When you hear the word freedom, what do you think about? Today I’m talking about how we can all achieve what I consider to be the ultimate freedom or specifically “inner freedom” – the ability to choose how you experience every aspect of your life in each moment.
When we have inner freedom, we are in control of our inner world and our experience of life, no matter what’s going on. You have the ability to choose your experience of every aspect of your life, including how you experience other people. If you can attain inner freedom, you win. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in your life, in your bank account, at work, in the government, or in how other people show up—you’re in control.
Today, I want to talk about how to achieve such a state of inner freedom, even during the most difficult times. You’ll learn why worrying is usually an unnecessary use of our energy, how to transcend inner turmoil, and experience life exactly as you choose.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Why we already have everything that we need to be the happiest and most at peace that we could ever be.
- How to consciously choose the state you want to experience every day.
- What happens when you stop consciously resisting reality and choose instead to embrace and express gratitude.
- How to create a paradigm that turns hardship and challenge into opportunities to grow.
- How emotional optimization meditation helps turn your chosen state of being into your default state of being.
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EPISODE RESOURCES
- Miracle Morning Movie
- The Miracle Equation: The Two Decisions That Move Your Biggest Goals from Possible, to Probable, to Inevitable
- Miracle Morning Movie [Sneak Peek #3] See How Mike Eaton Lost 90 Pounds Using The Miracle Morning
- Living Enlightenment: A Call for Evolution Beyond Ego
- The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader
- The Celestine Prophecy: An Adventure
- The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book
- The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
- Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening
- MANY LIVES, MANY MASTERS
- Conversations with God
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TRANSCRIPT
[INTRODUCTION]
Hal Elrod: Hello, friends. Welcome to today’s podcast episode. Do you guys and gals know that I’ve got some issues? I have a lot of issues. One of them is how obsessive I am with, I guess, it’s being a perfectionist but every time I record a podcast, I hit start and stop and start and stop probably, I don’t know, on average a dozen times because I don’t like the way I start. I don’t like what I’ve said and sometimes like already today, I was like five minutes into the podcast started trailing off and like, “What am I talking about?” and I stopped it. And it’s way worse when I do videos. Yesterday, I was recording a video for our community and I shouldn’t say yesterday. It’s a three-minute video and in the last three days, I’ve spent probably 10 hours trying to record a three-minute video. Anyway, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this but I’m just giving you a peek behind the curtain to let you know how much energy goes. If these podcasts sound, I don’t know how they sound, but they take a lot of effort on my part based on some limitations that I suffer from. But anyway, alright, that’s not the point of the podcast today.
We’re going to talk about freedom. And when I say freedom, it might not be in the context that when you hear the word freedom, what you first think? Most people might associate that with some sort of political freedom or with the freedom of the country, that sort of thing. What I’m talking about is what I would call true freedom or ultimate freedom or to be descriptive, inner freedom.
[EPISODE]
Hal Elrod: And here’s where I want to start. Inner freedom, the way that I would define that, it’s the ability to be completely in control of your inner world despite anything that’s going on in the outer world, to be able to choose your experience of life no matter what’s going on in your life, to be able to choose your experience of yourself no matter what’s going on with yourself, and be able to choose your experience of every other person in your world, regardless of how that person is showing up for you. So, that’s inner freedom. Inner freedom to me is the ultimate freedom. And if you can attain inner freedom, which you can, and we’re going to talk about how to do that today but if you can attain inner freedom, then you win. You win, right, because it doesn’t matter what goes on in your life or in your bank account or at work or in the government or in the world or with people around you with your spouse or your kids. It doesn’t matter because when you have truly mastered inner freedom, you’re free. You are free. You’ve won. You figured it out. And that, by the way, is what I would call heaven on Earth.
True freedom, it’s an inner game and it’s realizing that every single one of us already has everything that we need to be the happiest that we could ever be, to be the most at peace that we could ever be. We already have everything that we need and it’s simply called life. It’s simply up to us to be present to that reality in every single moment. Again, the realization that our inner world doesn’t need to be dependent on the outer world. And here’s what I want to invite you to consider. Consider that one day, maybe toward the end of your life, you might look back and realize that you spent way too much time stressed and worrying about things that are out of your control, things that you can’t change, such as everything that’s ever happened, right, because you can’t go back in time and change it. But most of our stress comes from either something that already happened, something that’s happening now, or something we worry about or project into the future. And that’s the one consideration is that much of what we worry about and I think there have been some studies that have shown that the large majority of what we worry about never actually ends up happening.
Therefore, you might look back and realize that what you worried about that never actually happened, it was a waste of your energy and a waste of your life, and it was a waste of your attention. It robbed you of experiencing the joy that is available to us in every single moment. And consider that everything that you worried about that did actually happen, you were able to handle it and that life essentially worked out perfectly exactly as it was. Consider that you have a track record right now, you have a 100% success rate of overcoming everything that’s ever happened to you. You made it. You’re here. You did it. And yet we spend so much of our time out of the present moment, stressed over something that already happened, stressed over things that are going on that are out of our control. If we can’t immediately do something right now to change the thing we’re focused on, then we’re focusing on something that’s out of our control. You know, at night, when you’re worried if you’re going to bed and you’re stressed out about the next day, that’s being out of the present moment. That’s focusing on something you can’t control. You can’t control tomorrow. You’re not doing tomorrow until tomorrow. The only thing that’s real is this moment, always forever, this moment, and the past doesn’t exist anymore. The past was this moment a while back, and the future that we worry about doesn’t exist right now. It will be a now moment at some point in the future.
All right. Where are we going to go with this? Look, I want to acknowledge you for waking up today and doing your best. Right now, life in general is challenging. It’s hard, it’s difficult. At times, it can be painful and I just want to acknowledge you for waking up today and getting out of bed and putting one foot in front of the other because it really matters. It matters for you, it matters for your family, it matters for your community for the world, you waking up every day showing up. And especially for doing the Miracle Morning, I really believe that that’s what the world needs right now that the world needs people who are waking up every day and pouring into themselves so that we can develop the tools that we need, the mindset that we need, which really the mindset is one of the tools, the tools that we need to handle the uncertainty and the chaos and the struggles that we are all facing right now. So, thank you. Thank you for waking up. Thank you for showing up. And if you didn’t show up this morning in terms of at your best, the beauty is every day we get to hit the reset button. Every day, every moment is another chance to change how we’re showing up, to change how we’re experiencing the world, life, ourselves. Every moment is another chance to change it all, to turn it all around.
So, if you can attain inner freedom, in my opinion, you win. If you can learn, if you can learn how to embody that true freedom where no matter what happens in your life, with other people in the world, you get to choose your experience of life. I don’t know if I mentioned this earlier but I posted this the other day on Twitter and whatever social media, and I’ll paraphrase. I’m not looking at it right now but it was something along the lines of that in the midst of, and I said you always have the choice. We always have the choice to be stressed and scared and worried and angry over outcomes that are out of our control. And you also have the choice to be calm and relaxed and at peace with outcomes that are out of your control. Either way, the choice is always yours. So, again, that’s just one kind of example of inner freedom. You get to choose. You can choose to be stressed and angry and frustrated and upset and scared. You can choose all those things. And most of us, by the way, we choose those unconsciously meaning we don’t sit there and go, “Hmm, I want to be scared. I want to live in fear. I want to be really stressed out right now.” Most of us feel that life’s happening to us and we’re out of control, we’re being reactive, and you go, “I feel so stressed. I feel so scared.” It becomes an unconscious choice and the way to make the other choice.
Other being choosing states, mental and emotional states that serve you, that you want to experience, you want to be happy, you want to be at peace. I’m not saying you do, I’m kind of asking that, right? Whatever states, whatever mental and emotional state you want to live in whatever you want your experience of life to be, the way to transcend the unconscious choice of inner turmoil is to consciously choose to experience life as you would choose it. I’ll say that again. The way to transcend the unconscious choice or choices of inner turmoil, that angst, that fear, that anger, that stress, that worry, that depression, the way to transcend those unconscious states is to consciously choose the states that you want to experience every day. And we’re going to talk about how do you do that?
So, I want to share a little bit of context around where I’m coming from today and what kind of brought me into this conversation, this topic for our podcast. So, when I was in my 20s, I began studying spirituality. It was after my car accident and I died and came back. And so, I started studying like near-death experiences. What I ended up landing on that really sucked me in, if you will, is the topic of enlightenment and the way that I would define enlightenment, there’s a lot of different ways that it’s been defined, but I would define enlightenment as inner freedom. So, it’s essentially what I’ve been talking about up until this point, the definitions I’ve given us of being able to choose your experience of life regardless of what’s going on in your life or in your world, being able to choose your experience in every single way. That to me is enlightenment. This is where you’ve completely unattached from the material world. You’ve been attached from your ego. You’ve transcended your ego. You’re no longer operating from a place of fear. How would I describe that? We’ll get back to that.
But the point is, I started going down this road and reading some pretty heavy books like books that you read slowly because they’re written so in such a challenging way. I’ll tell you some of the books that I read. One of the first books was Living Enlightenment by Andrew Cohen. By the way, I just pulled that book off my shelf about three weeks ago for the first time in, I don’t even know, I haven’t read it since I was in my early 20s. So, it’s been close to 20 years, maybe 15, 15 years since I read that book. And I started reading it again. And I was reminded of like that journey that I’ve been on, that I’ve kind of gotten away from but I was kind of reminded of I go, “Wow.” I’m reminded of a lot of who I’ve become, who I became from reading that book, and many others, which I’ll mention a few more but I had gotten away from. It had been so long since I read it that although there were parts of me that were showing up in alignment with this kind of enlightened state, there was just as much of me that had completely forgotten all of it and maybe even more of me that had forgotten. It was like, “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” you know, I’m having all these aha moments and going, “Gosh, I should have read this book. I shouldn’t have waited 15 years to pick up this book again. I probably should have read it like once a year.” Some other books that I read back then are I started reading Ken Wilber. There’s a book called The Essential Ken Wilber which is kind of like the best of. I read The Celestine Prophecy, which is very popular. You may have heard of that or read that. The Four Agreements.
So, some of these are more common, popular, kind of pop culture spiritual books. I read, of course, Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now. That was one of the first books I read during that journey and then I also read Integral Life Practice, MANY LIVES, MANY MASTERS. So, there’s a whole host of books, The Conversations with God book series, all these different books. So, anyway, the reason I share all that is that’s where I first started discovering this inner freedom. And that’s where when I had cancer, I was diagnosed with cancer, I had already decided I will accept all of my life before it ever happens and be at peace with all of it so that I never have to experience inner turmoil unless I choose to. And sometimes we choose to, right? We want to feel upset. We hang on to those feelings. But the choice I guess that’s ultimately what we’re trying to arrive at is being able to choose being so conscious that we’re able to choose how we experience every moment of life. That is what I would call inner freedom. That’s what some people call enlightenment.
So, if you’re interested, here we go. Let’s talk about, I jotted down just four quick bullet points on ways that I feel like what I’ve learned that’s enabled me to kind of start implementing this mindset, if you will, this way of being, this inner freedom. So, number one, accept life exactly as it is. Accept life exactly as it is. And you’ve heard me talk about this in a lot of different podcasts, in my books in different ways. In one of my most recent books, The Miracle Equation, I had a chapter called Becoming Emotionally Invincible. You may or may not. If you read that, great. You may or may not have read that but becoming emotionally invincible and that’s the idea that you are invincible from emotions controlling you but that you are in control and get to choose which emotion would best serve you at any given moment and then experience that emotion. So, how do you do that? How do you do that? Well, when you accept life exactly as it is, it means that you stop resisting reality. You stop wishing and wanting the things that are out of your control were different. Because you realize that that wishing and wanting is not only futile, it doesn’t actually change something just by wishing and wanting and resisting it, and getting angry and frustrated, doesn’t change it. It just creates inner turmoil for you.
And by the way, resisting reality, one of the ways that that manifests for us is complaining, complaining about reality. Every time we complain, in essence, we’re resisting reality and we’re causing ourselves that unnecessary inner turmoil, where the opposite of complaining, I would say, would be expressing gratitude. That would be at least an opposite. So, every time we experience or express gratitude, we are embracing reality exactly as it is even more than accepting it, we’re embracing it. We’re finding the beauty, the joy, the purpose, the meaning in the moment, by expressing gratitude, especially for our challenges. Consider that complaining and gratitude, they’re opposites. They can’t coexist simultaneously. If you’re complaining about something, you’re putting forth and you might call it a negative energy, right? That is the opposite of gratitude. You’re resisting, you’re detesting, you’re condemning the moment versus choosing consciously to be grateful, to be grateful for the moment. Even if it’s a challenging moment, even if it’s a painful moment, we can still find gratitude for the challenges and the pain in our lives because every challenge we face is an opportunity for us to learn and we can be grateful for the lesson.
It’s an opportunity, every challenge, for us to grow and we can be grateful for the growth and it’s an opportunity for us to become better than we’ve ever been before, to have a new tool in our toolkit. About a year ago, maybe a little less, I started developing anxiety and depression in ways that I had never experienced in my life. I never really had an anxiety but definitely, I went through a depression in 2008 when the economy crashed, I lost all my money. That’s kind of what led to the Miracle Morning but I had never experienced this kind of depression where I had lost my will to live and I think I’ve shared this at least to some degree on podcast episodes before but, yeah, I lost my will to live. I found myself contemplating ending my life every day and I would try, you know, I have a family, I have a wife and kids, and every day I would, or not every day, but I’d say probably most days, I would literally in my head go, “Is there a way that I could end my life and have it not negatively impact my kids and my wife and my family?” And thankfully, I could never figure out an answer to that question or meaning. The answer was always, “No, I can’t think of a way to end my life and have it not negatively affect my family, my wife, my kids, my parents, my friends.”
And so thankfully, I never got past that question. I never got past the question. Where was I going with that? The point was, and by the way, I couldn’t figure out why I was depressed because I want to be clear, nothing was wrong in my life. I had everything that I wanted, everything to be grateful for, my family. I’ve been doing work that is impacting people that I am so grateful like everything I’ve prayed for in my life, up until this point, that’s the life that I’ve been blessed to live. And so, the fact that I was depressed and had no will to live, the only thing I could attribute it to was chemotherapy. You know, I had read that all the different chemotherapies I’ve been taking for three years, almost every single one of them caused depression. I had been on a lot of them for a lot of years and I had not been depressed for like three years. I had been positive and optimistic and I was doing great. And then all sudden, I just started losing control of my psyche. Anyway, I’m going too far and I want to give you guys solutions. I’m going too far in this route but maybe it’s helpful for you to hear that, yeah, I was at the lowest point in my life. I got off chemo.
And that was about four months ago and my brain came back. You know, not on day one but pretty quickly, it started to come back and I still am suffering from a lot of cognitive challenges, which is why in the beginning of the podcast, I mentioned that I have to record this podcast. I end up doing like 20 takes because I keep forgetting what I’m saying and I keep messing up. So, I’m still challenged with my mental capabilities, which is really frustrating to have been had a level of mental capabilities for your entire life, and then all of a sudden, you feel like they’ve been taken away from you and you can’t think clearly and you can’t, yeah. So, the point is accepting life exactly as it is while I was going through that. Okay. Now I remember why I was bringing this up is even in the midst of that depression and that anxiety and just having lost the will to live, every day, I wrote down three things I was grateful for. Every day, I was grateful for what I was going through and I had the foresight, they always say hindsight is 20/20. I’d rather have foresight is 20/20.
And I believe that for all of us, when you’re going through a difficult period, you can create a paradigm that says, “This is an opportunity for me to learn, grow, and become better than I’ve ever been before. This is an opportunity for me to become the person that I need to be to use this challenge to help other people.” That was my paradigm every day that I was going through the depression and the anxiety and when I lost the will to live. It was like, as hard as this is, and I hated it and I wish it would change. Was I resisting it? Sure. But I would replace that resistance with gratitude. Instead of complaining about it, every day, during my Miracle Morning, I would journal and I would meditate and I would spend time being grateful for the most painful, mentally and emotionally painful experience of my entire life because I knew that it was an opportunity to learn, to grow, to become better than I’d ever been before, and then go into the world someday, I wasn’t ready then even though I tried, man, the podcasts were hard to record back then by the way.
But I knew that someday I’d be able to share this experience with other people and even just develop a level of empathy for people going through that because I had never gone through it before, not at that level. And as I was going through it, I go, “Wow. Now I understand when people are in such a dark place that they can’t just snap their fingers and flip a switch.” So, if you’re in that place, by the way, my heart goes out to you and what I would say is to see the benefits that see the growth that you can experience and to know that everything in life is temporary, including what you’re going through right now. And this is true for any challenges that we’re going through. Everything in life is temporary. Life is always changing. Life is always evolving. So, if you’re going through difficult times right now, whether they’re mentally emotionally, relationally, financially, whatever it is for you, my heart goes out to you. I can’t say I’ve been exactly there because I don’t know what you’re going through but it’s temporary. And I think the most important thing that I did during that time was my Miracle Morning.
If it wasn’t for my Miracle Morning, every day pouring into myself, giving to myself, meditating, and journaling and doing these positive things to keep myself, keep my head above water because when I would go through the day feeling anxious and stressed and worried and depressed and all these things, and then go to bed, well, if I didn’t have a Miracle Morning, I would have woken up and just one day would have rolled into the next, rolled into the next, and it would have snowballed into possibly an uncontrollable situation. But every day the stress would build throughout the day and then I’d go to bed and wake up, “Haah,” and I would read my affirmations that reminded me, “Hal, you’re doing great. You’re going to make it through this. This is only temporary. You’re going to learn. You’re going to grow. You’re going to become better. You’re going to one day use this experience to help other people. So, be grateful for where you are. Be at peace with where you are. And every day, put one foot in front of the other and do something that moves you forward, that moves you in the direction that you want to go.” So, that Miracle Morning is crucial.
So, number one, accept life exactly as it is. Accept your life exactly as it is. And as I mentioned, stop resisting reality and wishing life were different than it is in this moment. That doesn’t mean that you can’t wish life were different moving forward and take steps to change it but the point is you’ve got to accept reality so that you can be at peace within yourself so that you’re not stressed or anxious or angry because those emotions, they rob you of clarity, they rob you of motivation, they rob you of everything that you need internally to move your life forward. So, number one, accept your life exactly as it is. Number two, and we already touched on this, but be grateful for your life exactly as it is. Be grateful for your life. And I already said how do you do that? Well, you create that paradigm. You just simply consider and adopt the paradigm that every opportunity, especially the difficult ones, all of them are opportunities for us to learn, grow. They say every adversity is an opportunity for us to learn and grow and become better than we’ve ever been before. So, be grateful for life exactly as it is.
You can ask yourself, what’s great about this? How can I use this experience, this difficult experience, this painful experience? How might I use this now or in the future to help myself, to help other people? And when you ask the right questions, you get answers that empower you and it doesn’t necessarily make it easier to go through what you’re going through but it does give you hope that you’re going to make it through it. And remember, you have a 100% success rate of making it through every challenge you’ve ever faced. The third thing that you can do to create inner freedom, to experience inner freedom is emotional optimization, meditation. Really, I can say it’s the Miracle Morning, all of the practices, but for me, specifically, this is the one that lately and it’s funny because affirmations have always been the most important for me, practicing the Miracle Morning, and they really still are. In fact, I want to read one to you that book I mentioned, Living Enlightenment by Andrew Cohen. This is about a paragraph from that book that I wrote into my affirmations that I read every day, that I’m reading every day to remind me of this inner freedom that’s available that we can all experience. And as I mentioned, inner freedom, another word for that is enlightenment.
So, here you go from Andrew Cohen in his book, Living Enlightenment.
“You can experience enlightenment instantly if you look directly into what it would mean to be completely free here and now. This simply means to abandon any possibility in your own immediate experience that is not total unconditional freedom. So, if we think that we want to be free, we should look into this question with utter sincerity as if our life depended on it. What would it mean for me, whoever I think I am, to want to be free more than anything else right now, in this very moment and forever after? Through asking this one question, the whole world and everything in it begin to recede into the background. Again, the question, what would it mean for me, whoever I think I am, to want to be free more than anything else right now in this very moment and forever after?”
So, that is one of my affirmations. And so, for me, the Miracle Morning, as I mentioned, is critical for me to pour into myself every day, to shift my focus, to develop my mindset, to elevate my consciousness, to remind myself that I get to choose how I experience life. And actually, I’ll read you one other affirmation that came up for me in journaling the other day, and this is something that was around my marriage. Hold on. I’m looking for it right now. I posted it in the Front Row Dads brotherhood and many of the fellow Front Row dads who are also Front Row husbands posted comments that I don’t know where it is.
Anyway, the basic idea is this and this, by the way, if you have a spouse, you can apply this. In fact, you can really apply this to any person in your life. So, here you go. This is what I found. This is what I wrote.
“Imagine if God said something along the lines of this. I’m going to give you this imperfect person and your job is to love them unconditionally, including their faults and shortcomings. It won’t be easy and they will test your patience but it will be worth it. They will spend the rest of their life with you. They will love you and adore you in a way that most people only dream of. (Let’s see, some of this doesn’t apply unless you are a husband with a wife) All you have to do is commit to love that person exactly as he or she is to make him or her feel cherished and safe in your care despite all of his or her faults or shortcomings because that’s what true love is. Your wife or that person is your greatest opportunity to learn how to love someone the way that all of us deserve to be loved.”
So, I read that because the essence of that is to realize that you get to choose how you experience another person. That is one aspect of inner freedom in the same way you get to choose how you experience the presidential election that we just had. Again, you can choose to be stressed, frustrated, or afraid or you can choose to be calm and relaxed, and at peace. Either way, the election happened. Either way, we’re going to have a president, hopefully, but we get to choose our experience of life. And when we don’t consciously choose, that’s when we don’t have inner freedom. We don’t have true freedom if we’re not consciously choosing but we’re unconsciously reacting and our choices being born from those unconscious reactions.
So, back to emotional optimization meditation. This is simply every day choosing, asking yourself, what emotion, what emotional state do I want to experience right now do I want to experience in my life? Do I want to experience today? Do I want to experience more often? Do I want to experience all the time? Which emotional state do you want to experience? And then get yourself in that state by using some external stimulus. Well, when I say external, I just mean some stimuli. It could be a memory of the last time you felt that emotion. That for me is usually where I go to or if I want to feel gratitude, I think of the kids. And I’ve talked about this in recent podcasts. So, this is just a refresher for some of you and some of you are hearing it for the first time. But the idea if you have inner freedom, where you get to choose your experience of life at any given moment, then ask yourself, what do you want that experience to be in the form of an emotion?
And so, if you want to be grateful, think of what makes you feel grateful. I think of my kids and I smile, and I start to let that gratitude overtake me. And through that, then I set my timer for the meditation and I just spend 5 or 10 minutes in that state experiencing life as I choose based on my emotional state. And what I’m doing is I am anchoring that state in so that I now have access to it whenever I want. And the more I do this emotional optimization meditation, which I do every day, and I do for about 10 minutes, usually, the more these emotional states that I am choosing become my default states of being. And the more inner freedom becomes my default way of experiencing the world where when I find myself reactive, I literally will close my eyes, put my hand on my heart, take a deep breath and ask how do I want to experience life right now? This thing right now that I’m feeling stressed about, how do I want to experience it? How will I choose to experience it? I want to be at peace that feels good. I want to be grateful that I get to experience this, that I get to take this challenge on. I want to feel confident that I can get through this. I want to experience joy while I’m doing this. And through the power of inner freedom as we condition it each and every day so we become less and less and less reactive, and more and more and more proactive in the way that we choose to experience every aspect of our life. We’re developing true freedom, the ultimate freedom.
And then last but not least do one thing at a time. So, the first three strategies I shared, accept life exactly as it is, be grateful for life exactly as it is, number three, practice this emotional optimization meditation. That’s how you’re actively able to choose, consciously choose how you want to experience every aspect of your life. But then, “Okay. There’s still a bunch of stuff I got to get done,” like, “Okay. Now I’m feeling good but I’m still overwhelmed.” I’m still overwhelmed. And by the way, I’m sharing this because I’ve been feeling as overwhelmed as ever before trying to launch this Miracle Morning Movie. I’ve mentioned this in the last few weeks. I have more on my plate to do than ever before. So, that’s why I’m sharing this because this is something that is I’m going through right now in real-time. And so, the fourth strategy here is simply do one thing at a time. Feeling overwhelmed is a result of looking at all the things that you want or need to do and feeling like you need to get all of them done right now, today, simultaneously.
And while there could be some truth to that, and that, “Yeah, I really do need to get all these things done,” you’ve got to operate in reality. You have to deal in reality. And reality is you can only do one thing at a time. Now, if you have people you can delegate to, well, then that’s a way that you could actually have multiple things getting done at the same time. I have a team of people, right, that’s partially that’s definitely helping. They’re so awesome and supportive but even when I delegate to them, my to-do list is still like 27 things that need to get done today and I can only get done like three things a day. So, I woke up this morning and I’m like, “Okay. I’ve got all these things to get done. How am I going?” and I was feeling stressed and feeling overwhelmed. I went into my meditation. I pulled out my affirmations, I got centered, I reconnected with my inner freedom, right? And then I asked myself, right, I reminded myself I can only do one thing at a time today and I’m going to choose and I outlined each hour. First, it was record the podcast, then actually first it was send an email with the sneak peek of the third sneak peek of the Miracle Morning movie. I sent it out this morning. So, you will have gotten that a few days ago.
If you haven’t watched it, by the way, go look for it. It says Miracle Morning movie sneak peek number three. It’s really good. It’s this inspiring story of Mike Eaton. Anyway, just go look for it. It’s one of my favorite scenes. Honestly, it’s one of my probably top five favorite scenes out of 30 scenes in the movie or whatever it is from the entire film. It’s so incredible and inspiring. It’s how Mike Eaton lost 90 pounds and transformed his life with the Miracle Morning. Go check that out. But anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point was, I woke up and I go, I’ve got all these things to do. First, I’m going to spend an hour sending this email. Second, I’ll spend an hour recording the podcast. Third, I’ll spend an hour working on the Miracle Morning launch team, which by the way, I think I mentioned that on last week’s episode. It’s still not done. I’m trying, guys. But I just want you to know like I’m in this with you. Okay. I struggle every day in life, I struggle with focus, and overwhelm, and productivity, and fear and worry like all of it. Right?
So, it’s not that I don’t experience those things. It’s that I have practices that many of which are done in the morning, practices that refocus, realign, and remind me of who I truly am, of who I’m committed to being, how I’m committed to showing up, and how I’m committed to experiencing life from that place of inner freedom. So, it’s not that I don’t worry about stuff or I don’t deal with this stuff. No. I deal with it but that’s the thing is I deal with it, right? Like I’m always being proactive with strategies and things and that’s what I’m trying to do is just share these with you and hopefully, something that I shared today, maybe more than one thing, but hopefully something was helpful for you. I really hope it was. So, because it’s been for me. Usually, the podcast is just, hey, if I’m not interviewing somebody, it’s like here’s what’s working in my life or what’s worked in the past that I’m seeing in our community of people struggling with or needing help with. And so here you go. So, I hope that’s been helpful for you.
[CLOSING]
Hal Elrod: And last but not least, the Miracle Morning Movie, as you may know, we’ve spent the last six years and this is really the next step in the mission. Right now, you can go to MiracleMorningMovie.com. By the way, I know thousands of you have already done this so I’m preaching to the choir, but some of you maybe you haven’t yet. But if you go to MiracleMorningMovie.com, you can preorder the movie and basically here’s what it is you get the movie. We added that where you actually own the movie forever. Before it was just the Live Experience and then you’d have to buy the movie on like Amazon. We now included where with your ticket, you actually get the movie. So, If you can’t make the live experience, you’re going to own the movie forever so you can watch it whenever you want, share it with your friends and family. But then also, on the Live Experience it’s showing for 72 hours. So, if you can’t make it at the actual start time on December 12 at 12 PM Eastern, that’s okay. You have 72 hours to watch it. And it comes with immediately following the film, a live training from me on a Miracle Morning implementation training, a live Q&A where you can ask me questions, and I’m going to engage with you and in our community, and then a brand new and improved Miracle Morning 30-Day Challenge. And then again, you own the movie forever so you get to watch it whenever you want.
So, that’s all there, MiracleMorningMovie.com and this movie I really believe it’s going to help so many people. I think that people are when they watch it, I think you’re going to be blown away and impacted in a way that it’s hard to imagine that from watching a 90-minute movie could happen. But you know, we’ve done some test screenings and the experience from people or the response from people has just been absolutely incredible. So, with all of that, I hope I’ll see you there live at the world premiere. And if not, you can still get the movie. Either way, I love you and I appreciate you. Thank you so much for your time and being a member of the Miracle Morning Community and I will talk to you next week. Thank you so much.
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