Jeff Corrigan: Welcome back to Habit Masters. I'm Jeff, and today I'm flying solo. My co-host and friend Sheldon Mills is tripping with his family for summer vacations. He will be back on our next episode. If you were with me last week, we're going to continue our three-part series of life flipping. This is flipping your life from one of survival to freedom.
It's adopting a new mindset because I think we've been living life upside down. We've been allowing the external forces to decide. What's possible for us? We've been avoiding the things we don't want, and we've been focusing most of our time on things that we really don't like.
So over the next couple of episodes, we're going to continue. To share ideas and principles , you can adopt a new mindset that will help you live a life of freedom versus survival. Cuz right now I think we're surviving and I want to help you live a life of freedom. Last week we talked about approach versus avoid mindset.
Today we're actually gonna talk about creating the future you want versus reacting. And letting the external world decide your future. Cause most of us are currently avoiding what we don't want and letting external forces decide what we do on a daily basis and thus deciding what our future is.
Because what we do today is what creates our future. So today to give an example of this principle in action, I wanted to share the story of a young woman. Who was living on welfare as a single mother, and who decided that she needed to follow her dream, that she needed to write a book.
And she started writing a book and you can imagine that the people around her were probably discouraging her in every turn. Like, Hey, you're barely making ends meet. You're living on welfare. You've got a, you've got a child, now you gotta think about her welfare. So you should stop writing this book and spend your time trying to make money, get a job, do all these things.
But she knew that her destiny was writing this book, and that was the future she wanted to create for herself. So, although. It looked like a risk to everybody on the outside. She knew this was what she wanted to do and she spent her time doing it, and you would think that man writing a fantasy book when you're a single mother living on welfare about a boy who enters the wizarding world would be a ridiculous prospect.
But now, as you know, this is the writer of the Harry Potter series, the most popular highest grossing book series of all time. And her name is JK Rowling. She went on to become the most famous author in history in that regard.
And to that, I would say she took the reins in her life when we moved from a creative standpoint. When we moved from a, an empowered. Standpoint, we can add so much more value than we could ever imagine when we move from a place that's in our heart, from a place of freedom and abundance versus a place of security and scarcity.
We can create more than we could ever possibly imagine. Now, are we all going to become JK Rowling? Probably not. But how many of us are following our heart's desire? So many of us have resigned ourselves to living under someone else's dream. To use an example again that we've used in the past, if you're planting a garden, , you can't only weed when you are avoiding.
When you're reacting, you're basically weeding only. I don't want there to be weeds in my garden. Well, that's great, but then you must rely on everyone around you. , you're not self-sufficient. You have no ownership over your garden at that point.
It's just a patch of dirt. And so you're continually weeding and you might be helping other people with their gardens, but you're growing nothing in your own life. Your dreams are set aside so that you can survive. And what I wanna help you do is thrive in a life of freedom. So using JK Rowling as our example, she took the reins in her life.
She was a proactive in approaching and creating the life that she wanted versus reacting and taking the life that she was given because, All of us are going to be set with circumstances in our lives. Circumstances we are born into and that come our way throughout our lives, and it's up to us to decide what we do with those.
Are we going to just take what's given to us or are we going to plant something in our garden? And create something in our life that we truly desire. So we know that with the relentless determination, she completed the first Harry Potter book in about 1995.
And it wasn't until two years later after many rejections, many setbacks that she finally was published and it ended up becoming the most popular fantasy book in history, right?
And in instant success. In the process, she impacted the lives of millions of people across the globe. , and, JK Rowling has ju gone on to become one of the most influential authors of not just our time, but of history. And she really has captivated the world with her stories. I know it's been a little bit now, but her story is one that stands out to me as a great example of what it's like to create your life versus reacting to the circumstances you were given.
When we focus. On what we want, on what our heart's desire truly is on adding value through our unique ability. And we dedicate our time or as much of our time as possible to that we can create a future and a world that's better, not just for us, but for everyone around us. And she has a great quote that I thought kind of.
Pointed this out. She said, we do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better. So what are you imagining better in your life? What is it that you would love to deliver? What value do you want to add? Where are you going to contribute?
What kind of future do you want? And how does that future benefit those around you? I think oftentimes we have a mindset that we should , feel guilty for wanting something more. Like you can imagine how she felt when she started writing that bucket. There was probably an internal debate of, okay, I've got this daughter now.
I have no money. She's barely making ends meet. She's living off welfare and here she is spending time each day writing a story that she has no idea whether it will succeed or fail. How many times have we not followed our dreams or not followed our intuition because we felt guilty for wanting something more or something different?
At this moment, I want you to give yourself permission to dream again. Give yourself permission to want again. Give yourself permission to create a life that you want to live. And secondly, I feel like we have this idea that, oh, well, that sounds great. Great, I have permission, but I don't have time, or I'm not qualified for this.
How many times have we heard that it's like, oh, I don't have time because I've got all these other commitments in my life. You need to make time for the things you want to create. And even if it's just a little bit of time at the beginning, it's enough. Take a little chunk of time. And then the last thing I think that often we think is. Not only are we not qualified, we're not.
Time is like, I don't have the right contacts for this. I don't have enough followers. Like, can you imagine? She, she came from nowhere. She wasn't a writer prior to that. She didn't have manuscripts out there. Nobody knew who she was. She didn't have a giant following online. She was an aspiring author.
What are you aspiring to right now that you feel like, oh, , I could never break into that world. Historically, there's so many writers and so many famous people from writing, and she had to be thinking and doubting every step of the way that, okay, she's not qualified.
She doesn't know what to do with this. But you, you get the point. So JK Rowling was no different from you or me when she started out. We don't start successful. We don't start with a big following. No one starts from the top.
Everyone starts from the bottom and works their way up. So what mountain are you trying to climb? It's time to start climbing. Take the steps to move you in the direction of your dream. This episode is about taking control of your life by taking a creative approach to what you're doing, to creating your life versus reacting to your life.
So as an action step for today. I'd love for you to look at your life and say, of all the things you're doing, how many of them are reacting to something? And how many of them are you creating? Now , you could argue that well, we've created everything in life. We own everything in our life.
Jeff, you tend to take responsibility for everything in our life, and you're right, but where in your life have you accepted reaction? Instead of taking a proactive, creative approach and then figure out where can you shift that? Where can you flip it? Cuz this is all about flipping your life.
Where can you flip from reactive to proactive, so give yourself permission, and then do something today that is creating the future. You want, you block out time on your calendar. Cause that's the only way it's gonna happen to do the thing you want, I would suggest doing it immediately and then.
Scheduling it so that you can do it consistently. Cause we know doing it once is great. Doing it consistently is what will create the future You want. Thank you very much for listening. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. The best way to share a podcast is by you, the listener, and getting this message out there to more people.
If you're interested in flipping your life or having someone help you flip your life. We're now offering a live four week coaching program called Life Flip, and I will walk you through this program and I will align it to your goals and help you shift your mindset and then put it into action through an implementation process.
I can only work with a few people at a time. So if you email hello habit masters.com, I'm going to jump on a 30 minute free consultation to make sure that the program is for you and that it's gonna help you achieve your goals.
Thanks for listening and it's time to start living your best life.
