Day 3 of the 5-Day I Love My Life Challenge with Adam Markel

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to day three of the I Love My Life challenge. I'm just sitting here at this moment feeling really, really blessed, really grateful, really happy. Happiness is kind of a fleeting thing, right? It's so interesting. Often when things are sort of going our way and we feel like we're getting what we want, we're happy. And when things are not going our way, we're not getting everything that we want, we can be not happy. And so for a while now, I've been thinking more about the distinction between happiness and joy. But more lately than ever before, I've just also started to revisit that concept of happiness. And the fact that. That joy and happiness are kind of like two concentric circles. They're like. It's like an eclipse. When we're joyful, we're happy. When we're happy, we're joyful. So I'm not sure if the distinction is actually that important, but I know one thing is certain, that when I am joyful and when I'm happy, it's most often because I'm grateful. Because I'm. I'm feeling gratitude. I'm feeling appreciative. And in this moment, I am feeling that. I'm feeling tremendous gratitude for all of you, tremendous gratitude for the fact that we get to be here together. If you're feeling grateful right now, if you're feeling that sense of just appreciation for what we're doing here right now, for our time together, for the ability to. To breathe together, to be in community in this way, if that feels good to you and you're grateful for it, I want you to go ahead. Let's start it off right now. Let's just all welcome, everybody to day three of the I Love My Life challenge. Today is gratitude day, so it is no surprise. But I'd love it if you'd go ahead right now and leave a comment. Put a comment right there so that we know. We know that we're all together feeling this way and that we're sharing this and that there's a sense that it's expanding. Because whenever I'm joyful, whenever I'm happy, I know it's because in part that I am appreciating my life. And there's no question that gratitude is a huge determiner of whether we feel happy or not, we feel joyful or not. I know that watching how all of you were participating or many, many, many of you are participating yesterday. Some of the insights from yesterday, I'm just going to read a couple right now. And of course, again, I'd love it if you would leave your comments below. Leave your comments so that we can. And I'm just gonna pull up the comments right now, so I've got them right there. Beautiful. I love this platform, by the way. Get curious about what we're doing and how this is all looking the way it is. I'm happy, our team is certainly happy to have a conversation with you or share this information with you, how it is that this is being broadcast the way it is. And it's actually quite a simple technology. Doesn't mean we don't have. Have, you know, the usual sort of headaches that are involved in some of these things sometimes. But it's quite an elegant solution to how it is that we can communicate in this way to. To speak about things that are important to us, to create this sense, this community and this conversation and even this movement. And it's aided by this technology because we've got people that are literally from all over the world, in fact, right now, just to see what kind of a global audience we've got, please go ahead. As you're saying, good morning, as you're saying good evening, as you're saying good, good night, whatever you're saying, I love my life in the comments also indicate where you're, where you're from, where is it that you are consuming this at the moment? What part of the world are you participating from? And as you do that, go ahead and leave those comments. I'm going to read just a couple of the insights from yesterday, some of the things that we were seeing on the page. So, Chris Frank. Chris Frank, I don't know if you're out there right now, but if you're out there, I want to say thank you for leaving this comment yesterday. It says, I love my life, I love my wife, I love my family. To me, love means going above and beyond to make sure that those people in your life are cared for and love you back. This includes family, friends, students. In my case, Karen Smith. Thank you for that, Chris. Karen Smith said this yesterday. Today I am blessed with good friends. I was feeling very down and not answering my phone. And my friend, her brother and his girlfriend left a message singing Happy birthday greetings to me. I thought my friend had forgotten, but she had remembered the next day. It was so kind of them to remember. It boosted my spirits. That's so beautiful, Karen. Lovely. And then Sharon wrote this. I truly love my life, even though during the worst. Even during the worst times of my life. Hi, my name is Sharon Wilding. And I live in Dallas, Texas. See, Sharon's from Dallas, Texas. Way cool. I love my life in spite of the pandemic. I love my life in spite of being part of an unscrupulous business deal where I lost most of my financial wealth. I love my life in spite of burying my only child who is 28 years old. Why do I love my life? She asks. Because I am still breathing and I am blessed to be able to share my story of my life. I love my life because I now know what it means to be resilient. I will shout from the rooftop, I love my life. I'm with you, Sharon. We all are. And thank you so much for those incredible thoughts. And right now I want to ask you if you, if you spent some time yesterday just thinking and feeling into that question, what does love mean to me? How do I define love? How is it that I learned the definition of love? What does that look like? If you didn't do that, if you didn't share something about that, Go ahead. Right now even, and in the comments, what does love mean to you? What did you learn love meant when you were very young? What's your definition of it based on your, on how it is that you learned about love when you were a child? Go ahead. Any of those things. Go ahead and put that in the comments. As I said yesterday, I had a, a re examination of that question, a re examination of my own definition of love later on in life when I realized that love doesn't have to be about arguing. It doesn't have to be about getting mad. It doesn't have to be about proving yourself. You know, there's so many of us out there that have been people pleasers in our life. And I think for the most part, people pleasing is the result of the, the way that we have defined love and how it is that we seek approval as a way of feeling other people's love and feeling their attention and feeling their approval. We learn that when we're children. So right now, as we dive into gratitude day, I want to just share something else with you that has been a big part of my adult life. It's been a big part of the last 12 years of my own personal growth. And that has been this wonderful book which I will readily admit I have not read this entire book. Now, how many of you know what book this is, right? I know just to look at it, right? You could see the title there maybe. But as soon as you see this big beautiful book, this tome, this heavy this book probably weighs 18 pounds. This book is A course in Miracles. And there's a particular section, as I said, I haven't read the entire book from COVID to cover, but there's one particular section that I absolutely adore that I have read hundreds and hundreds of times. And it's section 30 called rules for Decision. Because remember yesterday we were talking about how the quality of our lives equal to the quality of the decisions we make. And we have a choice, right? That's the one fundamental freedom that all of us have. Each and every day we choose how we think. No one can ever steal that from us. There's nobody that can ever take away our right to decide what we think about except ourselves. We always have that choice to steal that from ourselves as well. But this one section, section chapter 30, section 1, rules for decision is really a roadmap. It's a GPS setting for how to create the day that you want to have. And what I love about this chapter is that it really explains how it is that we create the day that we want and that by having that day ourselves, we get to give it to the world. I know there's often so much confusion around the relationship between giving and receiving. And my experience is that many, many people are really poor at receiving. In part because we were taught when we were younger and are still taught in many ways that giving is more important than receiving. And we understand that they're reciprocal. They're both important. You have to be able to receive. And if we can't receive, it's very difficult for us to give fully. How can we serve from a half full cup, I ask you? It's in part the reason why we created this challenge. It's in part the reason why we created this workbook, the I Love My Life Challenge workbook. Because we want to challenge this idea that somehow it selfish to love yourself. My own experience tells me that when we learn and redefine what love means, we're able to give that as a gift to the world. And that's what this part of A Course in Miracles is all about. How it is that you actually create the rules and abide by the rules for the day. That is not just a day of joy and of happiness in your own life. Despite what might be going on, just as Sharon said, despite business good or bad, despite the pandemic, despite anything that you could imagine, I know that's difficult to take in. Despite all of that, we can still show up with joy in our heart. We can still love life, love our life. Not look at anyone else's, but love ours. And when we do that, we are also that same thing, that reflection, that mirror, that truth, if you will, for other people. Imagine what our world might be like, how peaceful our world might be like if people were more loving and kind to themselves. And that's the gift that they were able to give others as well. Now, we're talking about gratitude today, and I'm sitting here in. Literally in the seat of gratitude with all of you. And there's a lot of research on. A lot of research on gratitude. Scientists for many, many years have been studying creates dopamine, the parts of our brain that are triggered by gratitude, that trigger the flow and the. And the chemicals of joy, the chemicals, the neural pathways that open up to our happiness that are otherwise closed only because we feel grateful. In a moment, we feel better about our lives. We're happier, we're healthier. We do more things that are good for us. We all know we're supposed to exercise right. We all know we're supposed to do that, and yet we don't. And part of why we don't is because parts of our brain are not firing in the way that would enable us to be at our very best. Our serotonin levels, our dopamine levels, the neural pathways that either open or close to things that are positive for us. Even though we know we're supposed to eat the broccoli, we're supposed to take care of our bodies, often we don't do those things, and we don't know why. Our daughter Eden shared something with me this morning that I'm just going to quickly read to you. It says this, and it's no surprise. This was what she was reading for one of her classes. Guess what the antidepressant does? Wellbutrin does. It boosts the neurotransmitter dopamine. You know what else does? Gratitude. Feeling grateful activates the brainstem region that produces dopamine and makes us feel happier, more connected and positive. A little dose of gratitude. In fact, the studies. I won't read all the. All of what was said, but even just two minutes. Two minutes. Imagine that two minutes of gratitude a day for 28 days can produce lasting changes to your mental attitude, to your. Your sense of well being, to your, quote, happiness. Two minutes. We're. We're sitting in gratitude now. Every single day, you can sit in gratitude for two minutes. And I'm going to share a practice with you in just a little while. That's going to help you to do that. A little small change. We're not talking about doing something massive. I don't believe in, in the, in the, the big pivots, the macro pivots for most people. Because when we're talking about big change, we're talking about big obstacles, we're talking about big fear. What we can do is make small change each and every day. And so I created a list, and Deanna and I were working on this yesterday, of the kinds of things that I do on a consistent basis and then our family does on a consistent basis. We thought you might be interested in knowing what some of those things are. And just as an aside to that, some years ago, Randy and I were leading retreats about relationships. These relationship retreats for people that were wanting to develop greater relationship not only with themselves, but with other people. And at a certain point, as we were preparing to go overseas and deliver one of these events, we asked our family, we asked our kids, we have four kids. We asked them, what is it about our relationship? You know, we've been married a long time. In fact, Randy and I celebrated our, our 31st wedding anniversary just this past July 29th. We've created a vision board for our 75th wedding anniversary that's going to happen on July 29th, 2064. So we've had, we've had a great run. We're going to have a greater run in the future. We wanted to know for our kids, but what did they think about our marriage, our relationship? And pretty much every answer was the same, which surprised us. They said, we love how you are grateful, how you have invited us and have in many ways shown us how it is to bring gratitude into, into our daily lives. That gratitude was fundamentally the thing about our marital relationship that they thought was really important. So here are some of the other things that we think are important when it comes to how do you create that two minutes a day, that five minutes a day for gratitude? Because we know that again, it changes our brain chemistry, it changes the level of our happiness, even the level of our fitness. Walking, Walking Gratitude. Take a gratitude walk. Take five minutes and walk in nature and just look and see all the things that you could be grateful for on a simple five minute walk. Waking gratitude. That's the I love my life challenge. To wake up, to feel some sense of what you're grateful for. As Sharon was saying, just to take a breath, to be given a brand new day, happy new day. There's something to be grateful for. Waking Gratitude. To say I love my life is an expression of gratitude. Nutritional gratitude. Maybe you're wondering what the heck that is. Every time that we sit down to dinner, to any meal together as a family, we express something that we're grateful for. I think this was in part what the kids were talking about. How often it is that we express our gratitude before we eat and sometimes even while we eat, just to be thinking about how. How grateful you are, how grateful we are for the food and for everything it took to bring that food to the plate and for all the nutrition and the value and all the regeneration that we get from the nutrients of that food. You place that gratitude into the food, you infuse it with your gratitude. You create a gratitude box. Gratitude jar. We have a gratitude jar upstairs with all these beautiful gratitude notes. We used to ask people when they come into our home to. Back before COVID days, people just showed up at your house to fill out, just to write on a little sticky note, stick a piece of paper in this gratitude jar. One thing that you're grateful for. Go out and find a gratitude rock. We have rocks all over our home that we found on the beach or other places that we believe are gratitude rocks. You can create a gratitude journal, which is something you can do in the morning, you can do it at night, you can do it anytime that you just want to feel better. I don't know how else to say it, except that it's. I don't love the word hack, but it's a shortcut. It's a way to just feel better, to get that dopamine flowing, to feel more joy, more happiness, to be able to get out of your own way. I don't know about you, but I get in my way. And gratitude is one of those things that gets me out of my own way. Be grateful is one thing. Being grateful for the things that have already occurred. But I'm going to share something that legitimately changed my whole life perspective and changed my results some years ago. And that is what we now call pre visional gratitude. Pre visional gratitude, which means being grateful for things as though they've already occurred. Again, you can find this in spiritual text. There's no question. It's not a. It's not a new idea. I didn't invent it. This term Pre visual gratitude. I'm not sure I've heard that before, but who cares? It's. It's the concept that matters. And I read about this concept. I've. I've been praying in many ways for a lot of years. I didn't even know I was praying. I was just being grateful. I mean, what better form of prayer is there than just gratitude? To be grateful for something ahead in front of before? In other words, the thing that you're grateful for has happened. You can be grateful for the healing of something that's not right. Let's say you've got a pain in your shoulder. Be grateful for the way that that issue is being resolved in your body. Remember, we said on day one, bless that which you want. You can be grateful for that which you want. Gratitude is a blessing of the highest order. It's the highest form of blessing or prayer that you can think of. And so often I think is we wait until something right happens to be grateful for it. We celebrate. Some of us celebrate after. A lot of people don't even celebrate. But how about if you celebrate before, what would it look like for you to celebrate ahead of time? So one of the things that I wanted to share with you today, in addition to how it is that you can bring gratitude into your life, is how it is that you can create a code for yourself, a code of conduct. This what you're seeing right here, I'm actually going to show you now what this looks like live, because that's a piece of paper, as you can see. Looks like it's pretty torn and tattered. And it's my code of conduct. That's the name that was given to it, the name I gave to it about 12 years ago. And I'm just going to hold it up so you guys can see this. This is my code of conduct to this day. It is held together with a little tape and a whole lot of love. And originally I read about Ben Franklin and how Ben Franklin wanted to experience being of. He wanted to see himself improving each day. He wanted to see his values and his morals and his ethics on display. He wanted to check in with himself to make sure that he was. He was tracking to his true north the things that were most important to him. So he wrote down a list of these 13 things, these 13 states. These. He didn't call them states. They were like his own values, his own morals that he wanted to live up by up to. And then at the end of the night, he would see if he actually tracked to those things during the day, that if he was consistent with them and if he wasn't, then he knew where to improve the next day. And if he was, he would check it off. So he would start in the morning and he would check in at night. And I thought, this is such an interesting practice that I wanted to create my own code of conduct. And originally it was 13 statements. And I'm going to share with you exactly how to create one of these for yourself right now. But for me, what I wanted to do is I wanted to create that day, that day like no other day. I wanted to create the day of my dreams. I had Read again Chapter 30 in this beautiful book, ACIM a course in Miracles. And I thought to myself, how do I create the day that I want to have? I thought, well, let's architect it the way you would create a plan, an architectural drawing for a home, for a house that doesn't yet exist. I want to create that plan. And I want to start in the morning, meaning I'm going to start in the morning. With the end in mind. I asked myself, how do I want to experience my life today? That was the central question. That is the central question. You can put that question down for yourself right now. How do you want to experience your life today? How do you want to experience yourself being today? We're so busy doing. We know that we're beings, we're living beings. This is all about being. And yet we don't make a plan for how we want to experience ourselves being. Often we don't do that. So these states are simple. They're you asking yourself the question, how do I want to experience myself today? And this code of conduct is made up of originally 13 statements. Now there's dozens and dozens of them. I start in the morning, I take five minutes and I read from this list, and it always starts with gratitude. I experience gratitude today. That's the way these statements work. I start with the words I experience and then I fill in the blank. Today I experience gratitude. Today I experience myself being grateful for the opportunity to serve. Today. I experience myself grateful for all the people that I get to speak with, that I get to interact with people I've never met before. That I could say something that might help somebody today is a cause for gratitude. I experience being grateful for my life, for my breath, for my family, for my body, for my finances, for the sun, for the air, for the. For the country, for the land, for everything. I experience gratitude today. And then I move on to the next statement and the next statement and next statement. I experience being of service to others today. I experience being peaceful in my body, in my mind, in my heart, in my soul today. What are the things that you want to experience today? I want you to go ahead now and put those in the comments. I want you to actually start to create your own code of conduct again. Maybe, like me, your code of conduct will be around for many years to come. This one thing more than any other thing has been a tool for me to grow through some of the great challenges of my life. You never can compare your challenges to others. Pain is pain. We all feel it. I've had my share of pain, my share of frustration. Things that didn't go well, went sideways. Everything you can imagine, rejection, abandonment, you name it. But yet I control. I set the plan for how it is that I want to experience myself. And you can do that as well. So go ahead and start writing down those experiences. How do you want to experience yourself being today? How do you want to experience your life today? Start writing them into the chat. I experience order today. Shannon wrote beautiful. I experience feelings of love today. How do you want to experience your life? In other words, do you truly want to love your life? What does it look like to love your life? Write down those experiences. I experienced forgiveness today. I experience manifest, receive even miracles today. I love it. I experience courage today. Persistence today. That's exactly it. You get to choose your life experience. And the beautiful thing is that you don't have to trust me on this. In fact, I recommend that you not. I recommend that you try this on for yourself to see if it works. That's going to be the proof in the pudding. You're going to get to see at the end of the day when you start your day with your code of conduct and then you finish your day by checking in with it. Did I experience those things today? In fact, you get to see the work in action. You bookend. You start in the morning creating. I experience motivation. Yes. I experience focus today. I experience inspiration. Ian. Ian Bennett. Thank you so much. Exactly when you start your day deciding you deciding what you want to experience during the day, you get to see at night whether in fact you did. Maybe you want to experience more patience. Maybe you want to experience being more kind to others. Maybe you want to experience playing the game of life or the game of business or the game of finance on offense instead of defense for a change. Maybe you want to experience abundance instead of scarcity in all of those situations, you've got to start with a plan. If we don't have a plan, if we don't know where we're going, any road will take us there. As George Harrison sang, we've got to have that plan. This is a plan. The code of conduct is a way for you to start and finish the day. In accordance with what's most important to you and you check it out and then share your insights tomorrow, let us know how that works for you. I'd also love for us to be able to answer questions. So we're going to invite you to put your questions in the Facebook group. So if you've got questions for me, you can go ahead and put questions in the chat, in the comments. Right now you can see I'm kind of used to zoom, so I say chat, but in any event in the comments, put your questions for me and you can put your comments or if you later on today have a question, go ahead and put that in the comments and we'll address and start addressing some of those questions tomorrow and and on Friday as well. So if you've got a question about how this practice works, how the code of conduct works, or how any of the exercises that we've given you so far work, or questions about how it is that you will utilize the I Love My Life challenge itself, the 28 days of this workbook. Remember we said earlier that just two minutes of gratitude for 28 days can literally rewire your brain, rewire the neural pathways, the dendrites, even grow the gray matter in your brain. And that's the science of it. Not the woo. That's legit, the science of it. So right now, just a couple of quick reminders as we close out day three. First of all, we'd love for you to continue to post your daily ilml, your I love my life declaration, your intention, the blessing, the gratitude. Put it all in there because that's what's inspiring to all of us and to yourself. And now we know that it chemically will change the composition and the structure of your body, of your brain. So go ahead and post those declarations. Share an ILML moment, man, to see those pictures that you posted yesterday. Beautiful pictures of places and people and things, things that you are doing. And of course you could post a video, you can write something down, but share a moment when today it drops in for you that you know what, even despite what's going on in in the world, maybe even what's going on in your own life, that you still love your life. That's a big deal. Post that. Let us know. Also, try on a gratitude practice, any number of them. Take a walk. That's a simple one. Take a walk and see how many things on your walk you can receive, you can feel, you can express gratitude for and of course create your code of conduct. Originally, my code of conduct consisted of these 13 statements, I experience living with a positive and harmonious attitude. Today, I live with a peaceful, easy feeling. Today I experience peace being in energized focus. Today, I experience feeling and being healthy, wealthy and wise today. On and on and on. Create your code of conduct today. Do it now if you can, and then check in tonight, whatever tonight looks like for you. I know there are people all around the globe that are checking this out, so just let us know. Did you experience those things? What do you think? The is there causation involved? Correlation. You get to decide whether or not starting your day with a plan, starting your day with this actual code of conduct is what creates the day that you want to have and be able to give that day as a gift to other people. Of course, again, I know a lot of people have already gone out and either purchased the I Love My Life Challenge workbook for themselves or maybe even got it for a friend or a family member. If you've not yet claimed your bonuses, please go ahead and get your bonuses. I know I just got a couple of my own. Just yesterday the laptop stickers came in, the I Love My Life laptop stickers. So please go ahead. You can see the T shirt. I'm wearing it right now. This is the red version. We had the yellow version just the other day. We also want to remind you that if you've gone ahead and you've pre ordered the workbook, you ordered the workbook. You've got an invitation to join us on Friday for our I Love My Life Workbook Challenge event. We're going to be doing that event. We'll give more details about it, of course, but you can find out more@ilovemylifechallenge.com find out about what we're up to on the 8th, but you are cordially invited to come and attend and be with us. I know a lot of my own family members are going to be there and other people. We're going to do some work together. We're going to have some fun together. We're going to celebrate together. It's going to be a really amazing hour and I really want to see you all there. If you can make it, we'd love to have you there. And of course, course, if you are right now incubating some things in your life and want to find out and get some clarity about the roadmap for 2021, we are happy, always happy to have conversations with you about what that roadmap to creating a life you love actually could look like financially relationships and your health, all those areas. If you'd love to find out more about that, if we've not worked with you at any point in time and you'd like to find find out more, we'd happily get on an exploratory call willing to do that almost anytime. And again, I'm not able to do that with every single person, but if you'd like to do that, and that seems like something that makes sense for you to plan ahead for 2021, you can always email us@teamadammarkel.com teamdommarkel.com if you do that, just go ahead and put in the, in the notes there. Of course you got to tell us you love your life or you want to love your life and all that kind of thing, but if you'd like to get on an exploratory call with myself or another team member, just let us know that as well. Team at Adam Markel. Very, very simple. Now, of course, tomorrow is day four and tomorrow we're going to be talking about resilience and how it is that an I love my life attitude and way of living actually produces resilience. The most important thing right now, I think that any of us can be both individually and as part of our, as part of the organizations and the businesses that we're a part of as an entrepreneur really, is to develop our resilience. And what does that look like? I train on resilience all the time. Organizations from Fortune 50 companies to brand new startups, we are constantly speaking and sharing our insights on this very crucial skill of resilience. And we're going to talk about what that looks like tomorrow in connection with this attitude, this way of being that we call the I love my life challenge. So tomorrow's gonna be amazing. I want you to leave your insights, please share insights today. Share your declaration, share your moment and consider all of the things that we have shared with you today as something that might become best practice in your life, including the gratitude that you express upon waking. The waking, gratitude, practice or ritual rituals are gonna be on Friday. So tomorrow's Resilience day Friday, we're going to talk about actual rituals and the things that we do to change. And the first ritual, the first two rituals for me every single day are I wake up, I feel grateful, and then I put my feet on the floor and I say those words, those four words out loud. I love my life. Go ahead and put that, please, if you're willing to declare I love my life. I wish I could See all of you to do it right now. I know when we get together on zoom with folks, we get people, you know, for us all to be able to express that together, right? I love my life. I love my life. I love my life. But since we can't do that at the moment, please go ahead and just with exclamation points, put it in the comments. I love my life. I love my life. As though you're throwing your arms up and in the air to say it, that you're just going, I love my life. So go ahead and do that right now. That's the waking ritual. And certainly for me, within the first half hour that I am awake in the morning, I pick up my code of conduct, I sit down for five to 10 minutes and I feel into how it is that I want to experience myself today. How do I want to experience my life today? I wish you all the day of your dreams today. Today, not tomorrow. Today we have everything we need to be successful in our lives today. Tomorrow will take care of itself. Let's talk about today. Let's do something for ourselves today. Yes. Let's do something for our, for ourselves and have it be that what we do for ourselves today is actually an offering and a gift to the world and for everybody else around us today. I love you all. I know our team is just feeling so blessed, so lucky that you've all shown up and it's just going to keep getting better and better. We'll see you tomorrow, we'll see you Friday and hopefully we will see you at our, our launch event for the book on Friday evening as well. All right, ciao everybody. Keep commenting, keep looking in the group today for other people's insights. They're so inspirational. And again, thank you so much for everybody that's gone ahead and been sharing those really important moments in your life. Chris Frank, Karen Smith, Sharon, thank you so much for sharing those things and we'll see you all tomorrow. Bye bye, everybody. Ciao for now.