The ONE LESSON You Need to Not Repeat 2020 (How to be the TRUE Creator of Your Reality)

The world and business world are beginning to return to normal after the COVID 19 pandemic. As things open up, you're likely noticing opportunities to flourish in business as it opens up too. But there's a key lesson that needs to be gleaned from what actually happened during the quote UNQUOTE Chaos of 2020. And that lesson can catapult you into massive success this year and every year to come. If you don't learn this lesson, you're susceptible to future chaos. If you do learn it, you'll know you are the true creator of your reality, no matter what is happening in the world around you. Ready to discover what this lesson is? You're listening to the Universe has yous Business. It's the podcast for rising entrepreneurs, coaches, and change makers who are here to achieve more while letting the universe do the heavy lifting. And and I'm your host, Andrew Donovan. Now, the title of this episode was totally Bait Click. Because while yes, I want to talk to you about the one lesson you need to not repeat, 2020, what I really want you to glean from this conversation is how to be the true creator creator of your reality, despite anything that might be going on around you. So I thought this idea for this episode at the end of last year, I always end my year with a big year review. I do a lot of journaling and reflecting, and I concluded that 2020 was easily the best year of my life so far at the time. And I had a few moments where I just chuckled to myself and also kind of kept this idea quiet to myself for the time being because I know that a of people were still letting the dust settle from a crazy, crazy year and a lot of people were still experiencing a lot of contrast. And I'm going to tell you right now, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some of the conditions that made 2020 such a wild ride in such a point of contrast for so many of us. And I promise you, I was not without moments of intense contrast. But I totally believe that it was the best year of my life up to that point. So I waited a few months. It's June now, in 2021, and I thought, okay, I think the dust has settled enough for this conversation to happen, and I think that it's a really important one. So there was a lot of contrast in 2020, and if you know anything about contrast, when you know more of what you don't want, you also simultaneously know know more of what you do want. And in this lies the key to Feeling truly empowered. It doesn't matter if you're looking at your personal life, your relationships, your health, your business from and how all of those things were affected in 2020. The lesson here is universal. So we're starting to see the world to return to some state of normalness, if that's even a word. We're seeing vaccinations across the board, all over the place being distributed. Businesses are able to oper at their normal paces in a lot of places. We're having fewer restrictions with masks and with social distancing. And it's gonna take a little bit of time. And I'm not here to talk anything about COVID I'm not here to talk about whether I believe in vaccines or masks or any of that stuff. Okay? What I want to talk to you about is how to not repeat some of the unpleasantness that a lot of people experience in 2020, and especially how to springboard a of lot off of the contrast that happened. So when I did my journaling at the end of the year, I looked at how much personal growth I experienced, my marriage experienced more growth than ever before. And I actually had record breaking years in business, which was really fun to see. We had to evolve, we adapted. And my team and I, everyone got to keep their jobs. There were some intense moments where I didn't know how we were going to keep everybody in employment, but we did. And you know what I noticed is that there was a lot of collective temptation in the world to blame conditions in 2020, I mean, and we had some really obvious ones. We had the COVID 19 pandemic, which kind of took over a lot of stuff. Almost everything in the world was affected in some way and in many ways intensely by COVID 19. And then in the United States, where I live, we had a really intense election that was highly polarizing. Families were divided, friend groups were divided, political parties were obviously divided. And then we had some social issues. We had the Black Lives Matter movement that just exploded into protests and riots and just a sense of incredible dis ease with some social issues that we want to make faster and greater progress with. And that, I mean, I've just, I've said the obvious ones. There were also like the beginning of 2020, we had the Australian wildfires, which everybody quickly forgot as soon as COVID 19 exploded everywhere. But geez, there was a lot of condition that would be really easy to blame. Do you know what I'm talking about? You look at those things and you say, oh, business isn't going the way we want it to because of. And then you name the condition that you think is, is the explanation for why your business isn't going the way you want it to, or you're having a hard time being stuck in an apartment with your family and everyone's spending a lot more time in close proximity than you're used to. And you say, yeah, things are really just kind of on edge at home with the family because of. And you name the condition that you want to blame for the state of your family relationships. I mean, choose anything that you felt was out of ordinary, anything that wasn't the way you wanted it to be. And it's really easy to find a, a world condition that you think might be to blame for things not being the way you want them to be. This is kind of how human beings tend to operate, right? We find ourselves feeling negatively. We look around us and find the condition that is the closest explanation to explain why we're displeased with whatever we're observing. And then we either say, okay, let's complain collectively about this condition or let's fight against it, push back against it. And I'm not going to tell you that any of that is wrong. Alright? But I will point this out though. Most people are not consciously creating their reality. We say all the time, oh yeah, your thoughts become things, your thoughts become your reality. But if that's true, then why do we spend so much time thinking about the disempowering things that we think are taking over our lives or inhibiting us from having what we want? Do we really believe that we're the creators of our reality or do we believe that? It's nice to say that, but ultimately we are indeed susceptible to conditions in the world around us. So when I say most people don't consciously create, what I mean is that they just tend to regurgitate what they observe and then ironically, they resent that the things they're observing keep showing up. So. So you might have had some moments where you were upset with how your government or your local authorities were handling the pandemic. And maybe you didn't like how businesses were restricted or how businesses were open too liberally. Maybe you didn't like the mask mandate, maybe you didn't like people who weren't respecting the mask mandates, whatever it is. You could probably look at 2020 and identify things that you were protesting against emotionally, maybe vocally, maybe on social media, maybe when you'd see people. I remember for many months there were times when we'd run into people we hadn't seen for a while because of quarantine and social distancing. And the first question almost invariably was, so, how are you holding up? How are you dealing with all of this? And for the first little while, my spouse and I, we would kind of sympathize with people, and we'd say, oh, yeah, you know, it's been weird. It's been kind of rough. And. But after a little while, I realized that I wasn't being truthful when I answered that way. Because for me, first of all, everyone thinks I'm an extrovert, but I'm actually in many ways, introverted. I loved the quarantine. It was so nice to be able to be at home and to read more books and spend time with my spouse. And, I mean, he needed some space. He needed lots more space than I did. But, I mean, I really enjoyed the quarantine. But, you know, the way that I really made an effort to handle a lot of those conditions that were loud and big and in many ways painful and intense. Last year, in 2020, I would look at the contrast, and I would recognize that my observing the contrast wouldn't make it go away. It wouldn't change it. And I did not want to align myself energetically with the negative conditions that I could easily observe. Does that make sense to you? And so I would see the contrast, and as often as I was conscious, I would say, ooh, there's an opportunity to pivot. There's an opportunity to focus somewhere else. And some of you might be listening to this episode, and you might be thinking, hold on, this is ridiculous. There were real problems last year. There were huge issues with social and racial injustices. There were huge issues with people dying from a pandemic, with people getting sick, with hospitals being overrun and overwhelmed. And I'm not gonna say that those conditions weren't real, because they were real. But your aligning with the pain of a condition doesn't help you, and it doesn't make the condition change. And that's where people tend to forget that they're the conscious creators of your reality. Sometimes we say we're the conscious creators of our reality. And unless something's really big happening, something really awful is happening, then we're just subject. We're at the mercy of that awful thing happening. But, I mean, do you really get to have it both ways? You're the creator of your life or you're the victim of what's happening around you? Which one would you rather choose? And so for me, 2020 was really an opportunity to practice constant pivoting, constant refocusing. You know, people asked me, so what do you think about 2020? Do you think that it was really a rough year? Do you think that. Do you think that we made a lot of it up? Do you think that we exaggerated or magnified problems and made them bigger than they were? And what I would say is what you put your focus on, you get more of. So I know there's people all over the board that say there was a virus. China made up the virus, scientists in a lab and invented the virus. It's a hoax. The pharmaceuticals wanted there to be a virus. Or. And then there's people who are like, there's obviously hard, fast evidence that there was a virus. I mean, you have polarized opinions everywhere. I don't care what your opinion is. The only thing I want to say to you is that what you focus on, you get more of. For me, the real difference between 2020 and other previous years is that we simply had some big, common folks focal points. You see, if you are in the habit of focusing on problems and letting those problems become what Napoleon Hill called the airtight alibis to explain your, oh, way, your lack of success, whether it's money success, relationship success, health success, business success, doesn't matter. If you are the kind of person who has the habit of focusing on problems and letting those be your airtight alibi to explain away your lack of having what you want, you're gonna do that with or without the conditions that happened in 2020. You don't need a world health pandemic. You don't need crazy emotional social issues to come up. You don't need Australian wildfires to come up, you'd find problems to blame regardless. And what really made 2020 different wasn't that it was a worse year. It's that there were some very clear common focal points and people who would have. This is gonna. And I know I'm probably gonna get some unsubscribes here at this point, but I'm just gonna lay it out as it is. Do I have your permission to do that? I'm gonna do it anyway. If you're the kind of person who was going to find a reason to be unhappy, you were gonna do that without 2020, okay? And if you're the kind of person who says, you know, life is meant to have contrast, that's just how this physical world works. Contrast is the birthplace of. Of improvement. Contrast is the birthplace for new inspiration, for innovation, for evolution. And if you're the kind of person who says, you know, I know that I'm going to meet contrast because that's just how this physical life works. And I am going to learn to springboard from that contrast into the direction of more of what I want, into the direction of more of what feels a little bit better, what feels a little more inspiring, what feels like the improvement that. That I want to fall into, evolve into in my life. If you're that kind of person, then you probably didn't have the worst year of your life. And if you're like. If you're a human being, then you're probably like most of us. And you had a mix of a few things, which is more likely. So nobody is only stuck in the negative contrast or only flourishing in the positive counterpart of the contrast. All right? Because contrast is both light and dark, right? Nobody is either or. We're all a mix. And so. But for me, I had many moments during 2020 where, like, with those social and racial issues that were happening and the. I mean, police cars being set on fire, I live right by the Utah State Capitol building here in Salt Lake City, and it was just covered in graffiti and protests for days and things burning. And it was very emotional for me. And I tried to add my voice to the mix and got a lot of flack and got a lot of support because nobody was happy with one message. We were just in such a state of upheaval, and I had people get sick. I had family members of my team, of my staff die from COVID My grandmother died from COVID I got Covid. It wasn't bad. And my point is not to say, oh, he is not to get you to say, wow, he had a hard year. My point is to say, everybody has opportunities to be sucked into the contrast or to pivot from. From it. And, you know, it's not bad to spend a lot of time in the contrast. It's not bad because the longer you stay there, the more clear you become about wanting to be somewhere else. And that can actually be quite valuable, but it's not necessary. Okay, so, like, I would never look at the BLM movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, matter movement from last year, and judge how we handled it. We handled it. How we handled it. Do I want us to see much faster progress on that front? Totally. I want us to be a colorblind world. Do I think that we handled it wrong? No. Do I think that we handled it necessarily? No. I think that you could always springboard toward the solutions faster, but it's not wrong to spend time in the contrast. What I think is really valuable to glean from here, and this one lesson that I'm talking about in this episode, is that your ability to choose your focus really where your power is, okay? So when you look at a government agency or a big pharmaceutical company or a law enforcement agency, or a public health group, or just the public opinion, and you say, look at the problem here, that's not wrong. Because the negative emotion you're feeling, it's just your indicator that you're pointed in the direction of what you don't want. And at any moment you can start to choose to pivot your focus and toward what you do want. Marianne Williamson, she was the US Presidential candidate recently and also the author of one of my very favorite books, the Law of Divine Compensation. She says the solution does not exist on the same plane as the problem. And that's where I love that. I thought about that many times during 2020 because there were all these problems that we wanted to solve. And I'm not just talking about big group problems. You probably had individual things you wanted to solve. Maybe you had a hard time paying bills because of economic impact from various things last year. Maybe you had a hard time keeping business going or launching your business. Whatever it was. The problem is always a different energy than the solution. The solution always feels like relief. It feels like encouragement. It feels like forward motion. The problem feels heavy, sticky, muddy, stuck. It feels like injustice. It feels infuriating, it feels depressing. Sometimes it feels. Name any negative emotion. That is the kind of energy around a problem, which, again, not wrong. That's just where you springboard from. And the more that you can say, I am going to learn to be the kind of human being who springboards from the contrast. That, my friend, is, is where you discover more and more of your personal power. And it's where you realize that you get to create your reality with or without the circumstances that everyone around you thinks is reality. Because here's what's true. Anything you focus on becomes real. I mean, those of you who are parents and have little kids, if you have a child who's scared of the dark because there's monsters in the dark, you think, well, that's not real. But to your child, it's real, correct? And you might say, but it's not real because physically there are no monsters. But to your child, they can imagine those monsters. They feel the emotion in response to their perception of those monsters. It's totally real. And so then some of you who are very fact based human beings. You might be saying, okay, but you can't look at the health pandemic and say that wasn't real. And my point to you is there were human beings in 2020 that continued to live joyful lives. And while you might want to say they were privileged or they had some kind of advantage that you didn't have, the only true advantage ever is the advantage of shifting your focus towards something that feels like improvement, towards something that feels like more of the reality you want to immerse yourself in. Toward the feeling of improvement, toward the feeling of shift, of evolution. Something that feels like relief, something that feels like encouragement, something that feels it doesn't have to be joyful, it doesn't have to be gratitude that might be distant energetically from where you are in certain moments, but you can always shift towards subtle improvement, toward a feeling of relief or gentle satisfaction. In any moment of contrast, you can start to pivot in that direction. And, and the more you do it, the more you realize how powerful you really are. And the more you realize that law of attraction is always in effect. And that as you start to shift your focus in the direction of subtle improvement, subtle satisfaction, a little bit of relief, a little more satisfaction, that law of attraction starts to compound that focus and that energy, and you receive more thoughts and more vibes and you be more, more vibes, you become more of that kind of vibe and your life starts to shift. And then physical things in your reality begin to shift as well. Friend, we're talking about 2020, but I've discussed the same concept in multiple episodes, and every time I have this conversation, people say, wow, that was game changer for me, or light bulbs went off. And it's really the same principle on repeat, but I guess we explore from different angles and that can be really valuable. So when you look at your 2020, I hope that you repeat more of what worked in 2020, and I hope that you springboard off of the contrast, the things that didn't work for you. I hope you springboard off of those things into what would work a little bit better. All right, so ask yourself, how can you focus differently during the rest of this year? And I mean really in any year to come, how can you take that ability to choose your focus to say, you. I'm not going to buy into the reality that might be affecting everybody else. I'm going to focus in the direction of a reality that I want to create. And I know that I live in an abundant, generous, loving universe where the things that I focus on, compound and become larger. And so I'm going to focus on things that I want to see more of. And I'm going to, yes, stop talking about the problems that I don't like. I'm not going to tell everybody that the quote unquote reality of how things are and maybe how I don't like certain things. I'm going to talk about the things that are going well. Does that look naive to people? Maybe some people. But you know what? I'm not here to please them. I'm not here to bend to their version of reality. I am here to create. And the creator that I am is somebody who creates improvement, creates those good feeling things that I want to move in the direction of personally. And then I know that society is made up of many individuals. So I'm therefore creating and contributing my best to the community around me, to my family, to the people that I interact with by tuning into the whole of who I really am, by focusing in the direction of where I want to go, and by being an example of what it looks like to be a conscious creator of a positive future. And that, my friend, is the one lesson that I hope that you can take from 2020 and also any moment of your life that may be contrast heavy. Alright, there is so much opportunity. If you found something valuable in this episode, please tell us about it in a review on Apple Podcasts. Be sure to hit that subscribe button so that you don't miss another episode. And if you have a friend or colleague who would benefit from this message, well, hit that share button and send this episode to them through text or through dm. You know, we want to create more of this content. We want to keep this podcast, this message thriving. So we count on shares and we count on reviews to get the word out. So if you could spare 30 seconds to go type something in an Apple Podcast review. Just a quick note to sharing what you learned. That is so helpful and that helps us keep this podcast thriving for you. Thank you for joining me on this episode. Much love to you and I will see you next time.