So how does the magic really happen? How do we ‘actually’ change the experiences of our life when faced with challenging circumstances? Today I share a great insight from William James about how we can create a new experience of life regardless of what is going on around us. Listen in now and learn how to make the changes that you really want to make.
Transcript
Well, Hey everybody, Jonathan Doyle with you.
Speaker:Once again, welcome friends to the daily podcast, your daily dose
Speaker:of encouragement and inspiration.
Speaker:And these seem to be times when that's what we need.
Speaker:It's what I need.
Speaker:Is just a little bit of constant daily inspiration and encouragement.
Speaker:We are a social species.
Speaker:We need to encourage each other.
Speaker:We need to be around people and messages and ideas.
Speaker:That energize us and bring us encouragement of, uh, I've
Speaker:noticed over the last six months that, uh, so often have you.
Speaker:Start your day.
Speaker:With, uh, news websites and, uh, negative forms of social media, you end up starting
Speaker:your day in a really negative sense.
Speaker:So isn't it crucial.
Speaker:Uh, that we just surround ourselves with inputs that just build us up
Speaker:that make us want to grow that make us want to share ideas with people
Speaker:that help them grow and develop.
Speaker:So today,
Speaker:I want to start with a simple quote from William James, who many of you would know.
Speaker:Was one of the most extraordinary psychologists.
Speaker:One of the great progenitors of the early psychological, uh, discipline itself.
Speaker:So definitely somebody worth listening to, it's a very simple idea yesterday.
Speaker:I was talking about mindset.
Speaker:And I just want to riff on that for a second.
Speaker:So he says this human beings.
Speaker:Can alter their lives.
Speaker:By altering their attitudes of mind, human beings can alter their lives
Speaker:by altering their attitudes of mind.
Speaker:Now.
Speaker:When you hear that there's that part of your brain that goes yada yada yes.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:We need to have a positive attitude.
Speaker:And for some people that's easy.
Speaker:I often say my youngest daughter has this just absolutely irrepressible spirit.
Speaker:She just is always happy.
Speaker:She's just constantly, you know, really happy all the time and just
Speaker:constantly energized and alive.
Speaker:And some people just born that way, the cognitive architecture, the
Speaker:structure of their mind and spirit.
Speaker:Is just positive and God bless them.
Speaker:And then there's many of us that fall in the middle and there's
Speaker:some of us on the other extreme that, uh, have to work really hard,
Speaker:but all my pessimists out there.
Speaker:I want to say that pessimism of course has an incredibly useful.
Speaker:Evolutionary advantage.
Speaker:As I always say, you do not want an optimistic airline pilot, you
Speaker:did not want an airline pilot.
Speaker:That's like, Hey, there's a thunderstorm and fly through that.
Speaker:It's going to be great.
Speaker:Everything will work out.
Speaker:No.
Speaker:You want a pessimistic pilot?
Speaker:You want a pilot?
Speaker:It's like, well, if we go over there, something bad could happen.
Speaker:We're going to go this way.
Speaker:All right.
Speaker:So there is a role for pessimism, right.
Speaker:But we just don't want to be living in it all the time.
Speaker:So, uh, you know, as a species, it was the pessimist.
Speaker:It was the one that said the weather's going to be bad.
Speaker:We should, uh, store extra crops that survive.
Speaker:So isn't this, this funny human balancing act between
Speaker:rampant optimism and pessimism.
Speaker:And we want to.
Speaker:You know, we want to make things work for us.
Speaker:We want them to get that mindset that is seeing reality.
Speaker:Seeing the challenges in life of what they are, but then
Speaker:choosing a positive response.
Speaker:So William James is saying here, That we can alter our lives.
Speaker:I mean, how many of us at some level want to alter our lives?
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:None of you.
Speaker:Listen to this again, Jonathan, look, I like you.
Speaker:I like tuning into your show.
Speaker:But guess what?
Speaker:Uh, my life's perfect.
Speaker:I have absolutely nothing.
Speaker:I want to change every human being.
Speaker:If you are breathing, they will be something in your
Speaker:life that needs to change.
Speaker:You could take a relationship to a better level.
Speaker:You could, uh, you could earn more money, you could improve your
Speaker:health and fitness, whatever it is.
Speaker:All of us have some area of life that we would like to improve.
Speaker:So the question is how we do it now.
Speaker:That's what I guess I've spent the last two decades of my life, helping
Speaker:people with, you know, there's all sorts of different aspects to that.
Speaker:Of course we can.
Speaker:You know, learn new skills.
Speaker:We can.
Speaker:Get different reference groups of people that surround us new peer groups.
Speaker:There's a whole bunch of things we can do.
Speaker:But William James is telling us today that the most preeminent step.
Speaker:The most important thing that we will do is to alter our attitudes of mind.
Speaker:So as I was thinking about this in the studio, I go, okay, how do I help
Speaker:people move this from just an idea?
Speaker:Just from kind of a, ah, yeah, I.
Speaker:I get it.
Speaker:We've got to change your attitudes and mind.
Speaker:He don't nothing.
Speaker:Into actually doing it.
Speaker:And I'm pretty much convinced.
Speaker:There is a simple kind of strategy in the image that came to mind.
Speaker:Was many years ago when I was, uh, after high school, I did a gap year.
Speaker:Like a lot of listeners would have done.
Speaker:And I was doing a gap year at this boarding school
Speaker:that was over 500 years old.
Speaker:And there was, I remember walking in the front of the school, there was this stone.
Speaker:Sort of step this big stone kind of.
Speaker:You know, cut block of stone was kind of like a doorstep.
Speaker:You would step onto this and go through the main gate.
Speaker:And always remember that you could, there was this, the stone had been worn down.
Speaker:That they had, there was this like, you know, just the, the millions upon millions
Speaker:of feet that had stepped onto that head.
Speaker:Over decades and probably centuries had worn down.
Speaker:This very strong stone is granted had worn it down.
Speaker:It was this big dip in it where human after human had walked.
Speaker:And I began to think of a lot of ways in our lives.
Speaker:I thinking our results, our cognition, our attitudes are a little bit like that.
Speaker:It's the repetitive things that we do in think and say, That we don't
Speaker:think a significant at the time.
Speaker:But over time, like that stone doorway, they get grooved, they get shaped and
Speaker:this of course is born out by, you know,
Speaker:Neurobiology.
Speaker:Though we know that our brains form, these sign optic connections
Speaker:through things called myelin sheets.
Speaker:That, uh, that actually shape our thinking.
Speaker:And the more that we think in a particular direction, Our brain begins
Speaker:to groove in these neural pathways.
Speaker:So, I guess if you want to think today about changing your
Speaker:life and altering your life.
Speaker:And if the answer to that, according to William James is to
Speaker:alter your attitudes and mind.
Speaker:Then the first thing we have to do.
Speaker:Is begin to take a radical responsibility for our own thinking.
Speaker:Now, this has been such a big challenge for me to really come to
Speaker:terms with, because I just always assumed for so many years that
Speaker:whatever I was thinking was reality.
Speaker:And it's only more recently that I've said this in so many podcasts recently
Speaker:that I've come to understand that we can.
Speaker:Capture our thinking we can, we can cap.
Speaker:Sort of stop ourselves, capture ourselves in the, in the
Speaker:moment of negative thinking.
Speaker:And the first step is that recognition is to go, oh, I'm thinking that thing
Speaker:again, I'm thinking that I'm noticing that I'm thinking in that particular path.
Speaker:And if you're a kind of natural depressive and stuff, you'll notice
Speaker:that you start going down that path.
Speaker:You start going down that neural pathway of.
Speaker:Oh, this is terrible.
Speaker:And this isn't gonna work out friends.
Speaker:I'm sitting here in lockdown.
Speaker:Like many of you.
Speaker:And our lives are being just brutally impacted by I think what
Speaker:are unspeakably, poor policies.
Speaker:And, you know, All of us could go down that rabbit hole of negativity super fast.
Speaker:But I'm learning to go, okay.
Speaker:I am responsible for how I'm thinking.
Speaker:I, and my thinking affects the people that I love that are around me.
Speaker:I'm going to be diligent.
Speaker:I'm going to be proactive.
Speaker:I'm going to be on top of how I'm thinking, and it is work.
Speaker:Regular listeners know that over many years I've been an exercise.
Speaker:You know, I don't know the correct word for it, but it's
Speaker:been a huge part of my life.
Speaker:So.
Speaker:I've learned that fitness strength capacity in an athletic sense just comes
Speaker:from years of grooving it in years of doing it day after day, doing the work.
Speaker:And I'm convinced as I get older, that our cognition is no
Speaker:different, that we need to take some responsibility for what we're doing.
Speaker:So whatever you're going through today, as you go about your life.
Speaker:Start to pay attention to this cognition, start to pay attention.
Speaker:It capture something like, oh, I'm them going that way?
Speaker:I'm going down that way.
Speaker:I get it.
Speaker:I get it.
Speaker:Stop.
Speaker:And choose different things.
Speaker:It's a nature of faith, you know, remember.
Speaker:Sharing with you a few episodes ago, there's a beautiful quote from the Yale,
Speaker:uh, dictionary of the Bible that said, you know, faith by its very nature,
Speaker:confronts fear that faith is a decision.
Speaker:It's literally a decision.
Speaker:It's a, but it's a decision to believe something.
Speaker:And that decision for faith then overrides the experience of fear.
Speaker:It's like this, just this simple process.
Speaker:That if we live in faith that we live in hope we live in
Speaker:positivity in our mindsets.
Speaker:It slowly overpowers the fear and the limitation in our life.
Speaker:It just does.
Speaker:I mean, I've come to this pretty late.
Speaker:I really want to say it.
Speaker:If you're listening to this going Yardi yet, I'm not sure, Jonathan.
Speaker:I dunno you just thinking we should think differently and nothing's
Speaker:going to change his mind is a yes.
Speaker:Yes, I am.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:What else can I tell you?
Speaker:Yes.
Speaker:I think that if we think differently, we will get a different outcome in our life.
Speaker:So friends, I hope that's an encouragement to you today.
Speaker:Change the altered, alter, alter things in your life by
Speaker:altering your attitudes of mind.
Speaker:How do you alter your attitudes of mind?
Speaker:You do that in the concrete moment by moment.
Speaker:Realities of what you're thinking.
Speaker:That's the process.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:That's it.
Speaker:I always like to keep them short, do me a favor, hit subscribe.
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Speaker:Did I jump on your computer at some point and just go across to
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Speaker:Hit that, uh, give it a review.
Speaker:Just putting some comments and give it a review.
Speaker:It really helps move the podcast forward.
Speaker:And as always, if you could grab this link, Chuck them on your Facebook
Speaker:page, Chuck it in your Twitter.
Speaker:Um, just share it with friends and family.
Speaker:It's a huge blessing.
Speaker:All right, friends, that's it for me today.
Speaker:My name's Jonathan Doyle.
Speaker:You want to get in touch with me?
Speaker:Just go across to Jonathan doyle.co dot C O and you can reach out to me there.
Speaker:I love doing this.
Speaker:I hope it's a blessing to you.
Speaker:Praying for everybody listening.
Speaker:Better days are ahead.
Speaker:This is a testing moment for this planet, a testing moment for people,
Speaker:but we are going to come through.
Speaker:We are a resilient, magnificent species.
Speaker:That has uh, has always eventually overcome and we will overcome these times
Speaker:and you will overcome these times my name's jonathan doyle this has been the
Speaker:daily podcast god bless your friend i'll have another message for you tomorrow
