem a little murky when you actually try to imagine what changes you can actually accomplish or how you would actually go about doing it. So spoiler alert: there are almost no limits as to what you can do once you really make it your priority. So keep that in mind. Remember, this is just an introduction, and many people I know have truly recreated their lives in ways that they hadn't even dreamed possible when they first started.

To get one thing out of the way upfront: it isn't all about money. Actually, it has little to do directly with money, because money by itself rarely brings happiness or feelings of accomplishment. Which isn't to say that if money plays a role in your life vision, that it can't be a side effect of that as well. For many of the people I know who have successfully changed their lives using these techniques, and there are some really big transformations, some of the biggest transformations were often realizing all the things that they already had. They learned how to appreciate them and see them in a different light.

That may not sound exciting, but think about how amazing it would feel to not always view your life as inadequate. Sounds pretty nice to me, actually. This isn't accepting some particular state or whatever, but realizing that you might actually already have a lot of what it is that you desire. We've talked about this as a side in the past. Remember that a lot of marketing is to tell you all the things that you need so somebody can sell you something. That plays a big part in it. Maybe we didn't really need all those other things, and you really have what's most important to you right at the time.

One of the more common outcomes is finding more meaning in your life and feeling like you matter and are being seen again, which is a really important aspect of it. Many people I speak with express how they feel kind of irrelevant since they retired or changed into a less prestigious career. Our society really encouraged us to define ourselves by our work, which has both pluses and minuses. Yes, it makes introductions simple: I'm a truck driver, I work in construction, I'm an attorney, I'm a nurse, whatever it is. But there's some serious minuses at the same time because it groups people into these huge buckets that aren't really the same. And of course, when you retire, then how do you define yourself?

We'll go over both those situations in detail in another episode, but the high-level view of this is that despite us defining ourselves by the kind of work that we do or did, in reality, what defined us was our capabilities, our skills, not the job. We may have applied those same capabilities to different career paths, but our capabilities remain within us.

There's certainly quite a difference between driving a laundry delivery van, which is a fine profession, and being the lead driver on that big specialized crawler. If you remember the old Apollo missions, NASA had a big crawler transporter truck which moved the Saturn V rockets, these things multiple stories high, all the way to the launch pad for the Apollo missions. You say, how can those both be called truck drivers? And yet that's what our society does because society tends to put us all, with a wide variety of specialties, into some very broad buckets.

In the example, the skills used were very, very different. The van driver actually must be very efficient, able to keep track of hundreds of different items and get them to where he's going and get them sorted and all those sorts of things. While the NASA person had to be able to manage probably dozens of assistants, this monumentally large thing. I looked it up, it's something like 16 million pounds or something. And of course he only was carrying one thing. It wasn't like he was going to lose track of what he had, but it was pretty valuable. In today's dollars, it cost billions of dollars.

So these skills remained with those people. But no one tells you that perspective, and so you tend to think that you're now kind of valueless because you aren't doing your job. But what gave you the value was the skills that you had developed, and those remain with you well after you retire, and it can often give you a big advantage in many situations.

Another big piece of the transformation is based upon well-established neuroscience and brain training and support techniques. Relearning how to view yourself is a skill, and it's a skill that could be taught and learned at any age. Our education system is focused on making good workers, but that overlooks some really important points. One of those points is that we have a profound ability to impact our own lives, our health, our performance in many tests, simply by how we think about it and envision it in our mind.

A little side here: there's a whole study that was done with athletes, and one group of athletes sat and actually practiced what they were doing. I think it was basketball, but they actually practiced making shots. And then the other one spent something like, it was more than half of their time, a very large percentage, envisioning what a perfect shot would look like, and then did some shots. The people who performed better were the ones who envisioned it more and did it less.

So there's nothing woo-woo going on here. It's simply using how our brain interacts with the real world to our own advantage. Remember that our brain's prefrontal cortex, the whole thinking part of it, that was kind of a late addition in the whole development of ourselves. And as such, it often depends upon other areas of the brain for information. So by using our imagination in some specific ways, along with other well-defined methods, we can help our brain see different possibilities than the other suggestions it receives.

We've talked about this in terms of advertising, which we just mentioned, social media, things you learned as a child. That's where the brain keeps hearing these different stories and seeing the same story, so it assumes it's correct. We can also carefully imagine a different story and make that the new way we envision ourselves and the world around us.

So that leads us into the transformation. In most cases, we already have a pretty good idea how we want our lives to be. We might not talk about it much, or if we do talk about it, kind of with a little laugh: oh, it's kind of silly, I always wanted to be an opera singer or whatever. You hear people say stuff like that all the time. There really aren't any silly thoughts when it comes to life, and so much of the transformation is really just allowing ourselves to believe in those secret dreams that we have inside of us. It's giving ourselves permission to believe in ourselves, and it sounds simple, and it conceptually is.

But our minds have a lot of learned responses to keep us from straying too far into new things because that seems scary to our brains. Remember, our brain just wants to keep us safe. That's its number one priority in all circumstances and situations. Happiness and fulfillment are not big considerations to the brain unless we help it understand why those will help keep us safe as well, along with all the things like eating and proper nutrition and all those other things that we always think about as safety. But if part of what we define as safety to our brain is those things that are really important to us, it has no trouble buying into that as well.

So the whole purpose of re-imagining our lives and re-envisioning our future is to help discover and unlock those deep needs and desires that we have inside us, and then to work with our brains to make those needs visible and help our brain make them a priority.

Note that we don't talk about retirement or the feelings that we may have once we retire because those are just our brain's way of trying to protect us and keep us safe. For most of maybe even almost our entire lives, from what we heard from our parents and all these other things, safety meant we had a good job and usually a pretty controlled schedule. We were doing all the right things. Suddenly we retire and everything changes. Instead of saving money, we're spending our savings. Instead of working, we're doing nothing. Instead of being busy, we feel like we have nothing to do.

Our brain is not really prepared for that. So we end up in a funk. We feel meaningless, we have no energy, all those other things, because our brain's kind of like, wow, I spent my whole life trying to get to this point, and I totally failed because now we don't have a job. We are not saving money, we're not doing anything. We just have no reason to be. And that's where those feelings of meaninglessness come from, not being seen, not being heard.

But the cure for that is exactly what we just described above. It's training our brain to recognize our true potential, to refocus our brain on our new needs and goals, and to steadily overcome that feeling of meaninglessness by once again living the life that we dreamed of and remembering that we have all these skills that we developed over the years. They didn't just go poof and disappear. They're still with us. They're actually honed for a whole lifetime of work. So we still have a lot of positive collateral, and it's just reminding ourselves of that.

Again, this is just a quick high-level description, but I hope it gives you a taste of the power that we have over our future and how it really is possible to reprogram how we think about ourselves, our skills, our contributions, and to emphasize what matters to us. We can find our own meaning in life. We can live it however we want. If we want to do lots of things as we get older, we have the ability to do that. And if we want to just sit and do very specific limited things, that's okay too. The important part is that we're living the life how we imagined it.

So that's it for the evening. No homework tonight because it's a pretty broad overview and a lot of topics at a thin level. But I hope you're as excited as I am to start going over how these powerful techniques can truly allow us to reimagine our lives and reenvision our future.

Thank you. As always, remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. UKR7.com is where we have links to help the people of Ukraine. WCK.org is a big international organization that helps when disasters hit different areas. Two great international sites, but there's a lot of local charities and a lot of things you can do to help other people. And even just a simple smile can change someone else's day for the better in ways you can't imagine.

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along and please subscribe and hit that like button. Please drop me a comment as to what else you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com.