Stop Swimming Upstream
Focus on Your Controllables and Let the Rest Go

The 5 AM Miracle Podcast, hosted by Jeff Sanders

Episode #558: Stop Swimming Upstream: Focus on Your Controllables and Let the Rest Go

Jeff Sanders
Hey, it's Jeff Sanders, and this episode is going to be a little bit different.

I have a rather unique story for me to share this week, and I want to approach this from a slightly different format here on the podcast.

I tend to do the same episode every week and that rhythm, that formula that you hear is both rhythmic and familiar and high energy and well thought through, and then sometimes I just need to smash it all to bits.

Sometimes I need to take what I wrote and just not do it that way.

And that's how this episode has unfolded.

I did, but I usually do, which is I put together a script and I wanted to bring that to you in a very specific, well thought through way.

And I recorded the first half of the episode and then I deleted it.

Cause I realized it was just not authentic.

It wasn't genuine.

It wasn't real.

It wasn't good.

And if podcasting can be anything, it can be something very, very personal in ways that other mediums just can't.

And so that's my intention this week.

Um, I am going to read the script to a large degree, but I wanted to kind of throw this out there before the episode begins that if I sound like I'm going off script, I am, if I sound like I'm on a tangent, I am.

If the episode sounds weird, it is, that's just what this is going to be.

If you listen to the five, a miracle premium episodes, the ones that are the paid version of the show, um, I have more that are sort of like this.

Uh, but this is, I guess, in many ways, my attempt to break the mold for myself.

Possibly for you as well.

If you've caught yourself in a rhythm of life where at first it was a habit and then it was a rut, right?

First it was good.

And then it was bad.

And I think that sometimes good things can become bad if we kind of bury our heads in the sand and then we don't ever look up and realize, Hey, wait a minute.

I'm going the wrong direction here.

And I think that that's in so many ways where I found myself.

So having said all of that, let's get to the episode now, but that's your, your warning, you've been warned.

There we go.

You can't control other people.

I know it's a real bummer.

Yeah.

I've been trying my whole life to make others do what I want them to do.

And only recently have I finally begun the process to redirect my focus elsewhere.

And what I've come to realize is that there is an easier path to getting what you want in life and it all centers around where you give your time and attention.

This is the 5am Miracle, episode number 558.

Stop swimming upstream.

Focus on your controllables.

Let the rest go.

Good morning and welcome to the 5am Miracle.

I am Jeff Sanders and this episode and this podcast, yes, they are dedicated to dominating your day before breakfast, but sometimes we don't need domination.

Completely break the mold here of my entire show.

Sometimes what we need is to rethink through what our life is supposed to be.

And by supposed to be, I don't mean on someone else's standards.

By supposed to be, I mean on your own.

The concept of having your day dominated before breakfast isn't of itself truly intentional.

It is foundationally based on this idea of purpose and meaning.

And you asking the question, what do I want from all of this?

And am I doing this right?

And if you're not, if the results are not working, if the life cycle you have created is broken, something has to shift.

And sometimes that kind of change is thrust upon us and sometimes it comes from within.

And the story I'm going to tell this week is one where it was thrust upon me and I had to respond to it.

And yet having done the opposite from a lot of my life where I've intentionally and proactively pursued difficult things, when you have some change brought to your front door, you didn't ask for the skillset that you've gained in dealing with proactive challenges doesn't seem to carry over as well to the ones that you didn't ask for to say that a different way.

I need a new skillset for me and you may need a new skillset for you.

And so in this episode, I'm going to break down why swimming upstream is a waste of time, which may sound obvious and destructive to your goals.

But then more importantly, how we can identify where in life and work we are focused on the wrong things.

And then from there, where we can pivot our time and attention to make better choices, ones that are more meaningful, more productive, and ultimately more effective.

So let's dig in and start right there.

Just recently for the first time in my entire life, I saw a therapist.

We had four sessions together.

And in that short time, I finally admitted that I was fighting battles destined for failure.

I was in effect swimming upstream.

I specifically was arguing with people who were not listening to me.

I was trying to change people despite knowing logically that that was an impossible and fruitless endeavor.

In a nutshell, I was focusing on aspects of my life and work that I cannot control.

And it was making me very angry.

Angry to the point that I was experiencing real anxiety and angry to the point that I realized I didn't have the skillset I needed and I needed to ask for help.

Hence the therapist.

Now, about 10 years ago, I dealt with panic attacks and I discussed that here on the podcast, as well as in my second book, The Free Time Formula.

But something was different this time around.

There were no panic attacks, but I did catch myself kind of spinning in circles.

I was experiencing rumination where you think about a problem over and over and over and don't really pivot to a solution.

You just keep going back to feeling bad over and over.

And my bigger challenge here was that the rumination was on problems that were outside of my sphere of influence.

I was getting caught up in arguments about petty problems, trying to point blame at other people when it was an objective waste of time.

I believed then as I do today that I was right in these scenarios and justified to be angry, but my response to being right should not have been anger.

It should not have been justification of my position.

My response should have been a big deep breath and a pivot to focusing on what I can control, my zone of influence.

You know, there's a lot in life that we do not control.

And in those scenarios, we are by default victims.

Now, I don't like to use that word.

I tend to shy away from that because it doesn't empower me.

The word victim, I've discussed this recently in the podcast, tends to bring about this feeling of helplessness that I find to be very non-productive, very unhelpful, and yet somehow in this season, I was, without using that word, acting as a victim.

The good news here, and what I finally caught on to, is that we always have the power of choice.

We have the power of how we respond to whatever is thrown our way.

The power of choice is always with us.

The ability to pivot is always there.

The knowledge that we can decide not to be angry, as counterintuitive as that may sound, that choice is there as well, which leaves us with a different path.

A path that is carved out by our own choices, a path that has potential because we are the ones who get to decide where it leads.

You know, honestly, I really didn't want to talk about this entire topic.

The fact that I saw a therapist, I, I viewed this as a mistake to share it.

And I say that because I have always fully supported others who have seen therapists, I have friends, very close friends who are therapists themselves professionally, and yet I have personally viewed me, Jeff Sanders, seeing a therapist as a weakness.

For me to make that step was me admitting my own failures, my missteps, my inability to solve my own problems.

And this is at the crux of the issue.

I thought I could do it all.

I thought I could solve my own problems, coach myself through anything and ultimately do this alone.

And by this, I mean, solve every problem in my life, in my business, everywhere.

And I was wrong flat out my entire life of 40 plus years.

Now I have been swimming upstream.

I think in a lot of ways, just to simply feed my ego and reinforce that same belief system that I am my own best answer.

I don't know where I learned that from.

It wasn't taught explicitly to me in my life at any point, but I embodied that.

I really like sank into that as part of my identity.

And what I've now realized is that I was choosing a harder path out of a self-centered belief that seeking help was admitting that I wasn't capable.

Wasn't strong enough.

Wasn't smart enough, or dare I say, wasn't man enough to handle my own life.

You know, I only saw my therapist a few times, literally four sessions.

And yet I made a lot of progress in those four sessions, which also is a very Jeff Sanders thing to do.

I go very hardcore into something and really dominate it quickly and move on.

However, at this point, having completed this, you know, this series together with my therapist, I now view therapy as another tool in my mental health toolbox.

You know, for most of my adult life, I had a solution for every problem, a tool for every job.

But in recent years, I have been hit with new challenges that require new tools.

And it's not a failure or a weakness to get help.

This is the lesson that I will need to relearn for the rest of my entire life.

Seeking advice from others is a sign of maturity.

It is an act of self-respect and it is a, it's a realignment to focusing on your controllables.

Once again, there is a lot we cannot control, but there is so much we can.

We have more power than we know how to handle.

But from my experience, we tend to diminish it.

We hide from it.

We distract ourselves endlessly to avoid having to admit this is true of ourselves.

And we find every excuse in the book to ultimately let somebody else take the reins of our own life.

To write our stories for us.

You know, I love the metaphors of trying to swim upstream or downstream, as well as metaphors around magnets that pull me towards things or repel me from things.

And when I envision the next 10 years of my life, what I want to be true is that my life is filled with magnets pulling me downstream, these forces of nature that guide me effortlessly into abundance and success and peace, not anger, distrust, or discipline for the sake of feeding my own tough guy image, which I think has been true for me for a long time.

No, focusing on your controllables is an act of living in the real world, pouring your energy and resources into the parts of life we get a true say in.

We have a lot of power, which you have likely heard me mention on literally every episode of this show, because the final line every week, you have the power to change your life and the fun begins bright and early, you know, the power you have to wake up early itself is the same power you have to change careers, to improve relationships, to finally address a chronic health issue, fix the bad habit or anything else you may have been running from avoiding or simply pointing fingers to get yourself off the hook, you know, facing your fears, acknowledging reality and stepping into an uncertain future.

This is the part for me that's the trickiest, an uncertain future.

These are all scary propositions, but all of those are acts of courage and they can rest upon a foundation of you taking action in the direction of confidence, a confidence that you have the power to make real change, a confidence that you can start where you are now and take a step forward, a confidence that says your life is your own, not someone else's.

You know what I said at the top of the show about the fact that I wrote this script and then I ditched the recording and came back to it, that's all true.

And I think that what I realized in the expression of my first recording was this lack of a genuine conversation around this topic, this very specific topic of being vulnerable, this specific topic of admitting weaknesses, this topic of sharing publicly your weaknesses, which is a whole different ballgame, but it's extremely important to share certain stories of our lives.

I don't share every story of my life here on the show.

I'm never going to, I have no intention of doing that, but some stories are not meant for us to hold close to the vest.

If your life like mine has had a similar experience, whether now or in the distant past, or you're about to hit into a season very soon, a season where you are spiraling, where rumination is part of your story, where catastrophizing, that's a new vocab word I learned in therapy, catastrophizing your scenario.

You are making so much more in the negative sense of what's actually taking place.

I know where you are.

I have been there.

It's a mess.

It sucks, but there is a path forward.

There's a path forward through the nonsense, the anxiety, the stress, the fear, the goofy days.

I've had a lot of those.

You know, when you catch yourself in those seasons where you are, I'll use the term of rumination once again, you catch yourself in those moments where you just are spiraling through negativity, playing the blame game, imagining a terrifying future that has not happened and likely will not happen.

You can pivot.

You can change your thoughts.

You can shift your energy.

You can move in the direction of progress.

And that's what this episode is about.

And so I'm going to break down a few concepts that I think are critical for this conversation about controllables, about this metaphor of life being swum upstream, and this idea that we can let go of the things that are holding us back and instead embrace and grab a hold of those concepts, those strategies, those tools that we're going to leverage as a foundation for forward progress, for positive future days to acknowledge when the bad thing is happening and saying, nope, not today I'm going the other direction, thank you.

That shift is one that has radically changed my life.

And that's what focusing on your controllables is all about.

So let's break down the concept that I did pitch at the top, which is why swimming upstream is not only a waste of time, but it's also destructive to your goals, the concept to swim upstream essentially says that there is an opposite that's real to swim downstream.

And to flow downstream is to say, you're going to take the easy path, take the path that's available, see the opportunity that's there in front of you and go with it.

You're going to let life kind of guide you in a direction that is more effortless and easygoing.

And the opposite of that to intentionally kind of buck the system and swim upstream is one to say, I'll take the perspective of an entrepreneur or the kind of breaking the status quo kind of people who say, I'm going to do things differently.

I'm going to live life my own terms.

I'm going to go and forge my own path.

And certainly there's a part of life that is meant for that and is very beneficial.

But if you catch yourself trying to do that all the time, everywhere, it's exhausting and you're going to need to put your energy elsewhere.

And I say that meaning we need to pick our battles more wisely than I'll say for me, I need to pick my battles more wisely, if you catch yourself wanting to be right, catch yourself wanting to have things be perfect.

Are you struggle with this idea of perfectionism and you know, life needs to be a certain way and a certain sense of a polish.

I mean, heck even me recording this episode right now, uh, breaking the mold, the usual show, like I'm having a bit of a stress inducing moment, even going off script this much.

Because I'm so used to a certain way of doing things.

And you may not hear that in me.

You may not know what I mean by that directly, but you know what that feels like to have a vision for something, to have an expectation of something.

And then when you try to execute on it, it doesn't work.

When you try to make something that's just, is it meant to be and you fight it and you bash your head against the wall, trying to enforce it into existence.

That's what it means to swim upstream.

You're fighting too hard.

You're wearing yourself out.

And what ends up happening is you don't get the end result you wanted even through all the hard work.

So the objective waste of time scenario is real flowing downstream actually produces better results with less energy.

And you're a little happier too, which is also a huge perk.

A second reason why this upstream component is such a bad idea.

Generally speaking, is that someone else has likely already solved the same problem you're going through right now, and they can help you get there faster with less stress and less energy.

I'll use my therapist as an example here.

This was a guy who knows what it's like to help someone else through a problem.

And so when I went to him and I explained my scenario, the struggles I was having, the mental blocks I was experiencing, it didn't take him two seconds to realize what I needed.

He saw it immediately.

There was no pause.

It was just, I see this, here's the problem.

Here's the answer.

And he was right.

Someone else has likely already solved the same thing you're going through now.

And ultimately you can choose to do what I have done for so many years, which is to basically reinvent the wheel and solve the problem on your own by yourself without help.

But honestly, that's kind of silly.

It's silly in the face of the fact that we could just go find someone else who's already done it, learn from them, get there faster.

Yes.

In some cases you have to pay someone to do that.

In some cases you have to go seek out and find these people or systems or tools or frameworks, but they're there.

They exist.

And it's an easier path to go find them and copy them and mimic them directly.

Then it is to rebuild them parts of our lives as creatives or artists or innovators or entrepreneurs.

Maybe you want to go push yourself forward in certain areas.

You are going to invent something brand new, but the vast majority of life, it's just going to make you tired.

It's just not going to work.

All right.

The third and final reason why this upstream concept ultimately is destructive to your goals is that you don't have to take the harder path to prove to yourself or others that you're tough or smart or manly or whatever term you want to throw in there.

You don't have to prove this to anyone, not to yourself, not to others.

Ditch the ego.

This can be tough.

Even especially if you don't realize that that's what's happening.

I didn't for a long time.

I really thought that this was a certain way of life that should be done a certain way.

And the word should kept coming into my vocabulary.

This should be like this.

I am right.

Therefore this should happen.

But to double down on that mentality, to want to prove to yourself and others that that's, that's it, man, it's just, it's not going to work.

Even if you're right, you lose.

Even if you win, you lose.

And that's the message.

I saw a YouTube video recently of a reminder of this common scenario.

This was from a beard company that I follow who was involved in a lawsuit and they ultimately had to spend a lot of money to defend themselves.

They won the lawsuit.

It was tossed out and they ended up kind of winning on paper.

But as the CEO explained, it was just a terrible loss.

They lost a lot of money, time, energy winning.

The lawsuit was not at all a victory for him.

And I get it.

We tend to find ourselves in these scenarios in life sometimes where we think we've won, but we have not.

We think that this harder path is the right one, but it isn't.

Now it's very subjective to figure this out.

I'm not saying I know whether your path you're on now, it fits this scenario or not.

The point I'm making is that the self-awareness piece here is huge.

To catch yourself in these moments, recognize when it's happening, and then let it go.

Back away, find a smoother, easier path forward, because that's going to be a lot less stressful, a lot more fun, a lot more productive.

That's the intention.

All right.

Second major area of this concept of your controllables.

I want to focus now on how we can identify where in your life and work.

You are focused on all these wrong things.

It is subjective.

However, there are a few criteria you can use here to break that down a little bit more specifically.

The first would be that you are struggling, but you have not seen success recently or ever.

So let's imagine that you're pursuing a business idea, a diet, a relationship, whatever it is, and you have been trying and trying and trying over and over for a long, long time.

And you just haven't cracked that nut yet.

You have not yet figured it out.

Now there is one philosophy, one school of thought here that you could be like on Thomas Edison's a good example, you know, 10,000 tries to get the light bulb to work, maybe that's your story.

Or maybe it's just a strategy equation.

Right.

I had Seth Godin in the podcast recently with his new book all about strategy.

And that entire discussion really centers on this idea that you can go on a road trip and drive really fast in the wrong direction.

How is that going to be helpful for you?

It isn't right.

You're working hard, a lot of fast progress, but if you're going the wrong direction, it doesn't mean much, does it?

And so the question is, can you pivot your strategy?

If you've been struggling, possibly you view that as failure.

There might be a better way.

And that better way could come through a change of approach.

And yes, that could come from finding others who've already found success and modeling some attempts that they made as well.

Right.

There's always another option.

There's always the power of choice.

Second option is when you think about a problem, you see obstacles instead of opportunities.

One thing that I have caught myself in a lot in this last season of life.

And one reason why I found myself in therapy to begin with is that I caught myself in this trap where I would consider some option I was going through some new business deal, some personal objective I had, and instead of seeing the opportunities of success and the finish lines and the gold medals at the end, or whatever the case is, what I saw were all the problems, the obstacles, the reasons I say that in quotes, excuses, why these things wouldn't work.

And if you catch yourself in those moments where you want something, there's a problem to solve a goal to achieve, but your vision of that future to that path to go down is just nothing but obstacles and dead ends.

A change in perspective is going to be required in order to see the opposite of that, which are the opportunities, the paths forward, the places where you can go to make things actually work.

And that takes a different frame of mind, a different way of thinking.

It takes breaking out of your shell.

No, the episode this week, break the mold, right?

Stop doing things the way you have done them and try something in a new way.

And when that happens, you will change that approach.

And that perspective will then lead to what I have seen so many times in my life are those brilliant aha moments.

You know, for years in this podcast, I have taught the weekly review process that I ultimately had learned from David Allen's getting things done book.

And as part of that review process, when I am going to record my wins for the week, my losses, right?

The lessons learned.

One of the things that I write down every single week are my epiphanies, my aha moments, the things that I discovered in the last week that really shifted my perspective.

And what's really interesting is if you look back, I record all my reviews, they're all digital.

I have the last 10, 12 years.

I can go back to previous review periods, weeks and months at a time and see how many kind of epiphanies did I have in various weeks and on some weeks I had none and others I had dozens.

And you can tell when I'm having a personal growth crisis or possibly a personal growth, you know, magnificent breakthrough, because in those weeks when I struggle the most, but I also have the most epiphanies in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

That's the quote I have used on this podcast and I will forever use it.

Albert Einstein.

Thank you for that.

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunities that if you look back at your life and you can record and see those patterns that in those moments of massive personal growth, you will also see massive challenge.

They come hand in hand.

We have to be put into those difficult scenarios to grow.

There was a story actually I just heard in a book that I'm listening to right now, um, on productivity and I'll have to find the actual resource for this a story the author told, but the story he told was essentially that there was a group of scientists, I believe, who had crafted a greenhouse, uh, with the ideal environments for plants and trees and, and all these, you know, shrubbery, uh, to grow and an ideal space, perfect sunlight, perfect nutrients, perfect amount of water, just absolute kind of heaven on earth greenhouse experience.

But one major problem showed up, which is the trees would grow to a certain height and then fall over.

They would grow to a certain height and fall over, over and over again.

And they had to figure out what's going on.

Why are our perfect trees dying on us?

And the answer was a lack of wind.

The trees did not have any force to fight against.

So their roots didn't grow down very far and they just fell over.

We need struggle.

We need challenge.

We need obstacles.

We need something difficult to face in order to grow and in order to not die.

We need the challenge.

It's why exercise is so powerful.

It's why taking on new business venture is so powerful.

It's why the challenges matter because that's our path forward.

The obstacle is the way thank you.

Ryan holiday, phenomenal book there.

The obstacle is the way the obstacle is the solution.

The obstacle is what you are looking for.

Not avoiding.

This is one of the biggest personal growth shifts you'll ever possibly make.

I still am working on this one as well, even though I've known this concept for so long.

All right.

Third area here where you can identify where in your life and work, you're focusing on the wrong things.

You feel more anxiety, fear, and depression and any other kind of insert negative term here, then you feel enthusiasm, hope, or abundance.

Your emotional state is more powerful than your logical state.

Let me back this one up just a second.

For most of my life, I have valued logic as one of the most important things you could possibly value.

I have valued facts and self-awareness and seeing things as they are.

I mean, you've heard me talk about these things forever on this show.

Logic matters to me.

I took a class in college called logic, and I actually studied like logistical arguments and how to make sure that something was valid or not.

And it was so powerful for me.

It really changed my perspective on how to see the world.

There's one logical reality though, that I missed for a long time, which is that if you value logic, you value seeing things as they are.

And what is true about human behavior is that we as humans are not logical.

We are emotional creatures that use logic to justify our emotions.

End of story.

I would love for logic to be more important than emotion, but it is not.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned, the fact that I went to therapy for emotional challenges, not logical ones, oh no, no, no, no.

This was all emotion.

It's all feeling.

It's all experience.

It's all perception.

If you are feeling anxious about something, then that thing is now an anxiety producer.

If you feel enthusiasm for something, it's now a source of positivity.

Your feeling changes your experience.

This is exactly why a placebo works so well in studies with medications.

Someone can have an actual medication, someone else have a fake sugar pill, and both get the same positive end result.

That seems ridiculous on its face.

And yet that's who we are as people.

Our emotion, our perceptions, if we believe something, it becomes real to us.

And so if you catch yourself believing that your life is spiraling downhill, it is, because that's your belief about it.

That's your emotional state around it.

And so the challenge here is that shift in emotion.

You can use logic along the way to help justify various choices you're making.

But at the end of the day, this is not a conversation about logic.

Once again, I wish that it was, because that would do so much better in my life.

That was the case.

But it's an emotional question.

And emotion is very powerful.

Hormones are very powerful.

These are things that drive our behavior, that drive our choices, that reinforce good habits and bad.

They are the foundation of who we are as people.

And so for you to identify where things are going wrong, look at your feelings.

When you think about pursuing something, do you feel a sense of anxiety and fear?

Or do you feel a sense of hope and opportunity and possibility?

That feeling is going to give you a really strong hint as to whether or not to go down that path or not.

Generally speaking, that's kind of the gut instinct feeling.

The gut is powerful.

Those instincts are real.

Leverage those lean into those.

They will send you off in the right direction, not the logical one.

Now, the final area here to discuss is where you can pivot your time and attention to make your time significantly more meaningful, productive, and effective.

In order to achieve all of this, the first and most important concept to grab a hold of this week is the pivot.

It is the pivot to something small, tangible, very tiny that you can take action on right now.

If you're experiencing an emotional challenge, a negative thoughts, a fear for the future, you've caught yourself in one of those moments of, "Ah, here I go again," thinking negatively.

The mental pivot to something positive and actionable is going to save you in that moment, and the repetition of doing that over and over again is going to save you long-term.

This is in meditation what Dan Harris has called mental bicep curls.

If you study his book, 10% Happier, and his philosophy of meditation, essentially you're talking about this mental bicep curl, which is to acknowledge the thought and let it go.

Acknowledge the negativity, let it go.

Acknowledge what's happening, let it go.

Well, in this case, I'm going to throw a spin on that and to say, yes, we're going to acknowledge the negativity and let it go, but we're letting it go in a more proactive way, which is to say we're going to also seek out a solution to counter that.

Right?

It's not just saying, "Ignore the problem."

We're not trying to just let it go and not think about it.

This is the opposite of that.

This is actually facing fears, acknowledging things that are difficult and stepping into that obstacle.

Once again, the obstacle is the way.

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

The pivot is to step into this, not to run from it.

This will change your life.

This will save your life.

Second major strategy, pivot to something positive you really want in your life to be true.

So it's very possible to pivot to something, once again, that's logical.

You will pivot to something that sounds good on paper, but back to that emotional conversation, if you don't really want to do this next thing, you may have to use discipline and force yourself into action, and it may be too challenging for it to be helpful.

The goal here is to do a pivot to something that's easy now, effortless in the moment.

You have a negative thought, but here's a positive song to listen to.

You have a negative thought.

Here's some journaling I can do right now in the moment.

I have a negative thought.

I'm going to go for a quick walk, right?

We're really just going to pivot into something that is tangible and simple now that we can then leverage or snowball into bigger actions down the road.

And leveraging the fact that we want to go in the direction, once again, of flowing downstream to leverage that emotional positivity into things we want to be true.

This all sounds kind of, I don't know, personal, growthy, philosophical to a certain degree, tangibly what I'm talking about here is that you want to write down, here's what I want from my life and when you're experiencing a negative thought, go to that list.

How can you get those things you want now?

More opportunity, better connections, better health, more money, whatever it is, and go take an action.

That's going to push you tangibly forward.

Now, those types of actions you can sink your teeth into those kinds of actions.

You can look back on and say, wow, I, I walked more last week.

I talked to my friend more last week.

I worked on my business more last week, whatever the thing was to look back and you can see tangibly, I did something.

I stepped out of that shell.

I broke the mold.

I took the action.

All right.

Third and final piece is to pivot to opportunities that you see and can act on for the foreseeable future.

So the next evolution here is not just a pivot in the moment, but it's a pivot towards a long-term rhythmic lifestyle.

This is the goal.

The goal is not to say that I have solved this problem right in front of me.

The goal is not to say that I had a bad moment and fixed it.

The long-term goal is a long-term solution.

It's a lifestyle of living in a way that says when bad things happen, I have a response when things are going to go sideways.

I have a plan.

When my plan doesn't work.

I have another plan to draw from, right?

It's this expectation of challenge, this expectation of difficulty, this expectation of things are going to be wonky.

I know that's going to be true, but here's my toolbox of all my tools in it.

And I can draw from those when I need them to move forward.

That's where the opportunity really lives is in that toolbox.

Metaphorical.

It may be, but it's real to you.

It's real to me.

I use them all the time.

When I need them both now and going forward.

I hope any of this makes sense.

I hope anything I just kind of went off a lull I'll land about really resonates on some level.

I think that some of what I said is real.

Some of it I'll have to go back and find out later, but what I can really say is true for me in this moment now in my life.

First and foremost, I am very glad I saw the therapist that I did.

That was a very good choice.

I would do it again.

And I may second thing that is true about this conversation is that there needs to be more of them.

More of the conversations to admit reality, more of the conversations to talk to someone else when things are sucky, like a better word, and more of a realism.

And the fact that we need to acknowledge when things are not what we know they can be and that we as people are not who we know we can be and be able to take action on that in a tangible way, as opposed to just kind of saying, well, life sucks.

Move on.

I don't want to be that person.

I'm the kind of person who says, eh, some parts of life.

Sure.

We don't control those things.

We, I can find a way to ignore that, but what I can really gravitate towards back to the top of the show concept here, focusing on our controllables.

What can I do?

How can I take action?

How can I acknowledge that there is an opportunity here?

There is something I can do.

And that's where I start.

That's empowering.

That's what it means to take control of your life is to acknowledge the fact that you have a choice.

You have power and that you have things you can control.

The choice is yours.

The power is yours.

What will you do with it?

That's the only question that matters.

Now for the action step this week, identify an area of your life or work where you tend to focus on things you cannot control, then identify what is within your grasp and pivot your time and attention in that new direction.

It can be challenging to accept the things you cannot change, but that's the growth area.

That's the place where the magic can truly happen.

Now, of course, if you'd like to subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast app, and yes, you can go to 5ammiraclepremium.com for the premium version of this podcast that is ad free.

There's bonus content, lots of great stuff there. 5ammiraclepremium.com.

That's all I've got for you here on the 5ammiracle podcast this week.

Until next time, you have the power to change your life and all that fun begins bright and early.

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