Tap Into Joy at Any Moment – Using This Skill

Using your imagination to imbue the moments of life with meaning and beauty and significance and fulfillment and awe and wonder is a central component of becoming a consistent, disciplined, high performing person. Last night, while you were sleeping, the world carried on. While you might have been worried a little bit about how things were going, how you might turn out, whether or not you can get it done this week, all these stressors happening, the world carried on. It's a beautiful thing that there's this flow and this motion and this expansion happening all around you all the time. Whether or not you're aware of it, whether or not you're in flow with it, whether or not you like it, this constant flow, this evolution, this change, this adaptation, this expansion is happening 24 7. It was happening before we got here, it'll happen after we're gone. It's this beautiful expansion of the universe that we get to tap into. And so when you woke up today, and maybe in this moment right now, as you're listening to this, you're just going to decide to go, oh yeah, things are moving forward for me, whether or not I can see them, whether or not I know what's happening. The future holds good things for me. There's a flow leading towards my ultimate destiny that I may or may not understand, but it is carrying me forward every day. And you can be carried forward every day in trust and in faith or in despair and in fear. Today, let's choose trust and faith. Let's imagine that there's this great wave behind us, that there are thousands of ancestors behind us, that there's this great force carrying us forward, urging us forward, cheering us on. I like to say that so many people lack imagination and the kind of imagination that would make life feel even more epic. And sometimes the only connection we have to a greater world or a greater force is like the news or social media. Two things that make us compare ourselves to others, or become competitive or self doubt ourselves or just become stressed. And so sometimes what we have to do is tap into our own imagination for how epic the world is, how incredible things are. And that's really what I opened up with today. Imagine this great flow of force. Imagine things moving and evolving and getting better. Imagine the future is going to be incredible for you, leading you to an ultimate destiny. Or when you hear me talk about waking up in the morning and grabbing your spear of purpose and throwing out as far as you can that day and striving to work and move and go and go and work towards it, pick it up again the next Day, throw it as far as you can each day. It's just imagination to make the day feel more epic. I mean, think about how you describe and think about life. Some people, well, I get up and I go over my little post it note and I scribbled down my to do list here and Richard's out there like, and I picked up my spear of purpose and I threw it out there. It's imagining life to be a little more grand. It's using the creativity that you have been gifted with to make your mission, to make your cause, to make your family, to make your dreams vivid and real and spectacular. Now, I know some people. Oh boy, here we go. Brandon, that optimistic kid, you know, can't we just live in reality? Can't. Can't we just accept things as they are? I mean, does everything have to be so bright and vivid and beautiful and amazing? No, they don't. But don't be surprised if you're having a lot of bad days that feel blah. If you're not using your imagination to plus the world, don't be so surprised that sometimes you get so stressed that some things don't feel so fulfilling because you didn't take the moments of the day and enlarge them into the realm of meaning, into the realm of beauty. I remember one time in my 20s when I got very dedicated to the nonprofit world and I was volunteering at a soup kitchen and we were working to do simple tasks, literally just prepare meals and prepare a space that felt good for people in need to have a nice meal. And you know, it was a long, long, long busy day. And at the end of the day, I. I took a break outside and a friend of mine came out and he smoked and so he was having a cigarette. I didn't smoke. I just needed some air. So that didn't help. So I was out. It was a long day. And the way that he described what we were doing that day felt so mundane and kind of boring and awful and tedious. And these tasks of washing the plates, of putting things away, of making the meal felt just so uninspired the way he was describing them. In my mind, I was changing the world. In my mind, I was making human connection. In my mind, this meal was so important to this person because they didn't have this meal before they entered this, this door. And here we are, this group of small but mighty hearted individuals coming together to make a meal. For some people, in my mind, it was important. Now guess who showed up that next Sunday? Not the other guy. And I feel like that using your imagination to imbue the moments of life with meaning and beauty and significance and fulfillment and awe and wonder is a central component of becoming a consistent, disciplined, high performing person. Otherwise you get bored. Otherwise the tedious things that no one wants to do week over week over week over week bears down on you and you just go, why even because, see, it is an act of human imagination to attach meaning to things, so why not make that meaning spectacular and bright and beautiful and big and amazing. People will say though, but Brandon, every time I do that, I quote unquote get my hopes up and they are dashed. I feel disappointed because then I go do the thing and it's not that amazing. Well, listen, anything we do, we can either make amazing or not. We have the ability to enact initiative to change the outcome. So first, show up, deliver, work hard. But second, don't be so small as a child that everything is a disappointment to you anymore. I believe that the big shift in our lives is when disappointment is entirely replaced by a learning mindset. I don't get disappointed. I learn. So if I blow this thing up as a big, important, spectacular, fun thing and I go in with reverence and excitement and awe and it turns out to be not as good as I thought it would be, what's worse? Not looking forward to it, going through the motions, not trying, taking a blah result, forgetting about it later or imagining great things, getting excited, feeling the enthusiastic spirit in my life, having faith that things are going to turn out, going to the thing, ready to deliver, ready to make magic, ready to experience something incredible. And then if it doesn't turn out incredible, gosh, all those emotions made me feel alive. And in that moment, I tried a little bit harder. So I upped the odds that it would turn out incredible by sheer force of imagination and will. And if it turns out great, it feels 10 times better. If I didn't care and I schlepped through it and it turns out great, it's like, oh, okay, no emotion, no effort, no earning of it all. And so even a good outcome feels like nothing without imagination. Imagine your life. Imagine if you enjoyed this episode today. Do me a favor. Help us build this mindset in the world. Let's make self improvement thinking a way of life for people. It's transformative. It's not just shifts in mindsets. It's shifts in mindsets and habits, in our relationships, in our community. Our way of engaging the entire world is based on how we approach our personal development, how disciplined we are in Considering new ideas to make life even more magical. I imagine an army of strivers out there who are saying, I want to improve my world, I want to improve the world. And it all starts with each and every single one of us waking up each day making self improvement a way of life, every single day remembering that this moment we can make meaningful, we can make beautiful. That every day we get that choice. Because every day is a good day to grow. Have you ever just thought during your day about the wonder of it all? The magic, the blessing, the surprising abundance around you, the remarkable fact that you still have this breath? Have you ever thought about the wonder of life? I love meeting new parents, people who just had a child in their first maybe 60 fatigue filled days, that they've never been more tired in their entire life. And they have this look of awe and wonder and almost glee in their eyes about the birth of their child. It's a magical sense that they get to experience in their life. At some point they always end up taking it for granted, just like we all do in every other area of our life. But there's a sense of wonder and awe to the majesty of life. Same goes when I like to take friends to Montana and show them big sky, Let them see how that is so true. The Big sky state really does have a bigger sky. And take them up to Glacier national park and show them the beauty of this planet and the way their eyes open when I show them a crystal, pure, perfect lake. There's that awe that the majesty when you see nature in its full force. And yet so many times we blaze through the week and we miss the wonder of it all. I mean, isn't it a remarkable thing that you just had the week you had, Whether it was good or bad, you got good news or bad news, the project failed or proceeded ahead. It's kind of amazing that your whole life led to that week. And we can be distraught about that when we have bad weeks. Oh my gosh, my whole life led to this crappy week. And get down on ourselves when we lose perspective. I really believe that's the ultimate tell of dissatisfaction in our lives. When we lose perspective to the wonder of it all. We get so mired and beaten down and in the weeds of our emails and texts and slacks and busyness and we miss how remarkable it is that we had the choice to do what we even did. How remarkable it is that we happen to be in this town or doing this job or the blessings of being with these people, serving this mission, doing this work. We forget the people around us who've been pretty patient, honestly, with all of our distractions or passions or both, we find that we become more impatient with life when we lose the wonder. And so today, maybe you come back to center. You find a moment just to sit with your eyes closed, breathing deeply, thinking about the wonder of your life, the blessings of it all, the remarkable nature of how things turned out for you and how even if everything's not perfect, there's still an open gate, the wondrous possibility that comes with choice and new directions, new decisions, new habits, new environments that even when we're in the dark times, that wonder that we still have a new dawn tomorrow, the highest performing people I've ever worked with in my life still have that sense of wonder. There's almost like a childlike enthusiasm for the day, for the opportunity, the things ahead of them. I think of having the blessing of having worked with Oprah Winfrey in my life. And I remember how every time I hear her speak about her story, there's a sense of wonder to it. There's a sense of gratitude. There's a sense that maybe there was destiny at play, that there was a higher purpose. There's a wonder and a reverence for her own story and her own journey. And yeah, you can say, of course that's easy for Oprah. No, but that's why she got to have that. When you open your mind and your soul and your service to possibility, you stay grounded in the wonder and the. The miraculous nature of it all. Whether you pushed ahead and you forced it and you made it happen, or grace opened up a gate for you, it's a wonder that you are here today. It is a blessing that you are here today. It's a remarkable fact that you have a new day tomorrow in which new choices, new habits, new decisions can be made to make your life even more wonderful. Because every day you can grow, every day you can change. Every day you can open up to possibility. But first, recognize it, see it, look at the wonders of your week, look at the wonders of your relationships, look at the wonders of your contributions and feel that joy, that enthusiasm, that blessed, like, just appreciation and awe for your life. When you do that, you do start to feel differently about life. You start to raise to a higher level of consciousness. You start to feel a greater sense of reverence and sudden a momentum. There's an openness. There's something remarkable happening in your life every day, because every day you choose to be open to the wonder of it all. Every day is a good day to grow, my friends. That's what we're doing here. It's a wonder we get to do this work. It's a blessing we get to do this work. I love having you in this community because we can make that choice every single day to open our minds, recognize the wonder of it all, live in appreciation and awe of all of it, because every day is a good day to grow.