Stephen Scoggins walks through how breakthroughs happen: a thought triggers an emotion, attitude, physiological response, and action. Change the thought first. He shares concrete tactics: challenge negative thoughts by recalling past wins, tackle hard tasks early and reward yourself, and clear mental clutter with an end-of-day brain dump before prioritizing what actually matters.
Chapters
What makes breakthrough possible? Breakthrough is possible for everyone. And oftentimes people make it far more complicated than it actually has to be. And here's what I mean by that. When you understand that everything starts with a thought, that then creates an emotion, that then creates an associable attitude, then creates a physiological response, then creates an actual action. What you do is you start with the beginning and work your way forward. So you start with the thoughts that you're having and the way you're thinking about yourself, about your situation, about your friendships, about those specific things. And you start working forwards by asking questions, well, how does it make me feel? What if I use that same piece of information to feel differently? How would that change my attitude? How would that attitude affect me differently? For example, if, if I'm angry, my physiological response is going to be clinched and like tight. Whereas if I'm asking, hey, what can I learn from this situation? I may not be quite as angry, which means I'm more relaxed, which means I'm going to take a better action, which also means I'm going to get a much better result. So the trick is, is to be present minded with your thoughts. And I mean that quite literally. I call it a challenge thought. So when a thought comes in that's going to challenge me to create it to take a knee jerk reaction rather than respond, I challenge it immediately and I ask questions like what else can I learn about this? How better way can I understand this? What different way can I get a perspective on this? How can I change the feeling that I'm feeling in the moment? Why? Because I find that so many times if when we react that reaction is causing the negative result we want to eliminate. So you want to move away from reaction thinking and more towards responsive thinking. Right. Which means you got to take care of your ownership. Excuse me, take care and ownership of your thoughts in order to actually get the actions that you need to produce the results you want. I hope that helps. But that's the quick way and the quick answer on that question.
Okay guys, the next question for you is this. How do I overcome negative thoughts? Alright, well let's first talk about what a negative thought is. I. A negative thought is nothing more than a thought that's not going to produce reliable fruit in your life. In other words, when you look at your financial picture and you've got the negative mindset towards how you budget and how you do things, then you're not going to take the time that you need in order to make sure that you are actually taking the Time to save and spend appropriately. Now, if the negative thought is something that's challenging your overall self belief and self worth and self esteem, then obviously that question could be much deeper. What I mean by that is you need to take the time to look deeply into yourself and actually identify what the negative thought is. Right. So many people think, hey, I feel depressed rather than the actual thought that's leading them towards that, which is I don't feel like anybody loves me or I don't feel like I'm ever going to measure up or I never feel like I'm going to get by. These are negative thoughts that you want to challenge and replace. Challenge and replace. Anytime that I feel like I'm not good enough, the first thing that I do is I remind myself of all the different things that have come up in my life and all the different times I've been able to overcome. All the different times I'm able to lean into my faith to help me identify who I am, what I'm here to do and how I'm going to about do it, how I'm going to go about doing it. That's the best way that I found to actually help eliminate negative thinking. Right. Does the thought produce an action that's going to give you a beneficial result and if the answer is no, you have a negative thought on your hands and all you need to do is ask questions about how you can position it in order to help yourself move forward.
All right guys, tough one today. Appreciate that, I think a little bit. Alright, here we go. How do I do the things that I know I need to do that I hate doing? I can't tell you how many times this was my Achilles heel or how many times this held me back. Here's what I've learned to do that seems to help actually kind of move through the process and help me kind of move forward in my own life and hopefully it'll help you and do the same thing. Here's this. Always do the hard work first. In other words, it's a principle in my life that I always do the hard work first, then I reward myself. Sometimes it's with a piece of candy, sometimes it's with going out on a date or going on a vacation or to the movies. But inevitably I use that reward, if you will, the reward that's hanging out in front of me as a carrot, if you will, to help me go after with everything I've got. It allows me to do the hard work first. When I went to go write, then my next book for example, stuck to unstoppable. There are certain days I didn't feel like I was in flow. There were certain days that I felt like I was pulling the chapters out of my brain rather than letting it flow out of my heart. Well, those are hard days. So I took a quick break. I reassessed what I needed to do. I decided the outline that I needed to accomplish. I then put it into action. I did the hard work first. I got the flow I was looking for, and then I spent an amazing weekend with my wife and rewarded myself as a result. And as a result, hopefully that book will be out first of next year. Now, if you do those same things by doing the hard work first, then I think that you'll also get the same results. And finally move past this fear, if you will, of like, I really hate doing it. I don't want to do it. I don't want to touch it. Life doesn't have to be that way. Instead, take charge, Go after it like a warrior. And like, oh, yeah, I'm going to conquer this thing. I'm going to move it forward. I'm going to get. I'm going to keep it moving forward. And then take your breather, then get your reward, get that dopamine hit and allow yourself to do it easier the next time. Hope that helps.
So you guys are keeping the hard questions coming, to say the least. The next question is, how can I improve my focus? The best way to improve your focus is to learn to eliminate the distractions. And here's what I mean by that. At the end of every day, I do a quasi brain dump. In other words, all the things that I didn't get done or all the things that are on my agenda, all the different meetings that I didn't have or the meetings I should have and things like that, and I list all of that stuff out. The next thing I do is I prioritize those in level of importance. Now, important things for me either give me a huge pickup or they're urgent matters that have to be done right rather than the distraction items that may be someone who wants to meet that I simply don't have time to meet at the moment, okay? I use those items to prioritize what actions I need to take the next day and the next day and the next day and the next day. So often what we do wrong is we take everything that's going on in our life and we just let it spin in this rat wheel in our brain over and over and over again, right? All the different tasks, all the different meetings, all the different relationships, all the different financial woes, all the different job procurement that you're trying to go after, when stuff stays in your head and never gets on paper, then what happens is you end up getting overwhelmed. Why? Because the human brain is a lot like a computer. There is such thing as running out of storage space, at least on the surface level. So what you want to do is you want to do what you would do on a computer. You want to take everything that's cluttering up your desktop and you want to trash it in the recycle bin. Same approach to your brain. If you want to increase your focus, all you've got to do is identify, clarify, and take action. As you do that over and over and over again, you'll realize that your focus is improving because you eliminated more distractions than you probably realized that were there in the first place. So do those things. Try that and and let me know how that works for you and I'll see you next Video.
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