Get your mind right podcast notes
Great to have Todd Durkin on our podcast again today. Todd is the founder of one of the top ten fitness gyms in all America and has trained the likes of Drew Brees and LaDanian Tomlinson. For more information about Todd click the link below
Here are some random quotes that we may or may not have used during the podcast. Take a moment to learn how to get your mind going in the right direction
Attitude can make an amazing difference in so many areas of our life
Famous line from Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Summing it all up, friends, I’d say you’ll do best by filling your minds and meditating on things true, noble, reputable, authentic, compelling, gracious—the best, not the worst; the beautiful, not the ugly; things to praise, not things to curse. Philippians 4:8
For example, a large percentage of people who are given what they think is a well-known brand for a headache (like Advil or Bayer) versus a generic pill report more pain relief from the big-brand pill. Doctors and pharmacists go nuts when they hear that because—it can’t be! Advil is the same as generic ibuprofen. Bayer is the same as aspirin. The molecular structures are identical and the active ingredients are the same. And don’t look for an answer in the inactive ingredients (those shiny sugar coatings), because the experiments have also been done with absolutely identical pills that people are just told are different.
Wittingly or not, our own minds create chemicals more powerful than any pain reliever. If you think the big brand will work better, it actually does.
Similarly, even the most sophisticated oenophiles can be influenced by the price and provenance (real or not) of a wine. An expert opening a bottle that he thinks is a hard-to-get $200 Domaine de Chevalier will almost always find it tastier than if the label says “House Wine.” Professor Paul Bloom of Yale, who has analyzed the underpinnings of pleasure, reported on one study where experts were given wine bottles with the labels changed. Some of the connoisseurs who got the wine with a cheap label thought it was worth drinking—but three times as many approved when it had a fancy label. Apparently all the erudite opinions about oaky, earthy, silky, and structured are affected by labels as much as by taste buds
Chose a good Mind Set
Mind set= A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person’s responses to situations.
My dad encouraged us to fail. Growing up, he would ask us what we failed at that week. If we didn’t have something, he would be disappointed. It changed my mindset at an early age that failure is not the outcome, failure is not trying. Don’t be afraid to fail.
Do you agree with that mindset. How about if I told you that Sara Blakely is the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.
It’s sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It’s about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.
Let me show you who said that Adam Savage (Picture) from myth busters. Have you seen that show. Adam’s playful, curious and creative way usually ends up with him blowing something up. I like that.
I’ve never regretted not having children. My mindset in that regard has been constant. I objected to being born, and I refuse to impose life on someone else.
Robert Smith. The cure.
How many people think that’s a pretty good decision for Robert.
You can accomplish anything that you put your mind to.
Your mama.
Here’s an article I found this last week. Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder is giving away his money. 5 million dollars worth. Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck. His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.
“For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness. I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years,” said Mr Rabeder. But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling. “More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’,” he said. “I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need. I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing.”
“AN ESKIMO FISHERMAN came to town every Saturday afternoon. He always brought his two dogs with him. One was white and the other was black. He had taught them to fight on command. Every Saturday afternoon in the town square the people would gather and these two dogs would fight and the fisherman would take bets. On one Saturday the black dog would win; another Saturday, the white dog would win – but the fisherman always won! His friends began to ask him how he did it. He said, “I starve one and feed the other. The one I feed always wins because he is stronger.”
Gratitude
The survey I had recently done, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, had shown that most of us suffer from a huge gratitude gap. We know we should be grateful, but something holds us back. In the survey, 94 percent of Americans thought people who are grateful are also more fulfilled and lead richer lives. But less than half the people surveyed said they expressed gratitude on any regular basis. The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan
Which of the following statements are you more likely to make
My car is running great right now!
My car just broke down!
I’m so glad my boss employees me
My boss is a huge jerk
My head is clear and pain free
I have a headache
Thank you God for hot water
My hot water heater exploded
My intestinal track is working flawlessly today
My stomach hurts
One young woman literally wrinkled her nose when asked about being grateful to her family. “I can be grateful to the counter guy at the deli, maybe. But my parents are just doing what nature intended. Even chimps take care of their children.”Ah, yes. Parents as chimps. If we’re just fulfilling our biological imperative, why would our children say thanks? Part of the kids’ biological imperative was to develop independence, and gratitude somehow felt antithetical to that. The kids in the focus groups were still at an age where they needed parental help, but they wanted to pretend they didn’t. Greg said that when he couldn’t afford an apartment, his dad offered to pay the security deposit. “I didn’t like it because the whole point was to live on my own. I took the money, but only with spite,” he said. The Gratitude Diaries by Janice Kaplan
An article in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology evaluating all the literature in the field concluded that gratitude may have the highest connection to mental health and happiness of any of the personality traits studied. The conclusion: “Around 18.5 per cent of individual differences in people’s happiness could be predicted by the amount of gratitude they feel.”
It brought to mind the lovely poem by Billy Collins, the former US poet laureate, reflecting on the lanyard he made for his mother as a child at summer camp. “She gave me life and milk from her breasts, / and I gave her a lanyard . . .” he wrote, going on to marvel at his childish belief that the “worthless thing I wove out of boredom / would be enough to make us even.”
Because of built-in survival mechanisms, our brains are naturally wired to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones. But in reality, we experience positive events with much greater frequency. One key to building resiliency, lies in noticing and appreciating those positive experiences whenever and wherever they occur. Barbara Fredrickson, PhD, the author of Positivity
Resilience (Determination, Grit)
Victoria Ruvolo was driving home from a niece’s piano recital one wintery evening in 2004 when a large object smashed through her windshield, hitting with such force that it broke every bone in her face. The object turned out to be a frozen turkey. The thrower: a teenage boy named Ryan Cushing, out for a joyride with friends in a stolen car. Ruvolo’s passenger managed to grab the steering wheel, push Ruvolo’s foot off the gas pedal and steer them onto the shoulder. After being rushed to the hospital, Ruvolo remained in an induced coma for two weeks.
When it was safe to operate, the doctors began painstakingly putting Ruvolo back together. The then-44-year-old office manager from Long Island was left with three titanium plates in her left cheek, one plate in her right cheek, and a screen holding her left eye in place. Her family was told that she might have permanent brain damage and was unlikely to be capable of living on her own.
But that wasn’t a prediction Ruvolo was ready to accept. She had survived tragedies before. Two of her brothers died in separate incidents when she was a teenager. At age 35 she miscarried a much-longed-for child. Somehow, she had found the strength to come through those losses, and she was determined that she would make it through this one, too.
With a devastated face, and a questionable future ahead of her, Ruvolo had plenty of good reasons to sink into anger and depression. But she didn’t. Instead, even as she was still undergoing a series of reconstructive surgeries, she told herself, “This moping isn’t going to get me anywhere.” And she turned her focus to learning more about Ryan Cushing, the boy responsible for her ordeal. What could she learn about him that would help her understand the accident?
Ruvolo discovered that Cushing was in the midst of his own turmoil: His father had just left his mother for another woman. He had serious vision problems that left him unable to play sports or drive a car. Months later, when Ruvolo went to the troubled boy’s sentencing, she mystified many by working with the district attorney’s office to encourage a lenient sentence.
“I just couldn’t see how locking him up for 25 years was really going to help him,” says Ruvolo. The judge agreed, and Cushing was sentenced to six months in jail and five years of probation.
Ruvolo’s empathy toward Cushing wasn’t the only surprising post-incident event: Contrary to her grim prognosis, she was back at work within eight months, living on her own, and speaking regularly to at-risk youths about ways to improve their lives.
Looking back, Ruvolo realizes she showed similar resiliency after her brothers’ deaths and her miscarriage. But where does this kind of resiliency come from? And why don’t more of us have it?
Ruvolo speaks once a month to troubled teens in a conflict resolution program. Toward the end of each session, she makes a joke about the frozen turkey that came through her windshield on a winter’s night and nearly killed her. “I tell the kids that now for the rest of my life I have to be known as the Turkey Lady. Thank God it was a turkey, and not a ham, because I would have been known as Miss Piggy.
The answers are compelling. In his best-selling book, The Resiliency Advantage (Berrett-Koehler, 2005), the late Al Siebert, PhD, writes that “highly resilient people are flexible, adapt to new circumstances quickly, and thrive in constant change. Most important, they expect to bounce back and feel confident that they will. They have a knack for creating good luck out of circumstances that many others see as bad luck.”
One strategy for cultivating a learner mindset is to use “question thinking,” a method of problem solving developed by psychotherapist and executive coach Marilee Adams, PhD. Question thinking encourages people to approach challenges and situations with “Learner Questions” — neutral, nonjudgmental questions such as “What is useful here?” or “What are my available choices?” — as opposed to “Judger Questions” like “What’s wrong?” or “Who’s to blame?”
The 5 Best Ways to Build Resiliency By Jessie Sholl
No. 1: Pump Up Your Positivity
No 2: Live to Learn
No. 3: Open Your Heart
“In studies, researchers found that serotonin [the neurotransmitter associated with feelings of happiness and well-being] is used more efficiently by people who have just engaged in an act of kindness,” says David Sabine, PhD, a clinical psychologist in Wichita Falls, Texas
No. 4: Take Care of Yourself
No. 5: Hang on to Humor
Leave A Comment