Strong or Weak – Story and Gratitude Choose.

TRANSCRIPT

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Good morning good afternoon wherever you are, this is Chris we’re sitting here at the breakfast table it’s it’s been 19 degrees since 5am out on the beach it’s too hot for me to be out there right now. So here I am and hot not meaning hot temperature hot meaning sunburn hot.

I nearly cut my thumb forefinger off on the weekend and chopping trees in the backyard and soaring them in half and and so I have to stay out of the water for the next 24 hours to let this thing dry up a bit. I’m sure it would have benefited from a few stitches but I self self stuck it together and with a bunch of antibiotics and what have you. I’m sure it’s going to be okay but for now, it’s very uncomfortable and no swimming, waddling in the waters as close as it’s gonna get.

Today we’re talking about gratitude, fucking gratitude. If I if I could get something and choke it one day I’m going to choke gratitude. It is benign It is stupid it if you harp on about gratitude, and I’m gonna give you an opportunity to make up your own mind on this topic. And just go through it.

Firstly, when you ask people to be grateful you’re manipulating them because you want them to see the good in something and deny the existence of the bad in it. So gratitude, according to the walk up model is gratitude for the bad and the good and very few people are going to harp on about that. Whether you’re doing a business conference or a personal workshop or whatever you’re doing. When someone says Be grateful. ask them are they grateful for the dark side of it for what went wrong for what’s broken?

Or are they trying to distract you from the truth by saying Be grateful for it? That’s point number one, and I hope like hell gratitude, therefore, is not necessarily the silver bullet panacea that you’re harping on because it’s going to lead to depression.

Grateful people who don’t really understand what they mean but what it means to be grateful, get depressed a lot a lot, a lot. They also set up expectations of life that they can’t live up to themselves. I’m grateful for how wonderful it is. It isn’t wonderful. It’s good and bad. I’m grateful for how much support you gave me. I didn’t support you. I support and challenged you. So we can be real. We can be real. We don’t have to be fraud. We don’t have to be fake and dance around the maple tree, trying to get elated, full of sugar pumped up and say it’s gratitude. That’s not the word

The second thing is when you drive your car when you take your car out when you’re driving down the highway. Do you spend 1% of the time looking in the mirror rear vision mirror 5% of the time looking in the rear vision mirror or 100% of the time looking in the vision. How many people do you hear say I’m grateful for the future? Well, what future it hasn’t happened? How can you be grateful for it? You can be grateful for the now be now with an opportunity for the future but goodness me you start getting grateful for the future you’re living. Not in the moment. You’re living in fantasy. And there’s a place for that it’s called Disneyland or Netflix.

The other form of gratitude is in the past you finish your day’s work. I’m really grateful for what happened. I went through personal trauma. I’m grateful that it happened. I went through something. Gratitude is looking in the rear vision mirror of your car. Now how much of your life you want to spend looking in the rear vision mirror of your car looking back and being grateful looking, being in the moment and being in the revision rear of the car.

Being grateful because everything you’re ever grateful for as already happened. And therefore it’s the revision mirror. Now if you spend more than I would say in the total trip driving for four hours if you spend more than 5% of the time driving the car looking in the rear vision mirror, you’re going to have an accident.

I would say it’s about 2% which is a pretty good amount of time to spend flicking your eyes up into the rear vision mirror and checking what’s going on behind when you’re overtaking, etc.

So nobody’s arguing it’s a really important part of going forward. It’s a really critical part of being in the car and making good decisions about moving lanes and whatever. It’s a glance. It’s a glance in the rear vision mirror. Gratitude is the rear vision mirror. glance at it get it right. Don’t take shortcuts, do it on a piece of paper. Write it down, be grateful for what has just transpired. Now we’re going to talk about the opposite to gratitude.

We’re going to talk about visualization of the future now. Some people wait for the future to happen and then get thankful for it. And they tell a story about how wonderful it was this month that we hit our sales target. Congratulations celebrate the past. Live in the past. I love that. That’s really got to make a big difference to the world live in the past. Let’s celebrate that we achieved a goal.

Live in the past we achieved the IDI chieftain past let’s celebrate in the present what we achieved do in the past. Why did we do that because we’re trying to we got this sum link between if we celebrate what we did, we’ll do more of what we did in the future. Is that a vision? Is that a visionary human being going let’s do what we did in the past and 10% to it and celebrate that at the end of the year with a bonus that’s not visionary. That’s Ground Zero.

Of course you’re going to do what you did last year, whatever you did well, and whatever you learn, you’re going to do it next year. You don’t have to celebrate that to cause it to happen. But the thing is, what are you going to do next year?

Are you gonna make it the same? Just a little bit iterated up and therefore ho hum? Or are you going to create a story? Now stories are things that you transport yourself out 12 months, you write down on a piece of paper in the first person in the present tense.

This is what’s happening.

I’m standing on top of Mount Everest. I’m looking out over the Himalayas. It’s a beautiful morning, sun’s rising. I’m Billy cold, a little bit exhausted and nervous about going down but I’ve made it the $20 million sponsorship is now automatically by my arriving at the top of Mount Everest been paid to the charity of my choice. My family’s healthy, happy and wise a man radioing me from the base camp now. This is a story that happens in the future somewhere. And what you’re going to do is you don’t create a memory of the future. And that is how we lead a memory of the future. Yep.

If you’re not grateful for the past, you’ll repeat the past until you’re grateful for it. So we’ve got gratitude built into this package. We have gratitude built in net we’re not denying the need for it. But don’t walk around. I’m such a grateful person. Oh, I’m so grateful for everything that happened to me.

And all we listened to Anthony Robbins with 109 year old piano player going at gratitude that made me live long. That’s rubbish. It’s the story she created. It’s the story of the future and she created it before it happened. She scripted the movie before she made the movie. She created the script. She created the actors, she created the movie script and then lived it. And this is how we do vision. And because it’s coming to the end of 2022 in the Western calendar.

It’s not necessarily in the Nepalese or the Tibetan or the Chinese calendar, but it’s the one we’re talking about here on this podcast. It’s coming time to do 2023 story. Now, have you spent the time to go out 12 months and create a memory? Do you know I have a memory of my perfect client and whenever I meet anybody, I’m actually helping them fit the memory of my perfect client, a beautiful soul, our powerful heart, a strength of resilience and determination and commitment to their story.

I have the story of a perfect client and when I meet people, I’m just helping them fit the story. Now that’s leadership. That’s how we make a world a different place rather than iterated with gratitude looking in the rear vision mirror driving forward into the past future present thing.


So it’s an opportunity and especially this storytelling needs to be told to someone and no better person to tell it to the good old Uncle Chris. Why? Because I’ve got a bullshit writer. That’s about the size of that thing out in the warmer that looks at outer space, the Hubble telescope and all I have got a bullshit Raider because I’ve done enough bullshitting to know what bullshit smells like.

So I’ve got a bullshit radar. I know when we’re actually lying to ourselves. I know when we’re not telling our authentics and see yourself to the table. I know when the future we’re painting is a fantasy. We don’t want to paint fantasies grave with a future. That’s not gonna work. We have to have a story and that story needs to be balanced. And that story needs to be achievable. and that story needs to be believable. and that can’t be a polarized.

Oh, I’ll be so happy when No, you’re going to be happy and sad support and challenge. This is strength. This is strength a brilliant awesome bulletproof fantastic unfuck winnable story 12 months out from now. And if you really want to be brave, three years.

This is Chris, you have a beautiful day, and I’m going back to brekkie bye for now.

Live with Spirit