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In this episode, we explore how to be a beacon of calm in the storm. In this way you help usher in the ‘renaissance in human development’ I believe we’re on the verge of.
Also, discover 2 simple tools to navigate the storm and to discover the value you now bring to the world.
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TOPICS COVERED:
1:00 – Are we in final exam time during the game of life?
7:20- Why we need to be contributors vs consumers right now
14:00- Question #1 to access the higher mind
20:28 – Question #2 to access the higher mind
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LINKS
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The MindStoryMethod – Free Tutorial Video
https://mindstoryacademy.com/MSC-intro/
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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 80 – Finding Peace in the Storm. In this episode, we explore a way of looking at the storm we find ourselves in from a more peaceful, balanced and practical perspective, and I’ll also share with you 2 simple tools to navigate it all with much more grace. Hi, I’m Carla Rieger and this is the MindStory Speaker podcast.
So we are clearly in the middle of a storm these days. If you buy into the notion that life is a school for learning, we might be in final exam time before graduating to a higher level, or moving into a renaissance in human history. That said, you wouldn’t be experiencing the challenge if you weren’t ready. In other words, we are all built for this. It’s a great chance to build your ability to find peace in the storm, choose to look at the world from the place of the neutral compassionate witness and practice thought management, which means emotional management. So, game on. There is no better time in history to get out on that playing field and learn and offer as much help as we can to others.
No matter what happens in the future, we can handle this. Think about where we came from. If you look back through history at your family lineage, at your ancestral line. We lived just fine without a stock market, without jobs, without internet, without toilet paper, without smart phones. We come from humans that used their ingenuity to create this life we have now. So we’re not only going to make it, there’s a very big chance that we are on the verge of a huge renaissance in human evolution. It’s always darkest before the dawn. I don’t believe that life brings challenges unless you have within the capability to handle it.
So the most important thing to remember is that lots of people these days are feeling disharmony, uncertainty and conflict [inside and out]. But all of those feelings are created by thoughts inside your own head. Similarly, peace, harmony and certainty are just feelings we create with our thoughts. The world doesn’t create all those feelings for us. Your level of income doesn’t. What’s happening politically doesn’t. The rules that your national and local governments want you to live by don’t create your feelings. Other people out there in the world don’t create your feelings. You create it all in that little thought workshop in your mind. You are a thought factory. So, you can create thoughts that make you anxious or create thoughts that make you feel peaceful and certain. The moment you wake up to that and practice that as often as you can, is the beginning of your contribution towards a renaissance in human consciousness. Part of this final exam is to make it so chaotic and uncomfortable that people are compelled to learn the lesson once and for all.
And in fact, that is the beauty of humans in crisis. We are evolved to solve problems, we are evolved to create solutions. The bigger the obstacle, the bigger the solution, the more problems, the more solutions we’re going to create. To that end, one of the best things that you can do right now is to produce value. The kind of value that only you can produce, the kind of help that only you can offer. If you are a speaker, coach, consultant, expert, leader in some way…I say, all hands on deck right now. We are in real need of guidance during this intense time of learning. Because we’re an online business, we can keep creating value. And you can get online fairly easily if you’re not already there. Individuals, entrepreneurs, companies and organizations need virtual classes, presentations, coaching, consulting. Many companies and organization are having a hard time figuring out how to help people be more resilient, to manage their team’s issues, to communicate in a way that leads to productivity and not conflict, so I’ve been doing virtual speaking, classes, training, coaching to help them with all that. Many people no longer have jobs and are jumping onto the entrepreneur bandwagon and we are helping people with that. Or they’ve had a business but now need to pivot and we’ve been helping them with that. So, think about how you can be the voice of calm, reason, creativity and ingenuity for those in your circle of influence. All hands on deck.
Helping people control their thoughts alone will be hugely of value. Because we can control those, but we can’t control what’s going on in the world. Therefore, we can calm them down and help them turn this into a time of productivity. Because people who know how to be peaceful and calm in the storm are indispensable now. Those are the people who rise to the top. What’s that old saying “A crisis doesn’t make a person, it reveals what a person is made of.”
My suggestion to you as a manager, or leader, if you’re a CEO running a company, which I am, is that you encourage high level production. If you have virtual employees, even if you’ve sent employees home to work from home, you encourage them not to see this as a vacation, not to see this as a time to go away from production. I don’t think that that is the answer here. I think we need to keep producing at the highest level, not from stress, not from panic, but from value creation, from wanting to create value. I think that’s very healing for people in a time of chaos. It gives them purpose, direction, structure, and a sense of accomplishment.
Ironically, it’s times like this where your value can increase exponentially. Now I want to be clear that your value is not the same as your worth. Your worth is already absolute, 100%, there’s no increasing that. There’s no decreasing that, that’s an unnegotiable, that’s done. But the value that you can create in your brain, with your mind, with your ingenuity where you put that into action in the world …that is variable. And so I feel like this can be a time for us to increase that kind of value.
So I was talking to one of my clients who just learned our MindStory Method for her expert online business as a coach and speaker. By hunkering down and focusing on learning a skill that is incredibly helpful to people, then using it on those in her network…has made this period of unrest in human history actually a time where she feels truly on fire with purpose for the first time in a long time, helping people in a way they really need it, all while making a good living. For more info on the MindStory Method, just go to MindStoryAcademy.com backslash MSC dash intro https://mindstoryacademy.com/MSC-intro/. Or look for the link in the shownotes.
Now, I believe every single person can add value in their own way. So your value is going to grow more based on what you’ve learned and what you create. And you can help in direct proportion to the value you create and then reach out to others to contribute. At this time more than ever, you need to be a creator and a contributor more than a consumer. We have too many people stuck in a kind of flight, flight or freeze mode where they just consume too much information, that is making their brains have too many thoughts. Or they’re wasting their energy trying to convince someone else to see things their way, stuck in fight mode. Then getting frustrated when the person doesn’t come around to their way of seeing things. Or some people are just numbing out, drinking or smoking or eating more than normal or engaging in some other kind of addictive behaviour – in freeze mode. They’re not able to function at their highest level.
So I want to encourage you to switch that and to become a contributor and a creator. How can you add more value? How can you help more people? How can you increase your knowledge and experience so that you CAN add more value? What habits do you need to put into place so you can be stronger and more skilled? As humans, we are wired for survival, which means we are wired for short term vision. What are we going to do today? What are we going to do tomorrow? This is why people panic and sell all their stocks. This is why people panic and start hoarding toilet paper. It’s because the brain is trying to protect you. It’s trying to take care of you. That part of the brain only works in the short term. One of the best ways to get out of fight – flight – freeze mode — is to have a long-term vision.
Let’s try four months, for example. Things might seem better in the world, or worse, at that time. Many people don’t want to make any plans, because they’re waiting to see what happens in the world. But that leaves you a victim of external circumstances. I believe you can tap into a part of you that knows the future, or knows your best way to position yourself for what’s coming. It’s like feeling, not like instincts. The instinctual self is highly tied into the fight, flight, freeze brain. it’s that feeling of rightness when you meet the person you are meant to get into a relationship with, or that feeling of wrongness when you are choosing outfit to buy. it’s like this supercomputer within you that can tap into a multitude of qualities, aspects, information all at once and know whether it’s right or not. Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink, talked about being able to know the truth of something in the blink of an eye. we all have this ability, but many aspects of society create kind of an overlay, whereby we stopped trusting this inner knowing, and rely on external opinions, the media, educational institutions. And while those can be helpful in terms of informing you, if you live your life by other people’s opinions, you can end up going down the wrong road. so it’s just a matter of rebuilding a muscle you already have. one of the easiest ways to do that is by asking this higher mind within you, large, sweeping, open questions. As I’ve said before, the higher mind is a goal achieving device. It wants to answer the question. Even if you go blank in the moment they first asked the question, as you go about your day, as you sleep at night, this higher mind will go to work finding you an answer.
So here is potential question to ask your higher mind: what is a four-month vision that would serve me and all those concerned? It’s worded in a way to allow this higher mind to see how to best utilize your unique set of experiences, skills, knowledge, values to best serve those you are meant to serve. Just write the question down in a journal, or on a Word processor. Or, you can just ask that question while you go for a walk and see what comes up. Most people find it easier to stay focused on the question if they’re writing, but it’s up to you. Some people connect to this higher mind visually, auditorially, through writing, through moving, or a combination. Do what works for you. See what comes up. If you go blank, let it go. Then you might discover an idea or have a vision when you’re doing the dishes, or when you just wake up. Or, sometimes it comes through a timely email or text, or article or video you happen upon, or a colleague says something that sparks an idea.
For four months from now, it might be best to continue what you’re doing now, it might be adding to it, amping it up, or amping it down, or focusing more here, and less there, or pivoting altogether and going in a completely new direction. Just be open minded. Drop all preconceived ideas about your role in the world. As David Whyte, the great poet says, As the World Changes, How You Belong to the World Needs to Change. We might find a whole new kind of world emerging and your skills are needed in an entirely new way. You just don’t want to let your fight, flight, freeze brain make those kinds of decisions, or rely just on external opinions. Your vision for the next 4 months needs to come from deep within you. You’ll know its right when you feel enlivened, brighter, or have a feeling of rightness about it. If you feel neutral, or deflated, or darker, or have a tight or wrongness feeling about it, you’ll know it’s wrong. Some people have become disconnected from this internal barometer, or they are looking at the vision from the point of view of their spouse, or what other people will think. When you do this writing or envisioning, just make it for your eyes only. Make sure it’s you looking at it from your heart, from heart-based logic, and not just preconceived ideas about what’s possible for you.
For example, a client of mine had established herself as a professional speaker and trainer in the area of leadership communication. When the pandemic hit all her speaking engagements cancelled. Some turned into virtual events, but her income still went down significantly. When she asked her higher mind the question, what is a four-month vision that would serve me and all those concerned? She got a vision of herself turning her speaking topics into online classes and offering in depth online coaching to really customize her expertise for those who wanted it. At first, the survival brain part of her responded with, I don’t know how to operate online, I don’t know how to charge for that, I don’t know how to structure it, how to promote it. But when she let her heart based logic speak, she just focused on the vision, seeing herself living from anywhere she wanted, earning money online, sharing her expertise all over the world in indepth ways, and not just doing one off engagements with people who lived close by. The vision truly excited her, so she tapped into that every morning when she found her mind drifting off into worrying thoughts. This changed the way she saw the world, and all of sudden she’s finding resources to help her get there, like us at MindStory Academy, and hiring technical people to help and now she’s up and running. Had she listened to her survival brain she’s still be worrying every morning and not taking action.
A second question to ask is, especially in regards to a specific challenge you’re facing, what am I meant to be learning here? For example, you can ask that around income, or trying to manifest a goal that’s not manifesting, or in regards to a challenging relationship. Or a health issue. It helps to be specific, and then ask the question – what am I meant to be learning here? Then, open your heart and mind to really seeing what’s there. Sometimes the ego or the survival brain doesn’t want to know. I remember at the beginning of my career I was subcontracting to a consulting firm. It paid well, and the work was exciting, in terms of what other people thought about it. You know, they’d say, “Wow, what a great opportunity to be working with this company.” But I was so very exhausted every time I did the work. Everytime they gave me a new contract, I would feel all the energy in my body go down. So, I asked that question in a journal – what am I meant to be learning here? At first – nothing. I asked each morning for five mornings. Still nothing. Then I said this after asking the question…even if my survival brain doesn’t want to hear it. That’s when I got the answer. The answer was to leave and go out on my own. I was already doing consulting/coaching on my own, but hadn’t built it up very much because of this contract work. To give it up meant letting go of the money, the prestige, the relationships with the colleagues. So the answer definitely triggered my survival brain, but when I chose to look at the answer from the heart, from what I call heart-based logic, that higher mind that can see into the future, I got a strong sense of rightness, energy, and peacefulness. It still took a couple of months, but when I left my whole life took off in a much more congruent way that felt far more fulfilling.
So, play around with those two questions – 1) what is a four-month vision that would serve me and all those concerned? 2) what am I meant to be learning here? Even if my survival doesn’t want to hear it. See what happens.
That’s it for today. Again if you’re interested in exploring how to install the MindStory Method into your business, or starting a business discovering and sharing your expertise with the world, just go to MindStoryAcademy.com backslash MSC dash intro https://mindstoryacademy.com/MSC-intro/. Or look for the link in the shownotes. And, do post a review of this podcast if you liked it. It really helps other listeners find the podcast. Here’s a quick and easy way to do it. Just go to: https://ratethispodcast.com/speaker. You’ll also see that link in the shownotes.
And hit subscribe if you want to hear about other episodes coming up, which you can do on our website MindStoryAcademy.com\podcast. https://mindstoryacademy.com/Podcast That link is also in the shownotes. Until next time, I’m Carla Rieger. Thank you for listening.
