Coming to you in real time today, I had a wonderful opportunity befall me this morning and immediately I was like, got to do a podcast about this. Got to jump on, got to share these little tiny lessons I think are super important. As often as they come around, and especially in the moment, to be able to recognize them, recognize the lesson that life is giving you, recognize the opportunity that life is placing before you, and then take a step back, see it for what it is, and share it with our amazing community and all of you amazing people out there.

I was so fortunate. This morning to get a call from a real estate agent friend of mine who was holding one of my properties open for an open house to let me know that it had been broken into and all of the appliances had been stolen. This is a really nice high end [00:02:00] flip that we're doing. And when he arrived at the open house, the back door had been kicked in And tens of thousands of dollars of high end appliances had been stolen in the middle of the night. Yesterday was a holiday too, so just a little bit of the icing on the cake. You're really excited, kind of a slower day at the office after a holiday, kind of ease your way back into the day, and then BAM!

You get hit with that kind of news. . That's the challenge. In all of these things, life is going to throw you variables and challenges. It will test you. It'll test your mentality.

It'll test your ability to persevere and to find joy in the little things. It'll test your ability to put your money where your mouth is. I come from a boxing background. I boxed competitively my entire life, all the way into my adult life. There's a saying in boxing that everyone looks good on the bag.

It just means that everybody can look like they know how to [00:03:00] box when all they're doing is hitting the heavy bag at the gym. It takes a completely different type of individual to be able to perform in a real fight, to be able to keep that style, your senses about you, to be able to continue to think, to be able to remove yourself a step back and be strategic and be effective in a real fight.

It's much different than just hitting a heavy bag that isn't punching back. It's way different doing it in a isolated, captive environment where you're never being challenged. And it's very much the same with our thought process. It's very much the same with the continual evolution of our minds, the training of our minds to seek.

Joy to find purpose to allow the variables of the world around us, not to let us affect our mentality, but to see every day as a blessing and a gift, even in difficult circumstances that takes a lot of repetition. That takes a lot of time. That takes a lot of meditation. [00:04:00] It also takes diving really, really, really deep.

The boxing analogy is a really good one because truly the only way to become a better boxer Is to fight the only way to get better at hand to hand combat with other human beings is to do it over and over and over. And that could be a difficult proposition for a lot of people that want to take the easy way that want to cut their learning curve that want to get better overnight.

It can be really frustrating. It's what I love about boxing. It's kind of the ultimate proven ground when it comes to sports. Because there's no other way to get better than to just go through a enormous amount of pain and suffering. Years worth of being a lesser than opponent.

Years worth of being in fights with people who are better than you. Who are faster. Who are more intelligent. Who use their minds a lot more effectively in the ring than you do. And that's true in life as [00:05:00] well. Every time you get into a situation where life is throwing these variables at you, we have the opportunity to go down one of two paths.

We have the opportunity to come from our immediate emotional place of anger, of frustration of the world is against me. This is happening to me right now. And I'm pissed off. I'm so mad and I can't see through it. And so now that anger and now those emotions and all that frustration is going to seep into every other aspect of my life.

I'm going to carry that into my relationship with my partner today. I'm going to carry that into my relationship with my coworkers, my partners, my family, my friends. I'm going to carry around this anger, this resentment, this frustration because someone wronged me. The world was against me today and I deserve to feel sorry for myself.

And that's an entirely, totally [00:06:00] understandable human reaction. It can be really, really difficult when life throws a curve ball at you to do anything but see the negative. And that's why I don't want you to come from a place of judgment. If you still find yourself after however many weeks, months, years of continuing to try and practice.

A better way of thinking. I don't want you to judge yourself for still having those times. Because your brain is so hardwired to see the world that way. It's going to take experience after experience after experience of you really, really making a focused effort.

to seeing the world from a different perspective before it starts to become unconscious. It's just like anything else. Our mind is a muscle 

it's going to take repetition after repetition after repetition for us to train our minds to see the world in a way that serves us. It'll take a little while, so don't judge yourself, but here's some helpful tips. I've talked about this in other shows and my mind immediately goes to this [00:07:00] place now. As soon as I found out, and I'll try and put some pictures in the show notes the agent sent me, as soon as I found out the house had been broken into and a lot of money's worth of appliances have been stolen, 

I instinctively went to my questions, the questions I asked myself. It's one of the most powerful habits that you can get into is asking yourself questions in the moment, slowing it down and asking yourself questions. The first one I always ask is what would need to be true for this to be a positive experience?

I know right now I am feeling upset. I'm feeling very frustrated. I'm feeling angry. What would need to be true for this to be a positive experience? Well, in this particular scenario, a couple of things needed to be true, 

one, I asked the agent, did the floors get scratched up? Because normally, and I've been through this before, if appliances get stolen out of your house, they drag them along the floor. Those are very expensive floors. The floors cost way more than the appliances. We can replace the appliances. 

The floors are a much more [00:08:00] expensive endeavor. We were good there. Just fantastic. If I've got to go spend some money out of pocket, I'd way rather just pop some new appliances in there than have to go through a couple of weeks worth of contractors going in and out getting the floors done again. So that's a big positive.

I texted my partner right away and said, do you mind running over there after you're done with the project that you're working on? Getting your guys over there to fix the door and getting a padlock on the back gate, because obviously they had come to the back gate, kicked in the back door and it is what it is.

I have amazing people in my life who are in it with me, who have fantastic relationships with, I am always sure to make sure I let know how much I appreciate them.

and he was able to get over there within about a half hour, secure the property. It's being worked on. It'll be good as new. By the way, while they were there. An agent with some buyers showed up and they loved the house. Heard about what happened. These things do [00:09:00] happen with vacant houses.

It's not the end of the world. They understood that we're going to secure the property. And I think we have an interested buyer, which is phenomenal. So by asking myself that question, what would need to be true for this to be positive, I found a couple of things immediately. That brought me back to a place of mental center, right?

I could be really, really upset about these things, but that's not going to serve me it's not going to serve me to go think about the money that I'm going to have to spend, because that is just an objective reality. We can feel however we want about objective reality, but those feelings are going to guide the experience that we're having in our lives. We have the opportunity to view objective reality from any perspective that we want.

I'm blessed to be able to have these types of variables in my life because if I couldn't afford to purchase homes and invest in real estate and do all the fun things that I do in the first place, I would never be privileged enough to have these problems, these [00:10:00] opportunities. It can be very difficult in the moment to take a step back Focus on what is true? What is good? And hold on to the thoughts that give you energy and drive you forward to one snap out of it because the world isn't over and to go be solutions oriented.

We do our worst decision making in times of anger and frustration. That is why it is such an opportunity for us to develop our minds, to look at the positive side, not just for sunshine and rainbows because we legitimately are more effective decision makers when we're not clouded by this fog of anger.

We're not clouded by this fog of frustration that just debilitates. our ability to think clearly and make rational, logical, effective decisions. We're able to step back, train our minds to accept objective reality, frame it in a perspective that serves us and make logical, rational decisions. We can get through [00:11:00] anything we could simply execute and move forward.

Me being frustrated, me being upset, doesn't change what happened. What happens after this all comes down to the way that I. interpret the events and take action moving forward. The way that I frame this in my mind, a lot of good things happen today and a lot of good things are going to happen tomorrow.

And if you seek them out, you will find them. 

So here's what you can do. I want this to be a useful lesson. 

I want you to get really good at asking yourself two different questions in times of adversity. Whenever a big monkey wrench gets thrown in your day, whenever something really difficult happens and you're being challenged in a massive way, you could get frustrated, you could get angry, you could cloud your judgment, you could make really poor decisions, or you could step back and you can ask yourself two different questions.

What am I learning from this? And that is going to be difficult to answer [00:12:00] sometimes, but it is at minimum a pattern interrupt that will get you to slow down and think about the situation as it's unfolding. 

So don't judge yourself if you don't get that right away. It's going to take a while for you to just default to asking yourself, what am I learning through this? But I want you to start placing effort on it Every time you feel challenged every time you feel that anger or frustration rise up inside you think what am I learning from this?

Because that doesn't mean that you just need to be a pushover and allow everything in life To happen against you and you just take it but what it will do is allow you to open your mind to the lessons that you're learning and make effective decisions moving forward based on that information.

I am absolutely the exact opposite of a person that feels like you should just roll over and take everything that life throws at you. We have so much power to control our human experience. What I'm simply advocating for is better decision making and better [00:13:00] decision making comes from a better state of mind.

So rather than allowing your anger and frustration to take a hold of you, break that pattern. Ask yourself, what am I learning right now? And you'll be surprised more often than not, you're able to think of it right there in the moment. The lessons are usually really clear. They're just hard to accept sometimes, but they're valuable.

They're valuable in breaking your pattern and allowing you to come from a place of clear headedness in your decisions moving forward. And then number two, I want you to ask yourself what would need to be true for this to be a positive experience. The reality is we get so caught up in only looking forward.

Where am I at right now and how is what is happening right now going to affect me in the future? Being present in the moment is one of the most difficult things by default for human beings to do. That's why we place so much importance on it in our mindfulness practices. Being present in this moment, rather than the future, rather than the past .

[00:14:00] What we tend to do is completely forget about where we came from, take where we're at right now and think about how we can project that out into what the future is going to look like, negative or positive. Things are this way right now, so things will be worse in the future. Things are this way right now, so things will be better in the future.

That's kind of by default, how our brains work. But the reality is when we think about what would need to be true for this to be a positive experience, where we're at right now in so many ways is better than where we were, 

That means that I've done something right along the way that I'm afforded these opportunities in the first place. If I look back 10 years, 15 years, I would have never been blessed enough to have this problem. I didn't have the career that I have now. I didn't have the success in that way that I have now.

What needs to be true for this to be a positive experience is that I'm in the game. Now I get to do something for a living every day that 15 years ago I was only dreaming about. [00:15:00] That's a really positive way to frame something. It doesn't mean you're not going to have problems.

It means you're going to have the ability to solve those problems. And we always do. We have the ability to make better decisions. If we step back, ask ourselves the right questions and come from a place of clear headedness. Enjoy. Look, it doesn't mean you can't be joyful just because something happened today.

Life tends to work itself out in a lot of different ways. I have a feeling that the people that stole all those appliances are going to pay for it down the road in some way, shape, or form.

I hope it's not too bad. I hope they learn a lesson. I hope they frame that lesson positively. and grow as human beings and come from service to others in the future. But until then, I'm going to choose to frame this as a positive experience. I learned a lot today.

There's a whole other world out there of variables that are being thrown at you that when you focus only on the one negative thing that happened, you forget all the other things that happened to that 24 hour expanse. That 24 hour life experience that you have, [00:16:00] we get so focused on one negative thing.

We let it ruin our entire day. There's so much else happening in the 24 hours that we're here every single day. A lot of other great things happen a day and I'm going to choose to focus on those as well. Regardless, I think those are some really important questions to be able to ask yourself. Take time in the moment.

Next time you feel that anger, next time you feel that frustration, take a deep breath, count to three, and then ask yourself, what am I learning right now? And what would need to be true for this to be a positive experience? If you can start to get in the habit of that, even one out of every three times, even one out of every five times, How much better would your decision making be?

How much more effectively would you navigate your relationships with your job, your colleagues, your partner, your friends, your family, the world in general? How much more effectively would you navigate the world if you didn't allow your frustration and anger to make your [00:17:00] decisions for you in the most critical moments?

And that's when we're most angry and most frustrated. Imagine what kind of superpower that would be for your life experience. Thank you for listening to this episode. Ask yourself those two questions and get in touch with me. Drop a comment. Let me know how this has had a positive effect on your decision making and your overall life experience.

Talk soon.