Kenny: “How has self development impacted your life?”

I spent the first 35 years of my life bumbling through and not understanding what it meant to become better. Through a series of events, I have had to go through some counseling and through the network marketing company that I belong to, I discovered self development. I found out that I have to work on me. One of the things that Jim Rohn always says is, “Don’t wish the situation was better, wish that you were better. Change you and the world changes.” My first intro into personal development was through Jim. I’ve also gone to Tony Robbins “Release the Power Within”, were you walk on hot coals.

The weekend before we went to that seminar, I fractured my foot. I was determined to go because we had spent all this money. So I went and decided I just wouldn’t walk on the hot coals with my splint on. But we went and talked about mindset and how your brain works, how you can focus, and how you can transform you life by what you focus on. When the time came that we were going to walk on the coals, I actually took my splint off. I thought I would hobble across the coals. By the time I walked across the coals, there was a burning in the one spot where I had fractured my foot. It had healed it. I didn’t have to wear my splint the rest of the weekend. It didn’t hurt, the swelling was gone and I thought, “There has to be something to this.”

It’s the whole proverbial thing about putting your own oxygen mask on first. If you become better and stay healthy, you can help everyone around you! If you don’t pay attention to yourself and you abuse yourself you can’t help any one. You wind up in a hole. In order to help someone else out of a hole you have to stay grounded and don’t just get in the hole with them!

The other wonderful thing I’ve learned is that you become like the five closest people to you. I took a look around and thought I needed to make some changes. My favorite story ever is about a breed of crab that can get out of anything you put them in. But, they have one human characteristic that we all have. That is their need to have what the other one has. So, what people do is they’ll put food in the bottom of the crab trap. One will jump in to eat the food and the others think they need that food so they all jump in as well. Pretty soon the food is gone and so one crab will try to climb out. But, the others say “No you don’t.” They grab him and bring him back down again and again. Now people are no different. You can get stuck around people that are negative or self degrading and they reach to try to bring you down as well. In order for themselves to feel better they have to make you feel bad. Think of maybe some bad bosses in your life who maybe single you out to bring you down.

When I was in college I was a waitress and we had a terrible trainer. She was so negative and derogatory. I didn't understand at the time what she was doing to all of us. It didn’t take very long and that restaurant went out of business because they didn’t see what she was doing to the business.

It’s been interesting to work past all this and to understand that the mind is like a computer. It’s like a blank slate. It will produce what you put into it. If you put garbage in, you are going to get garbage out. If you put good things in, you get good things out. Your mind does what you program it to do. There are some exceptions for example, people with mental illnesses. I’m not talking about those things. But by and large, the person that is without those circumstances, most of us have a brain that will allow us to program it to do what we want it to do. That’s the whole point of personal development, to program your brain to do what you want it to do. We are intelligent human beings.

I had one lady that I was seeing as a friend over coffee. I asked her how she talks to herself when she’s alone and no one else is around - and she started to cry. I asked her “Would you say the stuff you say to yourself to anyone else? No? Then why are you saying that to yourself?”

We are so good at finding faults in ourselves. We are our own worst enemies. If you were raised in a house where you had critical parents or siblings, it’s incredible what you have to get over.

Our personalities are formed by the time we are 6 and 7 years old. We get the most of our personalities between the ages of 3 and 5. The Bible talks about teaching a child when they are small the ways in which they must go because when they are old they will not depart from those ways. I know that when I think about myself I still have to fight the things that were taught or told to me when I was young.

When this woman and I were talking, she talked about her 5th grade teacher. She’s still carrying that. We don’t realize people do that. You may not even realize that you are doing that. Unless you are mindful of that, you can’t turn it off. It’s there and in your brain forever. So if you look at or watch terrible things, you are going to remember that. You can’t unsee that.

I always tell people, your secretary is the most important piece of your mind. The people that have dementia, their secretary is on vacation. So the new information coming in does not stick. But if you talked to them about something that happened when they were small, they remember that.

This concludes Part 3 of The Davinci Mindset Podcast. Be sure to sign up to our mailing list to be notified when Part 4, the final part, of this podcast comes out! Kenny and I will be further discussing the journey to self development and I think there are some wonderful take-aways!

If you’d like to jump right into it or if you would prefer to listen, you can access the podcast at this link: https://spoti.fi/2MrZZ5V.

#podcast #adults #selfdevelopment