The Victor or Victim Mindset

Hello, Entheos Optimal Living Academy. So excited to be here once again. My name is Travis Thomas, and I am a leadership coach at IMG Academy. as well as the creator of 30 Days of Yes, actually soon to be Living Yes and, so new name coming soon, life coaching and public speaking. A veteran here. I guess 4 or 5 talks makes me a veteran at this point. I think that qualifies. Our talk today is How to Ditch the Victim Mindset. The other title we could have used is How to Make a Billion Dollars I'll tell you why. Actually, I'm going to give you permission to make that billion dollars. I just want 1%. I'm not greedy. Just give me 1%. We'll talk about that billion dollars in a little bit. That sounds a little cheesy, though, so let's stick with how to ditch the victim mindset. This whole talk really— there's one quote that I think really captures this talk, and it's a Shakespeare— it's a quote from Shakespeare. I think it was Hamlet. Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. That's good. All right. Think about that for a second. Nothing is either good or bad, but what makes it so? But thinking. All right. So our whole talk about victim or victor mindset today is going to sort of revolve around the crux at the heart of what that quote actually means. So what I want you to do right now, I want you to ask yourself, on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you? Just in your head, give yourself a digit. Are you at a 9? Are you at a 10? Ooh, that'd be awesome if you are. Congratulations. Are you at a 5, a 6, or Or are you wallowing down in a tough spot right now? Where are you? Just be honest with yourself. You don't need to tell anybody. I believe that there's this happiness scale or this peace scale, whatever you want to call it, that exists for all of us. I think we all have sort of a default of where we rest for the most part. Granted, when something awesome happens, that spikes us up a little bit on the happiness scale. When something bad happens, that knocks us down a few notches. Depending on the severity of the event. But I believe that we all have a default that at any given moment, when things kind of calm down, we settle back to wherever we are on that scale. So my goal today is to give you the tools, to give you a couple of ideas to help you consciously choose and move yourself up a few notches and to understand how you can actually do that. And so I'm excited to do it. This is a talk that I that I give all of the time, so I'm honored and excited to bring it to the Entheos community. So we're going to break and ditch that victim mindset. So here we go, let's do it. Victims be damned, here we go. Big idea number 1, what is your lens? All right, what is your lens? So here's a scary story I always tell the kids, okay? This is gonna be the scariest story I tell you, all right? So let's pretend that I raised you. Yes, I raised you, and you've never been out of the room that you're in, right? There's no windows on it. I've raised you in that room. Kind of scary, I know. I'm a nice guy, but still kind of scary. I raise you in that room, and I say, today is the big day. Today, you're going to go outside. I'm going to give you a notepad and a pen. You have 10 minutes to write down everything that you see. All right? I say, before you go out, I want you to put these glasses on. Not these cool Kevin Costner glasses. No, I give you glasses and they've got this kind of lens to them. They've got a green lens. I'm like, that sun that we've talked about, it's really potent, so put these glasses on. It'll protect your eyes. You're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. I just want to go outside. You go outside and you see, oh, wow, a tree, and you write down the tree. You're like, oh, those people. Yeah, people. Cars, cars. You write down all these things. You come back in after 10 minutes. I'm like, all right, tell me, what did you see? I saw a tree. You're like, oh, wow. There were these people. I'm like, what color were they? You're like, well, they were green. I was like, oh, there were trees. What color were they? You're like, they were green. There were cars. What color were they? Green. Everything that you saw was green. What I didn't tell you is that I went outside, and I had a different pair of glasses on. These are what my glasses look like. My glasses had a red lens to them. You say, what do you mean the trees were green? They were red. And the people— great, no, they were red— were arguing. Everything's green, red, green, red, green, red. So who's right? Right? Who's right? Are you right? Am I right? Are we both right? We both wrong? Maybe yes, yes to all of the above. The truth is what we see, our perspective, our lens is, is what we experience. The lens through which we view the world is how we view the world. So my question to you today is, what does your lens look like? And so I usually do this in a diagram, but we'll kind of visually go there together. So the first thing I want you to envision is there is you, and then you've got this metaphorical lens through which you view the world. So let's just talk about that lens for a second. I call the lens your perspective. So the way that you look at everything is clearly your perspective. And so whether you think something is good or bad is usually your perspective. So let's just go a little bit deeper. What is our perspective usually based on? People could say, well, it's how you grew up, your life experiences, your religion, things like that, which could be true. I would say at the base of all of that is your beliefs. Your beliefs create your perspective. What I believe in my heart tends to be the perspective through which I view the world. If I think that the world is a nasty, nasty place and everyone's out to get me, Right. And that's, that's these glasses, right? That's the world is out to get me glasses, right? I don't quite— these are 3D glasses that apparently my kids stole from the movie theater. All right. So if you believe that the world is out to get you and that that's these glasses, everything that you see is going to re— is just going to back up your defense that the world is out to get you. You know, look at that, look at that, look at that, right? If I believe, if I put my Kevin Costner glasses on, which are the world is a great place and everyone is loving, I'm going to see examples all the time based on my perspective, and my perspective is based on my beliefs. Simple. Here we go. We've got you, we've got your perspective, all right? And your perspective is based on your beliefs. Simple pie, simple pie. I'll tell you why this is going to be a billion-dollar idea later. All right? And then we have life. All right? You, your lens, and on the other end of that lens is life. And for the sake of this argument, all right, Life is just what's happening. But before we get there, I realized I got so excited that I'm jumping ahead of myself. All right. So big idea number 1 is, what is your lens? Big idea number 2 is the Earth is not flat. And what do I mean by that? For thousands of years, we believed that the Earth was flat. Well, not you and I. It was kind of before our time. But we believed that the Earth was flat. Don't sail out too far because you'd fall off the face of the Earth. And so that belief affected our behavior. Think of all the things of how people adjusted to that belief. Now we know at this point that that belief wasn't true, but it affected our behavior. So when we talk about our beliefs, when we talk about our perspective, don't mistake belief with truth, but just know that our beliefs tend to inform how we view the world, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's true. And that's a huge, huge point to understand. And that's why our beliefs are just simply our perspective. They really help define how we view the world, but we'll talk about those more. Big idea number 3 is life equals what's happening. What I mean by that, life is simply the facts of what is happening. You've got you, you've got your perspective through how which you view the world, boom, and then you've got life. It's just happening. Whatever is happening right now. What is happening right now? I'm giving this talk, which I love doing. Right. But the facts are, I'm giving this talk. The reality is, right now you are sitting in a room watching this talk. There is no value to what is happening right now until you choose to give it value. Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. So the fact that you are watching this talk right now is neither good or bad until your perspective or your beliefs or your opinion give it judgment. Let me give you another quick example, as if you don't get it already. Let's say the room that you are sitting in, the walls are painted red. The walls are red. Let's say you hate the color red. If you hate the color red, you're going to look at the walls of the room and go, this is an ugly room. Then I walk in, and I don't know how I got there, but I walk in and I love the color red. I'm like, oh my gosh, I love these walls. What a beautiful room. The room is just a room. The walls are just the color red. Whether I like them or not is simply my perspective, my beliefs. The facts are just the facts, but that's what we do. The facts, what is happening, has no value. As we talk about this, remember that what is happening has no value until you choose to give it value. Same walls, different beliefs. Both of us are standing in the same room looking at the same walls. different behavior because we have 2 different beliefs. All right, you with me? It's still common sense, right? It's not a billion-dollar idea yet. All right, stay with me. Big idea number 4. So therefore, happiness is your choice. If we stop this talk right now, I could just say, listen, your beliefs decide whether you're happy or not. All right. They color your experience, no pun intended, of how you view the world. So therefore, happiness is a choice. So wherever you are on your happiness scale, you are there because you have a set of beliefs that have put you there based on how you are judging and valuing everything going on in your life and going on in the world. That makes sense, right? That's kind of a big idea. We're not going to stop there. I'm not going to leave you there. That'd be mean. Let's not stay there. Let's go on to big idea number 5. Beware of the big 3. Okay. Before I get to the big 3, so we've got you, we've got your lens, life is what's happening. Okay. And then to overgeneralize, 2 things kind of happen. You kind of spike up or you spike down. It's kind of like a fork in the road. I want you to visualize it as a fork in the road. Life is what's happening. You bring your perspective to the party and now you create a fork in the road. And let's— that fork I'm going to call Victim at the bottom, victim at the bottom, victor at the top. But let's talk about the victim real quick because that's what we're trying to get out of. So if I were to ask you if you've ever felt like a victim and the answer is yes, right? Absolutely. So what does it feel like when we feel like a victim? Well, obviously it's negative. We tend to feel heavy. Um, we're probably pessimistic. Here's the big 3. When we catch ourselves complaining, blaming, or making excuses. There's the big victim 3 right there. Complaining, blaming, making excuses. All right. Basically saying that other people or something outside of us is responsible for my victimization right now. And therefore, when we, when we catch ourselves blaming someone, complaining about a situation, or just making excuses of why things are bad, We're in the victim mindset. So that is a gift right there. When you catch yourself blaming, complaining, making excuses, you're in the victim mindset. That's why they're the big 3. So you're in the funk. All right. When you, when you're in there, you're in the funk and you can— here's the cool part now is that you can choose yourself out of it. Big idea number 6, choose again. All right. Just to give you a little bit of context on that, one of my favorite sort of analogies or ideas that I was given on choose again was in the Bible. If you just take the word repent, what does repent really mean? Repent just really means choose again. So when it's time to repent, it's time to just choose again. And so when you find yourself in a funk, what can you do about your current belief or perspective is choose again. And so we've got that fork in the road. The victor is on top. The victim is on the bottom. We find ourselves on the bottom. Well, who is responsible for where we go on that scale? Well, you are. I am. So the only thing that separates the victor from the victim is choice, is your choice. So when you feel yourself in the funk, when you feel yourself down there, the opportunity for you is to recognize it, notice it, and now choose again. You can choose to stay down there, but that's your choice, or you can choose to get out of it. Okay. So the choice to get out of it is you going back to your beliefs and changing your perspective. All right. But before we talk too much more about that, let's talk about big idea number 7, which is what do victors do? What does a victor do? So you've got the victor mindset and the victim mindset. It's, it's pretty easy, right? The, the victor is going to tend to do the exact opposite of what the victim mindset is, right? Victors tend to win, but this talk isn't about the results. The talk is about your mindset of how you approach Not what, not, not the outcomes, your approach to life and how you respond to it. Okay? So a victor mindset, they're going to tend to be positive, right? Instead of blaming, complaining, making excuses, they take ownership and responsibility of what's happening, right? They're taking ownership and responsibility of their role in how they are choosing to respond to what's happening. The victor mindset, you tend to adapt, you be flexible, and you do your best. You're constantly living under that mantra of, Control what I can control and do my best. Whatever is happening, you are just adapting, responding, choosing your response, and just doing your best. Which is why when you think about which mindset, the victor or the victim mindset, are you going to be successful and accomplish things? Clearly, it's always going to be in the victor mindset because you're constantly growing, improving, learning, and getting better. In the victim mindset, you're attached to the outcomes and you believe that you're invaluable because something bad happened, and then you just lash out at the world and everyone else as being the cause of why you're unhappy. The victor— we have to understand what the victor does if we're going to be able to choose our way into being a victor. We've got the fork in the road. The event happens. You choose where you go. Victim or victor? The choice is yours. That's why we're at the big idea number 8, which is the billion-dollar question. Travis, why is this a billion-dollar question? Because this is why. We know this. We understand this. Everything that I said to you is actually pretty common sense at this point. You know your beliefs. They color your experience, and then you choose how to respond, right? Here's the billion-dollar question. So if I were to ask you, how do you move yourself up on the happiness scale? What's— what do I— where do I need to focus my attention to move myself up on the happiness scale? Do I need to focus it on the events that are happening in my life, or do I need to focus it on my beliefs? And all of you right now, I'm pretty sure you're saying, Travis, it's clearly your beliefs. Yeah. And you're absolutely correct. Right? And this is why this is the billion-dollar idea. Be honest with yourself for a second. And now when I ask you, where do you spend the majority of your thought thinking about? Do you go back to your beliefs or you go back to what is happening and you fall into the trap of getting caught in wanting to change what's happening and the facts instead of changing your perception about what is happening? Right. Because this is what we do. If you do either one of these 2 things, you're caught in the trap. If you have thoughts such as, if only, or when I. If only I had won that game. If only I had gotten that promotion. If only she had said yes. If only my parents were better. Or you play the other game. When I get that promotion. When I finally get married. When I finally get that new car. Right? That's where our thoughts spend a lot of the time. We fool ourselves into thinking, if only we could control the current events and make our facts better, oh man, would I go up that happiness scale and I would stay there. But we know that's the illusion. We know that we can't have great things happening to us all the time. We can't win the lottery and then win the lottery again and then get everything that we would humanly choose. Right? We know that's not reality, and we all know that we've had awesome things happen to us. But what happens after time? Where do we go? We settle back to our default on our happiness scale. You know, we've all come across people who have more wealth and stuff than they will ever need in their life, yet they're not very happy people. And we all know people that don't have much to call their own from a material possession standpoint, yet they tend to be really, really happy. I use this example of a good friend of mine who on 2 different occasions lost 2 of her children to drunk drivers. Think about that for a second. 3 kids, lost 2 of them to drunk drivers on 2 different occasions, and their child was not at fault. If you were to meet this woman and not know anything about her story, she has the most life and joy than anyone you'll ever meet. It's clearly not based on what has happened to her in her life. It's based on how she believes and her perspective about life and the world that keeps her up there close to a 9 or a 10. But we spend all— right, turn the TV on and what do the commercials Does a commercial ever say, hey, you don't need the new Cadillac, you just need to change your perspective you have about your current car? No, it doesn't happen. You need to get the new car. You need to get the new this. You need to get the new this, the new iPhone, and that, because that's where the happiness is going to be. Right? We get so focused on, if I could just make my facts better, my happiness is going to be better. And we know that's the lie. So big idea number 9. Nurture the roots to change the fruit, right? The analogy of the roots and the tree is still one of my favorite analogies. Because if you want to change and improve your happiness, you just can't go back to what's happening. You need to go back to your beliefs. You need to go back to the roots. The beliefs are the roots that create the fruit of your experience. The way that you view the world, what is happening on a day-to-day basis, And this might be hard to swallow, but it's true. What is happening on a day-to-day basis is kind of irrelevant. What happens is kind of irrelevant. Your beliefs about what is happening is all that is ever relevant. And that's where our happiness comes from. And the reason this is the billion-dollar idea is because all of us on an intellectual level understand that the path to true happiness is by focusing on our beliefs. But it takes just a snap before we get sucked right back into playing this game of wanting to mistakenly get more stuff or just change the events of what's happening, and that's what's going to make us happier. When all, when all of the evidence, all of the proof is just focus on your beliefs. What story have you created about something that's causing your unhappiness or causing your anxiety or causing your stress. It all goes back to that choice. Big idea number 10, good or bad, who knows? One of my favorite stories, I believe it's in— I know it's in a few places, but I believe it's in Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth. It tells a story about a farmer and his son. One day the son leaves the barn door open. And all the horses run away. That's obviously a bad thing. And the neighbors come over to the farmer and they say, we heard about the horses, that's so bad. And the farmer responds, good or bad, who knows? The neighbors kind of give him a look like, all right, whatever. Well, about a week later, the horses come back and they actually attracted more wild horses. So now they have more horses than what they began with. And the neighbors come over and they tell the farmer, we heard about the horses, that's so good. And the farmer responds, good or bad, who knows? Weird. All right. A couple of weeks later, the son tries to go out and tame one of the wild horses. He gets bucked off on his shoulder, breaks his shoulder, can't work for a couple of months. The neighbors, oh, we heard about your son. We feel so bad. And the farmer responds, good or bad, who knows? A couple of years later, the country goes to war. The military comes to recruit kids to fight on the front line. So they put his son through a physical, but his shoulder never healed properly. So they turn him down so he doesn't have to go to war. He gets to stay home with his dad. The neighbors come over. We heard about your son. That's so good. The farmer responds, good or bad, who knows? The answer, the key to, to, to us raising ourselves up a few notches on that happiness scale is realizing that life is Good or bad, who knows? It is simply the choice that you have decided to label every experience as. Because I guarantee you right now, if you take a moment and you reflected back on your path of how you got to where you are today, you can tell me that some of the amazing things in your life would not have happened if some quote-unquote bad things that you labeled them at the time weren't on that path. We all know that some of the best experiences in our life and the reason we are where we are today is because we had to deal with bad experiences. We had to deal with adversity. Instead of labeling everything in front of our face good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, good, bad, can we accept it for what it is? It's just happening. How we choose to respond to it is always up to us. If we notice ourselves having a negative reaction to it, we want to call it bad, that's a great opportunity Maybe for us just to notice, wow, I'm really wanting to label this as bad, but what can I learn from it? Now it's kind of good. Or when we're having an experience like this is kind of good, you can ask yourself, wow, why does this feel so good? And you can, you can notice why it feels good and go, oh, okay, this is why it feels good. And then just enjoy that experience. But we get to choose our value to everything. You have everything you need. Right now. You have it right now. It's not out there. It's not out there. You have it right now. And the only way to improve it is just to work on your beliefs about everything that you're believing that doesn't make you feel good, to go back and challenge your beliefs. So the big question, of course, right, Travis, why is this a billion-dollar idea? It's because we all know this. We all know this, yet most of us still struggle to live it. We get caught into the trap. I invite you, the viewer, if you can come up with a way to help the world or to help mankind take this model, this very simple model, and to present it to the world in a way where people get it and live it, there is your billion-dollar idea. You can have it. I just want 1%. I'm not a greedy guy. And that is how to ditch the victim mindset and make a billion dollars at the same time. All right, you can throw that in there. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. Again, this is a topic I could talk about for a really long time, but if I'm paying attention to my time, I think we should probably end it right there. But please go into the Oasis, drop me a message, be in touch. I've heard from some, some of you in the Oasis, and I love it. I love hearing and talking to you guys, and that's— what a great place to continue the discussion. Go join me in the Oasis, and let's talk about how you are becoming the victor and not the victim. Have a great day, everyone. Thank you, Travis.