Good morning, and welcome to Morning Cereal!
Pull up a stool, grab your favorite cereal, and let’s kick-start your day with a spoonful of inspiration, nostalgia and personal growth. Join your host, Shaen Inglis, as he highlights the music, movies, and moments that made the 80s, 90s, and 2000s unforgettable—kind of like digging for toy at the bottom of the cereal box. Each episode, Shaen also reviews a chapter or so from top wellness books, offering practical insights to help you set a positive tone for your day. Start your mornings right—no cartoons required!
Follow and subscribe to the Morning Cereal podcast and visit our Life Happens, Live Balanced channel and our website at shaeninglis.com to check out and follow our other podcasts. You can also follow Shaen @ShaenInglis on Instagram, YouTube, etc. Feel free to share the Morning Cereal with someone who could use a little fun and motivation to start their day right.
Good morning.
And welcome to morning cereal
Okay, good morning
and welcome to Thursday.
Well, it's the day after the midweek and
it's the day before
Friday, on a short week.
So if you really think about it, today
should be hump day and
tomorrow should be Thursday.
Either way, that's getting too confusing.
I'll take a short week any day and
welcome Friday tomorrow.
But first, well, it's National Mount
Everest Day and that's
commemorating the first successful
summit back in 1953.
climbing Everest?
Difficult.
Climbing out of bed this morning?
Nearly impossible.
And also requiring a big celebration
today is it's National
Paperclip Day, which means
it's time to show some
love to the office MVP.
And let's not sleep on all the things
that we MacGyver with paperclips.
Oh, and if you're feeling a little bit
wild today or just love
big lizards, it's National
Alligator Day too.
So pucker up buttercup.
Actually, just run.
Run fast.
Well, today's quote is from someone who
might wear crocodile boots.
And I'm speaking of rocker Gwen Stefani,
who said, "Being honest
and real and sensitive
is what makes people attractive."
And Gwen is reminding us that
authenticity beats perfection.
Whether you're navigating a career pivot,
parenting, or just picking a playlist for
your commute, showing up as yourself is
still the power move.
Well, today's news facts and
birthdays are for May 29th.
And we're going to start back in 1886
when on this date, American
pharmacist John Pemberton,
he began to advertise his patented
medicine Coca-Cola in Atlanta, Georgia.
Then in 1917 on this date, this was the
birthday of the late
President John F. Kennedy.
Then skipping up to 1942 on this date,
that's when being Crosby,
he recorded White Christmas,
which would become the best-selling
Christmas single in history.
Now I might need to fact check that.
I'm pretty sure Mariah Carey's "All I
Want for Christmas is Up There Too."
I'll get back to you on it.
Then lastly, in 1953, as we mentioned
earlier, Edmund Hillary and
Tenzing Norgay, they became
the first climbers to reach the summit of
Mount Everest, the
highest mountain in the
world.
Well, happy birthday to you.
If today is your birthday, you share a
birthday with Melanie Brown.
She's also known as Scary
Spice from the Spice Girls.
She turns 50 today.
Noel Gallagher, the lead guitarist and
songwriter for Oasis, he
celebrates his 58th birthday
today.
Then Melissa Etheridge, she's a
Grammy-winning rock singer-songwriter.
She's 63 today.
And lastly, Danny
Elfman, he's a composer.
You would know a lot of his work.
He worked on "The Nightmare Before
Christmas," and you would
definitely know he was the one
who did the Batman theme.
He turned 71 today.
Well, the number one song on this date
back in 2005 was "Holla
Back Girl" by Gwen Stefani.
Now, this track marked Stefani's first
solo number one single
in the United States, and
it showcased her transition from "No
Doubt's Front Woman" to
a solo pop, I guess what
we'll call an icon at this point.
Now, the song's catchy cheerleader chant
and its minimalist
production made it a standout
hit of the year.
And Gwen says of this song that it was
like her fight song.
And when asked what the true meaning of
the song is, Gwen says
she would never say what
it is, but she would only say, and this
is a quote, "I won."
Well, we're all winners here because
we're in the middle of
diving into Stephen R. Covey's
"The 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People."
And today, we're focusing on part two,
habit two, re-scripting,
becoming your own first
creator.
And Covey invites us to take a hard look
at the inner scripts
that govern our lives,
those mental narratives often written by
others that we unconsciously follow.
Now, these scripts are shaped by our
upbringing, our experiences,
and our emotional triggers.
And unless we challenge them, they
quietly dictate our
responses and our actions and
even our sense of identity.
So we cannot forget that we are
self-aware creatures, and we are also
capable of imagination
having conscience.
As such, Covey says that we have an
incredible potential within each of us
because self-awareness,
when combined with imagination and
conscience, quote, "empower
us to write our own script,"
end quote.
Covey recalls the story of King Faroq in
Egypt, who despite his
wealth and his power, he lived
a hollow life driven by
external symbols of success.
And it was only later in his life, even
after being in prison,
that he actually realized
the deeper truth of success, quote, "Real
success is success
with self, not with the
trappings of status or
achievement," end quote.
And that's the
foundation of this chapter.
Before we can achieve public victories,
we must first rewrite
the private scripts that
define how we see ourselves.
Many of us carry ineffective scripts
handed to us by our
parents, by teachers, or these
social norms today.
And they're scripts that often say we're
not enough, that our
value is tied to productivity
or that we're too old
or too broken to change.
And these scripts, they lead us to react
instead of act, to
shrink instead of grow.
And we become so tangled in problems and
daily pressures that
we lose touch with the
values that we once held dear.
Covey points out that when we become
problem centered rather
than principle centered, our
true priorities get buried.
And we end up chasing
urgency instead of meaning.
So what's the good news here?
We have the power to
re-script or shift our paradigms.
The process of re-scripting then is about
peeling back those
layers of limitation and
rediscovering the core
values that inspire us.
It's about shifting from a mindset bound
by a limited past to one
empowered by a limitless
potential.
Quote, "Our most important work," Covey
writes, "is always ahead
of us, never behind us."
So when we operate from vision and values
rather than wounds
and habits, we gain the
clarity to create a
new internal blueprint.
When we get too buried under those layers
of problems and to-do
lists, we tend to lose
sight of those values
and we become reactive.
That's when our interactions with our
children or our spouse or
our friends and family, our
coworkers, at times, those reactions do
not reflect or even
resemble what our core values
are or the way we
actually feel about them.
Instead, tie yourself to your limitless
potential instead of your limiting past.
Okay, here's the takeaway.
You are not your past.
You are your potential.
Rescripting is the act of rising above
old definitions of
yourself and authoring a life
based on intentionality,
principle-centered choices.
It's a conscious decision
to live forward with meaning.
And just like keen for rope learn, true
victory is not
conquering the world but mastering
yourself first.
Okay, that wraps up today's
episode of Morning Serial.
And as you navigate your Thursday,
remember that you have the
power to reshape, re-script
your life's narrative.
Also remember that kissing
alligators is a bad decision.
Thank you for joining us today.
We'll see you back here tomorrow.
Have a fantastic day.
Don't forget to follow and subscribe to
the Morning Serial
podcast on the One Life
Live It channel.
You can find more episodes and videos by
visiting our YouTube channel and the
website at seaningless
and at seaningless.com, where you can
also follow our other
podcast, the Mr. and Mrs.
Inglis podcast and the
Life Happens podcast.
In these other podcasts, we'll dive
deeper into everyday issues,
self-improvement and
well-being, business and finance, and we
welcome special guests too.
So join us.
It'll be a good time, I promise.
Thanks again for listening.
Have a fantastic day and
we'll see you tomorrow.