You Are Creating Your Life Every Minute, Whether You Mean To or Not

For the next 40 minutes, forget all the goals that you have. Let's just start there. Tired of the hype about living the dream.

It's time for truth. This is the place for tools, power, and real talk. So you can create the life you dream and deserve.

Welcome to your ultimate life, the podcast I created to help you live a life of purpose, prosperity and joy. And you know what I notice? Not everybody and not all the time, but certainly I've done this. We get obsessed with goals.

We have vision boards and even powerful goal statements and big hairy ass goals and all that kind of stuff. But I want to talk to you about something powerful that at least it's powerful for me. And that's right this minute.

So put the vision board away, forget December, forget the five-year plan, forget the big dream. And let's just look at this week or better than that look at today. Now for me, I'm reaching 300 million people, right? What for with a message of worth, identity, possibility, ownership, and sovereignty.

And I am so done with talking gently about this. This is fierce and unapologetic and consistent and kind. And yeah, that's a funny acronym, but it is.

So let's take a look at this week for you or even today. In fact, best of all, let's just look at the last hour. Everything that we do and especially the stuff we do repeatedly creates something, right? And a lot of the time we're creating accidentally.

One of the reasons I do what I do in the morning, I've talked about this a lot, my daily creation process is because I want to create something and I do it repeatedly every day. I never skip. Why? Because I am intentionally creating something.

I am creating who I want to be that day, and I want it to be consistent, fierce, unapologetic, consistent, and kind. So let's talk about your life. So your life as you move along, minute to minute, hour to hour, is continuously generating something, right? It's generating habits.

It's generating energetic or emotional states. It's generating relationships. It might be generating some skills.

It could be generating reputation. It could be generating trust. It's certainly generating financial conditions, certainly generating physical conditions and spiritual sensitivity, ability to hear, intuition, courage to follow it.

It generates a set of expectations and on and on and on. So as life moves on, every minute we're generating something. And so we don't pay enough attention to that, right? And here's the truth, the thing that like whack matters a lot and smacks us over the head is you, me, we are creating constantly.

Whether we're consciously creating or not is a different issue. So if I walk through a room and I'm preoccupied and I ignore everybody in the room, that creates a certain thing. Now, I may be completely fine with that, and I don't give a crap if everybody feels ignored, or they may all be strangers and they're not caring what I think anyway.

It's all possible. But there are other circumstances, for example, where you might be in a room with people that you do want to connect with. I'll give you an example.

I was recently at the IANDS, the IANDS Conference in Bellevue, Washington, International Association of Near-Death Studies, a week ago, nine days ago, and I spoke at one of the events, and it was four days, a big deal, right? But anyway, I spoke to some people, and when I wasn't speaking, not even in that room, not even on the day I was speaking, but all the other days when I was in the bookstore, they have a bookstore, when I was in the hallways, when I was hanging out in other events, listening to other speakers, I'm creating. And it's an interesting thing. It might feel weird, but I've chosen to pay attention to that, like to be really present for a reason.

I want to create consciously. Like I ask myself, what is the energy around me? Am I open? Am I inviting? Am I repulsive? Am I preoccupied? Am I negative? Am I discouraged? Am I uptight? Like the half hour before I was supposed to speak, I sat at a table in the hallway. Why would I do that? I could have gone in a corner in the room where I was going to speak, but I didn't want to do that.

Because I'd been hanging around the conference, I spoke on Sunday, which was the fourth day, Sunday morning, a lot of people knew who I was, and so some people came and sat down for a minute and chatted. And I could have created that I'm busy preparing, go away, and instead I created something else. What I chose to do is not the point.

The point is it was on purpose. So that's why I said forget your goals, forget December, Christmas, next month, even next week. Just write this minute.

What are you creating? As you listen to this, and thank you, by the way, for being here with me. Thank you. I invite you to subscribe, cling, on whatever your platform is.

I invite you to share it. And again, it's not about me, yay me. This is about if you know someone who needs the message or would benefit or would grow or would love or feel comforted from the message.

Maybe you know somebody that is consciously creating all the time, like really doing that. Then they need to hear this to have my warm congratulations and admiration that they're paying attention. I spent a lot of my life unconsciously creating.

Now there were times when I was conscious, you know, and I was an executive doing things and I had meetings and I knew I had a bunch of people coming. I was very conscious of my energy and focus and creating then. But those times were few and far between.

As I drove home, as I walked the hall between meetings, I was only semi-conscious. And so that means a lot of my creations were accidental. So I'm inviting you to be present here, be present, that's a buzzword, right? We all say that, ooh, be present.

What the hell does that mean? Well, as I walk through the hall, I can be thinking about the talk I got to give or the meeting I just had or what's coming or the fact that my shoe feels like it doesn't fit exactly right or that I'm hungry or a bunch of things. And all those things are real and we got to handle them. But we don't got to do anything, but the opportunity for us to create is everywhere.

The reason I'm pounding on this for a sec is when I say worth, identity, possibility, ownership, sovereignty, we'll skip the first ones. Sometimes your worth is infinite, your identity is a divine being with divine DNA. I don't even know what those chromosomes look like, but you got them and so do I. The third one is P, possibility, and that's the one I want to talk about for a sec because the possibility that you can create is amazing, astounding, unbelievable, but only if we're doing it on purpose.

So, we have a beautiful Ukrainian daughter that's been with us now for four years plus because of the war and her mom. She is really intentional. She's a glorious artist, beautiful.

She draws pictures of our cats and dogs and other things, but she is very intentional about her creation, and it's beautiful. So, I want to talk for a sec about this creation. We usually reserve the idea of creation for stuff we like.

I created a company, I created a painting, thinking about Veronica, but we also create mostly unintentionally distance by how we look at or don't look at someone, by how we feel apprehensive and communicate that as we enter relationship with them. And you might say, well, how the hell do I not do that? Maybe I don't know them. Maybe I'm worried they don't like me.

Here is how to do that. Make a decision that you love them. Make a decision that you know them.

They're a divine being just like you, and guess what? They're wandering through their life path just like you are. And they're just as worried about being liked and cared about and misunderstood and, you know, listened to as you are. And so, because we know that, I can love you and you can love them just because you want to.

But if we don't and we have worry, we create distance, you know, space. We also create mistrust, right? If we assume the worst, if we go in a negative direction mentally, we might create debt. Now, that could be physical debt.

You know how it feels. Here's an example. You know how it feels when somebody borrows money from you.

You've given them a dollar or a hundred dollars or a thousand or ten thousand. Doesn't matter. You have an agreement about it.

Maybe it's casual. Maybe it's very structured about when they're going to pay it back. And if they don't, what happens? People start avoiding each other.

They're avoiding them like they owe them money. I'll give you an example. When I was young, 23 or 24, something like that, I bought a house.

And I became friends before I bought the house with a... I was living in an apartment at the time. I became friends with the guy at church who was a builder. He built homes.

And he didn't have a big company, but he built some homes. And I got to know him and I told him I was looking at buying a house and I needed to worry about a down payment or whatever. And so we talked and he lent me, he lent me several thousand dollars so I could do the down payment and buy this house.

Now, that meant I had two payments. I had my mortgage payment and I had an agreed upon monthly payment to this fellow. If I had not made those payments regularly on time without question, without him asking, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, it would have been really awkward.

Every time I go to church, I'm going to avoid him. I sit on the other side. Oh, it's coming.

You know, that kind of thing. We create that accidentally or on purpose. Sometimes we also create resentment, right? We imagine an offense.

We create weakness in ourselves or imagined weakness in others. We create clutter. Oh, man.

I just today, as I record this, I just had a meeting, the second of what I hope is many meetings with a new executive assistant that I've hired to help me clean up clutter, not on my desk, but in my digital realm. I have, you know, Joy runs some teams that do email and a bunch of other things. And my getting info from them has gone through Joy and she's overloaded.

So, this EA is now communicating directly. And guess what? Mental clutter closing some loops. We also create chaos sometimes through inattention.

We might create learned avoidance where we avoid a problem, a situation, a task, because we're scared of it. We might feel afraid. So, all of those things are creations.

They don't exist of their own selves. We invent them. We also create competence by practicing.

Just before I'm recording this, I'm over, you know, rehearsing for a concert that I'm doing. Create competence. We create intimacy that comes from truth and trust.

We create strength that can be spiritual strength, physical strength, working out or whatever. We also can create peace. So, none of these observations or moral, you know, moral condemnation or blessing, they're just observations.

Creation is simply cause producing a consequence over time. If I repeatedly interrupt Joy as she's talking, I create something. And you know what? That has happened.

She's commented to me, you know, you don't let me finish my sentence. So, I've had to, I created something. The feeling that she has that I don't listen all the way or that I think she, you know, I know what she's going to say.

And even if I know exactly what she's going to say, what I'm creating is the feeling that I don't have time to listen to her to the end. So, with that observation, I immediately am paying, guess what? Some attention to creating something different. If you repeatedly keep your word, even in small things, you create trust.

You trust yourself. You know that everything you say is true and going to happen. If I continually rehearse some kind of resentment, I create something.

If I continually experience or live with or allow fear, I'm creating something. If I practice the piano every day, I create neurological and artistic capacity. Every repeated act, every act, but especially repeated ones, leaves material somewhere.

And so, I'm just inviting you to think about that. So, I want you to think of seven things here. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Not seven habits of highly effective people, although that's a monumental book, but this is seven things that you are creating today, whether you're doing it on purpose or accidentally. The first thing you're creating is your state. What does that mean? Your emotions, both physically and spiritually.

What is your intention? What is your view of the world? Are you positive? Are you negative? Are you expecting success or disaster? What are you rehearsing emotionally? I have a story about that. Some years ago, 10, 12, maybe 15 years ago, I was going to give a talk, and I like to speak, and I'm a good public speaker, but the circumstances of this talk made me worried that I was going to fail, not because I didn't know how to talk, but because I was afraid some people in the audience knew something about me and were going to heckle or whatever. So, I rehearsed fear until I was losing sleep, and I had to work with a coach that I had at the time to walk through some stuff.

But that rehearsing, that emotional rehearsing created a very visceral state. The second thing you're creating is you're creating your body. Now, what I want you to think about is what is today's behavior asking your body to become? If you exercise, even a little bit, you're asking your body to become more in shape, have more physical capacity.

If you eat garbage, you're asking your body to process and get used to junk food or garbage. If you're processing, I don't eat because I'm busy, you're teaching your body what to become. Another thing you're creating is relationship, and that's big.

What does the way you speak to yourself create in your relationship with you? What is the way you speak to the divine creating in that relationship? If you ignore it, are you creating distance? About the way you speak to a client, what are you creating? About the way you speak to your spouse or your partner, what are you creating with that? Because you are creating, and that's the point, you know? There's another thing. You are creating with money or creating money. So, here's a question.

What does today's spending or earning or investing or avoiding or planning create? For a long time, I just didn't worry about it. Made a lot of money, I put it in the bank, I pay bills, and I didn't worry about it. And so, what that created was a very haphazard portfolio of investment, non-investment.

Do I have enough? I don't know what's going on. And I avoided looking at it. I used to avoid taxes.

And so, I was creating huge uncertainty around my tax bill, you know? And so, you create money. A fifth thing that you're creating today is reputation. Even in the smallest interactions between your VA, if you have one, between your kids, between your partner, even with yourself, what are people learning they can expect from you? Like, what is that? What are they learning to expect? We have, you know, we live in Canada, and our prime minister up here is a fellow named Mark Carney, and I particularly do not like the way he's handling the economy, you know? The Canadian economy is the only G7 or G8, G7, whatever, country that's in recession, meaning we've had a couple of quarters of contraction.

Now, government economists will claim differently and, you know, calculate differently, but there's a real clear indication. But we can feel it because for the last, I don't know, several years, but especially under this dude, you know, things are hard to get, prices are higher and higher. And you know what's funny? Joy and I go to the U.S. often for different things.

We were just, like I said, in Seattle for that conference, and we went to a Trader Joe's there, and the selection was just mind-boggling. How many yogurts, you know, different kinds and different brands I'd never even heard of. And, you know, the creation of economy here in Canada is lousy, flat lousy.

The selection is limited. There's good stuff here, don't get me wrong, the shelves aren't empty, but the selection is bad and the prices are high. And that's the creation of our government with what they're spending.

And we're not going to get into political discussion here. But as a Canadian citizen, you know, we're watching that. And when I go visit the U.S. and we're dual national, so are U.S. citizens too, we say every time, holy crap, look at the prices and look at the selection.

Prices are way lower, selection's way higher. Anyway, the next, I said reputation, so the reputation my government and my prime minister is creating is really lousy for me. But the question for me more is what is my reputation with others? What are people learning they can expect from me? Trust, on-time delivery, kindness, paying attention, listening, focusing on them, not me, like what is my reputation? A sixth one that's so important is self-trust.

Every time you keep a promise, even a little one, you teach yourself you can trust yourself. Every time you break it, it teaches you something about whether your own word matters. And I'm going to argue or proclaim or declare without apology, fierce, unapologetic, consistently and kind that your word to yourself is the most important word in the world, more important than any other word, period.

If you cannot keep your word to yourself, you cannot keep your word, period. People say to me, yeah, I do what I say to others. You're pretending and you can't keep that up because we can't consistently behave in a manner that is inconsistent with how we see ourselves.

So, I know from my own experience, from coaching clients, the level of self-trust is paramount. The seventh thing, and there's more, but we're only talking seven today, is our own emotional or spiritual receptivity. Are we able to hear our intuition or do we have noise so much that we can't, right? Are we listening or do we have constant input? I don't, you know, when I walk or when I'm on a plane or when I…I don't have earphones in with podcasts and plugging, pounding, input, input, input, input.

I don't do that. The reason? It's a choice because I want to create space so that I can hear the divine, my higher self. That's an intentional choice, and I found that it pays real dividends.

I'm creating reverence, not numbness. Now, you could add others. Many are depending on the day.

The next thing I want to talk about is sometimes avoidance is productive. You know, we talked about avoidance earlier in the show and talked about it like it was a bad thing, so it's a bit of a delicious, chewy paradox. Avoidance is productive.

It produces something. If I avoid the difficult conversation, I don't have to deal with that right now, so I get away from it. But the distance grows, like avoiding somebody you owe money to.

If I avoid the bank statement, financial uncertainty grows. If I avoid some training I need to do, my capacity stays the same, and nothing really stays the same. It shrinks.

If I avoid asking, then, of course, no is always the answer. It's like you fail at all the shots you don't take. If I avoid making the art or the music, you know, the idea remains invisible.

If I avoid grieving, and there are many things that happen that we need to grieve, then something that's unresolved continues shaping behavior. So, avoidance, while you may not have to do a thing, I've avoided it, it creates big and permanent obstacles, almost none of which are productive. I want you to think about that.

Are there things that you are avoiding? Doing nothing about something is still a vote to continue what already exists. So, if I do nothing about something I don't like, don't want, wish was different, and I do nothing about it, I'm voting to keep it the same. Now, that's not true, and you can think of different examples.

Sometimes you can wisely wait, and that can be good, but if you're arguing with what I'm saying because there are those times you can wisely wait when you know darn good and well that most avoidance creates those problems, then you're deliberately missing the boat here. Deliberately waiting for something and fearful or uncomfortable avoidance are grand canyons apart. Now, sometimes we think, well, it doesn't matter, like this minute doesn't matter, this hour, but your micro creations, they become your architecture.

Nobody creates a life or a business or a relationship in one giant act. A successful marriage is millions of tiny encounters. A failed marriage is millions of tiny encounters.

A business is hundreds and even thousands of decisions, not just about transactions but about the how. Your body is years of repeated inputs. Your heart is years of repeated choices.

Mastery of anything is rehearsals. Trust is promises kept. You know, there's a phrase, promises made, promises kept, and regardless of how it's used, it is true.

If you make promises and keep them, you build something. Character is the choices we make when nobody's watching. You know, we sow an act, we reap a habit.

You know, we sow a habit, we reap a character. We sow a character, we reap a life. And I think there's a longer version with smaller steps in between, but the truth is the character, who we really are, is what we choose to do when nobody's watching.

When nobody's going to find out, when nobody knows, the door's closed, nobody's in the house, and nobody knows but you and God. So, today I wanted you to think with me about this waiting game that we do for dramatic creation, okay? And I want to invite you to not wait for dramatic creation. Because your business is thousands of small decisions.

Are you going to post on social today? Are you going to send the email? Are you going to go to the networking event? Are you going to prepare yourself energetically before you go to the networking event so you don't sit in a corner or approach with negativity and create, you know, that negative kind of feeling? If you're working on a relationship, either at the beginning, the middle, or the end, I can tell you powerfully from having failed at three marriages, which it's not a thing to be proud of, but it's just the truth, and then finally at this time having wildly succeeded. The millions of tiny encounters are completely different. I have chosen to be completely different.

The business I build and have built is thousands of decisions. Doing this podcast is one of them that I have to repeat over and over again. Mastery of anything is a zillion rehearsals, a zillion opportunities to choose what we're creating.