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Discover 4 ways for turning failure and challenge into opportunities. If life is a game and the challenges help you evolve — how can this lockdown help us and those we serve – to grow? Even though this time in history is very stressful, overwhelming and uncomfortable for many people, there are ways people are benefiting. It can also be viewed as an initiation. If we choose to use our life experiences to grow and learn, then we win at the game of life.
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Topics Covered:
0:45 – Ways to possibly use this lockdown to help you grow and change
4:30 – If life is a game, what are the deeper learnings we could gain?
9:30 – Why Life wants you to win at manifesting your goals
10:45 – 4 ways to turn around failure into success
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LINKS
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MindStory Inner Coach Book and 2 Neuro-Blueprints (FREE)
https://mindstoryacademy.com/book-free/
TAKING APPLICATIONS NOW TO GET CERTIFIED in the MindStory Method – Build a Career as an Online Coach and Speaker https://mindstoryacademy.com/join-mic-certification
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Connect with Carla Rieger:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/carlarieger
Twitter – https://twitter.com/carlarieger
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlarieger/
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This is episode 49 –Life Wants You to Win. In earlier episodes we looked at the metaphor of life is a game where the challenges help you grow. In this episode I’d like to get more curious about how this time of calamity could help us and those we serve grow in more potent ways than ever before. Hi I’m Carla Rieger, and you’re listening to the mind story speaker podcast for thought leaders who transform the lives of others through their expertise.
Even though this time in history is very stressful, overwhelming and uncomfortable for many people, it also helps to pay attention to the ways people are benefiting. On one level some people are more focused more on self-care than ever before, finally eating more healthy, drinking less, and learning about how to increase their immune system. Others are connecting more authentically with family and friends they’ve been estranged from, even if it’s only online. Some are learning how to bring their offerings online so that people all over the world can benefit, instead of just those in close proximity. There are online choirs, online treasure hunts, online painting classes, more online coaching and classes. Some are taking much needed down time to rest, slowing down, reflect and do inner work. Some are deciding to reinventing themselves, their life, their career, educating themselves, taking a new course, and re-evaluating their choices, getting clearer on the values they really want to live by. Some are get focused on a back burnered project like writing a book, reorganizing their home, or creating a garden. While others are noticing that they are ok, in fact better off, by eliminating activities that used to cost lots of time and money.
But let’s take it a step deeper. Some life lessons we might be learning are about wise discernment and personal power. The amount of theories and conflicting information about this pandemic is astounding. On one end of the spectrum people are painting a doomsday scenario of millions dying, on another people are writing off the whole thing as a hoax….and everything in between….usually the truth is somewhere in the middle. You can either get caught up in someone else’s idea about what’s really going on, or you can practice wise discernment, and decide for yourself what’s true and what isn’t. For example, think of a time where you had a gut instinct to do or not something despite logical information and it worked out in your favor. Another way of saying it is “I knew in my heart it was the right thing to do”. I had a friend who was vacationing in Phuket in 2004. Every morning he strolled along the beach, but the morning of the tsunami he had a strong instinct to stay put in his 4th floor suite, which saved his life.
One interesting fact to consider is that within a few days in March, billions of people around the world went on lockdown. It’s amazing to consider how easily we all acquiesced based on information that cannot be fully verified. I’m not saying the virus is a hoax, something is clearly causing a lot of people to get ill and some of them to die. But the information about where it came from, how it’s passed along, how to survive it… is causing many experts to question what’s really true and what isn’t.
Have you heard of the Black Mirror series? Black Mirror is a kind of modern-day version of the Twilight Zone series. It’s a sci-fi anthology series on Netflix exploring high-tech near-future scenarios where humanity’s greatest innovations and darkest instincts collide. It feels like we’re living in one of those episodes now.
So if Life were a game and the game creators want you to learn lessons about discernment and personal power, what would be the best way to help you do that? Maybe you’d give people a lot of conflicting and half-truth information about a high-stakes issue, so that you have to look inside your own heart, use your gut instinct to decide what’s true and what’s false. If you get clarity on what’s true, you pass the test. How about increasing your personal power? How about we have the governments of the world starts telling people all these things you’re not allowed to do because of public safety. At first it makes sense, so you do it, but it goes on for a while, and you fill the airwaves with doomsday predictions, and many people start to lose their livelihood, mental and physical heath, and relationships, basic human needs for connection, in hopes that people will start wondering if all that is more of a danger to society than the original reason for doing it. This would be like an interesting reality show, or Black Mirror episode, or social experiment, where you see how people react. How long will billions acquiesce to being on house arrest? What kind of information would you need to feed them? Who is going to use wise discernment and who is not? If not enough people practice wise discernment and roll over, you’d need to step it up. Maybe you’d take away a few more freedoms and give a vague, un-verifiable reason why. And still they don’t learn the lesson. And so you give them something else, and you’d keep going like that until enough people pass the test. All the while you would want to give them clues, like TV shows or movies, or popular songs, or investigative journalism shows, or evidence they could find online. You’d maybe set it up like a treasure hunt, or an Easter Egg hunt… One by one you help them find the clues, you help them piece it together, so they can pass the exam. At the same time, you wouldn’t want to make it too easy, so you’d try to throw them off the scent, by giving them false info that seems real, and if too many people started figuring out too quickly, you’d try ridiculing or threatening people who got close to the truth. Of course, that would also help with the wise discernment lesson. But eventually and hopefully, people start passing the test, they get to graduate to the next level of the game. Maybe that means getting to have a higher level of functioning or higher evolution physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritual or all of that. Maybe this is an initiation into a higher version of ourselves as a collective.
And even though Life is not going to make the journey easy, it does still want you to win. Because if everyone fails then why even bother playing the game in the first place? Humans were designed to take care of themselves, to choose love over fear, to have authentic relationships, think innovatively, have wise discernment, and personal power as long as that personal power is also in harmony with the collective. So the tests and challenges activate these latent skills, if we let them.
That said, many people in this world never take the time to develop mastery over their own minds in this way. But I will say, just by the fact you are listening to this podcast, you ARE one of those people who want to master your mindset, to pass the tests life brings you, and to get greater control of your thoughts and emotions. And as a leader in the world, an expert in your field, the more you do it, the more you help others do it, too.
What kind of future becomes possible when you have evolved in this way? Imagine the results you could have personally over the next year and the impact your offerings could have in the world, and the kind of future that creates for humanity. Think of the impact on people’s mental strength, health and well-being. It’s that confidence, that knowing that you are on the right path and moving towards the next level of your vision and the next level of your personal growth. When you have that as a guiding philosophy, you can see challenging situations as a gift and not something to fear. Once you break free of fear, it’s your ticket to freedom, security, power and connection.
Along with this game metaphor is the whole aspect of goal manifestation. Most of us are born having desires and aversions. Things you want and things you want to avoid. And those drives cause us to set goals and go after them, goals to get what we want, or to avoid what we don’t want. Sometimes we get those goals, sometimes we don’t. From this game metaphor, however, the journey is always more important than the end goal, because it’s who you become on the journey. It’s the lessons you learn or don’t learn. That, however, is easy to forget when you continually miss the mark. But, if you are a real seeker, truly in your heart wanting to grow personally and professionally, you’ll set big goals and lots of them. Life wants you to do that because, of course, this increases the odds that you will learn. But it also increases the odds that you will fail more often. Because if you set no goals, or set really easy goals, you’ll either stagnate or move at a very slow pace. You won’t be able to pass the finish line anytime soon, and as I said, I think life wants you to grow and wants you to win the game of life.
So, if you find yourself disillusioned or disappointed because you missed the mark, become like a detective. Maybe you’ve watched a few good detective shows, they have their list of ways to find who committed the crime, what went wrong. Here’s a few places to look when it comes to discovering why you failed to achieve a goal. Let’s use the example of a business project like launching an online course. You launched it, and hardly anyone signed up, or not enough to make it worth it.
Life has a sense of timing that we often can’t know with our conscious mind. For example, just before the whole pandemic we were going to host a big live event, and all kinds of things got in the way of getting that underway. Now, in retrospect we are glad we didn’t put a lot of time and money into hosting a big live event that would have needed to be canceled because of the pandemic. If things aren’t flowing, maybe Life knows something you don’t know.
All that said, it is important to put a date on your goals, because, without one, it’s just an aim. A deadline gives your subconscious mind a focus and increases your enthusiasm. You are inspired to take more action and work harder if the clock is ticking. But, a date is still only a best guess, so don’t give up if your timing is off. When things don’t work out exactly as we want, that’s when the self-doubt creeps back in. When that happens, just go back to this inner work, ask the right questions, course correct and keep seeing the goal come to fruition. This is so important, because what most people do is they let the self-doubt win and completely give up on their goals instead of course correcting. In our research, the biggest difference between people who achieve success in life and those who don’t, is that the successful people kept course correcting. That was the main difference.
Most people seem to have a subconscious, or even a conscious expectation that the path from A (our vision) to B (vision becomes reality) should be a straight line. In reality, it rarely is. Life is, more often than not, a zigzag journey that goes all over the place. One of the best beliefs to cultivate is that Life is always working for you if you allow it.
That said, the survival brain part of you is programmed to crave security, proof you can be successful before you get there, and instant results. Part of the game of life is to retrain your survival brain, to let go of external security in place of internal security, let go of the need for proof and instant results, and grow into emotional maturity where you understand and accept how the game works.
As Joel A. Barker once said “Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. But vision with action can change the world.” Most people live life either visioning, but not taking action, or being busy for busy’s sake without getting anywhere. I believe that’s so because they’ve consciously or subconsciously commited to a path of mediocrity. They decide: I’ll just do enough to survive, to not be fired, to make just barely enough to live on, to play small, to not rock the boat, to not challenge the status quo, to not break out of my comfort zone, to make sure people approve of everything I do.
Those MindStories keep people enslaved. No one, at the core of their true self, wants to be enslaved in this way. Nor should they be. I believe you’re meant to be the best version of yourself, to achieve mastery. That said, the path there is like the Hero’s Journey. It’s fraught with discomfort, so the survival brain part of us will want to continually give up. But, if you buy into the game theory, or are at least open to it, then you didn’t come here to fail, you came here to win. If you commit to this Path of Game Mastery, then that becomes your guiding light, instead of external circumstances that were designed in the first place to help you become better at playing the game. When you make that kind of commitment, Life conspires to support you, especially when things get tough.
Most people are letting their survival brain run the show, and that makes life unnecessarily challenging. Life often has a better plan for you than the one you have for yourself–one that is often beyond your wildest dreams. Maybe you’ve noticed that Life can bring things to you in mysterious and unexpected ways. You get it when you are ready and at the right time. Staying connected to Life, to your higher mind, to your higher self, or God, or whatever word has meaning for you… helps dramatically.
The problem is people forget to listen; or they let the connection get interrupted, or they misinterpret the message. If that ever happens to you, apprentice yourself to creating a strong, clear, true connection. Is like any relationship in life, it requires your time and attention. If you want a good marriage, or a good friendship, you need to give and receive love, support, listening, caring. It’s the same with this higher power connection to life. If you ignore it, it will ignore you.
And just so you know, worry, stress and negativity block your connection to this higher power. The other thing that blocks it is a conscious or subconscious belief that there is no higher power, that Life is meaningless, or that Life is against you. Truth be told, many people actually believe that. Again sometimes its unconscious. But we’ve all experienced hardships in life, these game obstacles designed to help you grow. But you may have felt like a victim to that challenge, where you lost money, lost an important relationship, got fired, failed miserably at something. The survival brain is programmed to feel like a victim in those situations, a victim of others behavior, a victim of circumstance, in short a victim of life. Then, you might decide you’re not going to trust life anymore. It’s like a friend who ends up betraying you. So you say, That’s it I’m no longer going to be friends with life. I’ve certainly gone down that road before. It was only when I decided to reframe the experience as learning journey, and forgive life for giving me that experience, and forgive myself for any way that I handled it wasn’t the best, that’s when the learning actually integrated, became wisdom, and then the challenge dissolved away. I’ve seen that happen so many times now, that as soon as a big challenge comes into my life, immediately I look at what I’m meant to learn and put all my focus there, instead of feeling like a victim to it.
Of course, that also means going back to past experiences where you felt like a victim, and going through that forgiveness process, learning the lesson, which allows you to grow, and move on. Often that means you also don’t have to repeat it. If you keep dealing with the same challenges over and over again, big clue, you haven’t learned the lesson. Commit to learning the lesson, even if you don’t know what it is yet, and you may never have to deal with the challenge again. That’s why re-interpreting the meaning you’ve given to past experiences can be one of the most life habits you ever cultivate. Because the truth is, often the hardest experiences in life gave you the biggest gifts, if you really think about it, and you really let the learning happen. In fact, in all my studies of resiliency in organizations, the people who had the biggest challenges in life had the most resilience. The people with few challenges in life, crumpled at the sign of any challenge. Now I did encounter people who had lots of challenges who didn’t grow, and just stayed bitter. The truly resilient people chose to rebuid trust with Life, and let Life help them, because they believed that life ultimately wanted them to win.
One thing we also noticed with resilient people who more often successfully achieved their goals was that they let themselves feel the positive feelings of achievement now, before actually achieving the goal. Have you ever booked a vacation and then enjoyed the anticipation of the vacation more than the actual vacation? Same phenomenon. As soon as you set the possibility and you start believing in the possibility, you don’t even have to wait until you achieve it to enjoy it. Isn’t that interesting? Enjoying all your goals as a work-in-progress is the key. As I’ve said before in other episodes, the paradox is to set outrageous goals AND be happy at the same time with what you have now.
Staying in a perpetual state of frustration because you haven’t reached your goal defeats the purpose of life. Choose to love the process. The true purpose of any goal is the journey of growing into the person who is worthy of the goal. That’s why you can’t hate your way to success. You can’t stress your way to freedom. If you do, you’ll either block your success or reach the top and hate the view. One tip I often share with my coaching clients is to continually ask yourself, how can I better enjoy the journey towards my goals and dreams? In some senses, that’s the only question that matters, because, as soon as you set a goal, if you feel yourself tightening up, you’ve defeated the purpose of doing it in the first place.
For example, I’ve had many people come to me saying they threw their lives away to create their business. They did it at the expense of their health, at the expense of their family and friends. That’s a trap I help many people resolve, and sometimes it’s hard to resolve that on your own. As soon as you stop loving it, you have inner work to do to realign yourself with the vision.
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This podcast episode, by the way, is based on Chapter 15, the last chapter, of our new book, MindStory Inner Coach. If you’d like more tools like this, for a limited time we’re offering this book for free on our website: MindStoryAcademy.com. You’ll also see the free book link in the show notes. Along with the book, you also get two short guided audios that are called neuro-blueprints. They are form of mental rehearsal that opens up communication between your conscious and subconscious mind to deepen this relationship with Life. One is called how to end self sabotage, it’s one you would use at night. The other is called your hero’s journey, which is about reframing the challenges of your life in terms of a mythic adventure and how those challenges have forged you in the fire of wisdom to now help others. Sometimes that’s hard to see until you do a process like this. And this is a version you would do in the morning. These take chapters 2 and 10 of the book to a much deeper level. All together, the audios and the book come to $94 but you can get them free right now.
Also, we’re looking for more speakers and coaches who want to learn to use the MindStory Method. If you’re interested check out our certification tab at MindstoryAcademy.com. It’s where we train you how to make extra income or even your next million working online, from the comfort of your own home, living from anywhere making a huge difference while making a great living speaking, teaching and coaching others to become masters of their own mind…one of the most important skills you can learn in this day and age.
So that’s it for today…I hope that was helpful. Until we talk again, just remember each morning when you wake up…that life wants you to win…let it help you. Until next time, I’m Carla Rieger, thanks for listening.
