← Earn the Right to Live Your Dreams
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to the Earn the right to live your dreams podcast. This is Coit Cooper and I'm ready to rock it out. What is going on, everybody? ETR98. This one is entitled 4 Yellow Ball Habits to pull out potential. And this one is in honor of my new book called Flip the Script that I just released this past week. You have the opportunity to order it, to be one of the first to get it as it starts to ship. And man, I'm excited about this book. And one of the reasons why I'm so excited is that it just, it just, it's something that's changed me, you know, and my wife asked me pretty consistently. She says, coy, you're going to go out, you're going to launch this book and somebody's going to ask you why. People are going to ask you why. Why did you write the book? Why should I buy the book? And one of the things that I say is this, is that when I travel around and I give keynote talks, one of the things that I make a habit of doing is I always ask the audience is what is stopping you? Or what are stopping other people from going out and getting the desired results in life that they want? And the craziest thing happens when you ask questions enough. You see some patterns, and sometimes they're loose patterns, and sometimes they're patterns that are so common, so tight, so noticeable that you can't miss them. And when I ask that question, the one thing that you can't miss is the fact that there are certain barriers that are stopping people. You know, fear is the number one thing stopping people from living to their highest potential self. Doubt constantly mentioned as well. You know, negative thoughts or distractions are there as well. Criticism and fitting in. There's these very common things that always come up. And it doesn't matter if they're middle school students or 80 year olds in a grief group, corporate, nonprofit, it's the same, right? It's always these same things. And so my thought was, what if I wrote a book that taught people to flip the script on these? And that's what I went out and did. And so first off, why should you look at this book? Because, listen, it is designed to help you pull out your potential to take the most common barriers and to give you some strategies to make that happen. That's number one. The number two reason is this. I thought I was writing the book for other people and I was. But as I moved through and I came upon these most common barriers and I was here trying to go for it. Walking away from academia, you know, going after my goals and dreams. Guess what? I ran into the same barriers. And every time I ran into a barrier, I worked my butt off to find a strategy to flip the script on them. Why? Because it's what I had to do to support my family, to be able to go out and get my goals and dreams. And so I legit. I would not write a chapter until I'd found something, found something that would help people flip the script on these things and go out and crush it. That's reason number two. Reason number three is it's got a really, really cool yellow ball concept, right? And so you take those first two things I've told you about these common barriers. They helped me change my life. And then one day I went to a swimming lesson with my son, Carter. And at the time, he was seven. And we were going into the same pool that I had gone into 30 years earlier. And my parents would tell you, you know, Kuwait never had fear when he was little. But I did have some fear that I remember. And what it was is the pool. I was afraid I was going to go down in the water and not come back up because I didn't know how to swim. And so here we are with my son going to his first swimming lesson, and we walk into the pool and his arms are pinned to his side and he's nervous, right? And I tell people, you know, fear had entered the equation, you know, because you don't really know what to expect your first swimming lesson. And he wasn't the only one. It was all the kids in his class. And I'm thinking, what do I do to help him flip the script? What can I do? And before I can do anything, the most energetic high school student I've ever seen in my life comes walking up. His name's Trevor. And he's like, carter, what's up, buddy? And his arms are kind of moving around. He slaps him a high five. And Carter's like, you see him loosen up, and he's like, yeah, yeah, I'm ready. Let's swim. And they get in the pool, right? And there's this platform, okay? So they're on the platform. It's about up to their waist. And then, you know, the platform goes out about three feet. Then there's a drop off, and it's like over five feet. And my son ain't five feet yet. He's going to go down. And it's not something that he would enjoy. And then there's, you know, five Six feet and there's another platform. And so he gets them warming up and all of a sudden he tells them, he points to the other platform and he says, I want you to try to swim to that platform. And the kids all of a sudden back up and they pinned to the side of the pool and they're gripping the edge of the pool. Fear has entered the equation. And I'm sitting over in the corner and I'm going, there's no way he's going to get this to happen. And I'm the motivational speaker, the mindset guy, and I should have been going, okay, I'm going to see how he's going to make this happen. But I'm going, oh, no. No way. Fear is the number one thing stopping people. He ain't getting them jumping that water. And then he does something I will never, ever forget. He goes walking. He goes walking over to the edge of the pool and he grabs a yellow ball and he goes in front of them and he says nothing, but he starts to throw the ball up and down right in front of them, up and down, up and down. And whenever I'm in front of audiences, I ask them, what would a 5, 6 or 7 year old do when you throw a yellow ball in front of their face? You just go ahead and answer that right now. And I'm guessing you're saying they say yes, but some of you would say, no, no. They're so enthusiastic, they'll say, yeah. And that's exactly what they said. They said, yeah. Like they were. They were. Like, they weren't like, I don't know. Yes, I guess no. They're like, yes, bring it on. And you know, the funny thing is, when I ask grown adults in audiences whether they can think they can catch the ball, people like, I don't know, don't throw me the ball. Keep it away from me. I don't want to see the ball. And but kids, they believe that they can. So he takes and he throws it to my son, Carter. Carter throws it back. He goes down the line with everybody in the class. And then because you're going, okay, cool. Yeah. You got him to caught the ball? Yeah. Great. You know, that's not impressive. You're right, that's not impressive. But then he turns and he points towards the other platform and he takes the ball and he acts like he's gonna throw it and he goes, do you think you can go get the ball? And I'm sitting there going, yeah. No. And all of a sudden they go, yeah. And I'm sitting there going, what? No, no, no, no, no, no way. This guy just throws a yellow ball up and down and then says, hey, go get this thing. And they jump in the water. That's deeper than their head, where they could go under and knock him back up. There's no way that works. And yet he takes the ball, kind of puts it in front of my son Carter, and takes and throws it out. And my son jumps in the water without hesitating, not even a little bit. And I'm not going to say what he did is swimming, flailing is what he did, but he flailed like a champ and he got to the other side. Trevor lifted him up, he grabs the yellow ball, he looks at me, he gives me a thumbs up with a big smile on my face. And I am sitting there going, what? Like, no, no way. And I'm going, this is unbelievable. And I think I'm the only parent that's sitting there like blown away. But I think in my mind what he just did is a flippin Houdini act. He took the number one barrier, fear, and went whoop. He flipped the script on it with a yellow ball. He threw it up and down, he threw it out into the water and he made fear disappear. And the times after that didn't even need the ball. They just jumped right in and they did it. And I left the pool that day and I got into our Jeep Grand Cherokee with my wife and I remember thinking, is it possible to do this with adults? And you're probably sitting there going, hey, Corey. Yeah, you take me to a pool, I can jump in the water and get that yellow ball. And yet you know, and I know that's not what we're talking about. What I'm talking about, is it possible these biggest barriers, these biggest barriers that people are facing that are stopping them, that in their mindset are keeping them from getting what they want? Is it possible to give them some sort of yellow ball that says, hey, just go chase this. And we'll take care of fears, we'll take care of self doubt, we'll take care of negative thoughts. All these prominent barriers that are stopping people. All we got to do is give you these. And I remember thinking, is that possible? And I thought to myself, huh? I know in my core that it is. And the reason why is about two or three years earlier, I had lost my job at the University of North Carolina. I had gotten denied tenure at a job that I thought was a dream job. And I was disappointed and, and I was frustrated And I was upset. I was a lot of different things. I was embarrassed and I had just a slew of negative thoughts and I had self doubt and I had fear. I had all the things that all the people at my talks have that are stopping them. And one by one, it wasn't my intention, but I had stumbled upon these ideas about these certain activities that you could do if you did them consistently enough would turn into habits. And it was those habits and that went whoop and flipped the script on my biggest barriers and they became my yellow ball habits. And that's what the whole book is about. It's rather than dwelling on all these just things we got going on and focusing on them, why not just stop in the middle of it and just say, hey, just go chase this world class yellow ball habit for 66 days and let's see what happens. Let's not dwell on the fact that you have an abundance of negative thoughts. Let's just get up every single morning and set the tone. And if you do that, the most incredible things can happen in your life. But here's the thing, it's not going to be easy. It won't be easy. It's hard to do it. But if you're willing to be one of the few to get up and fight for the habits that I outlined in this book, you can radically transform your life. And you can go to it from a point where you're kind of disappointed with things. And I was dwelling on disappointment when I lost my job, but now I love my life, I love who I am, I love the things I'm doing. I am pursuing my purpose and I believe it's all because of these yellow ball habits. So I hope you're at home going, dude, come on now you've set the tone for about 10 minutes, let's go. Tell me about these yellow ball habits. I hope first off that two, I hope you want to get the book so bad that you just pause this thing right now and you go to Amazon and you click my name in and you click and flip the script and you go order a book so you can be one of the first people to get them. And you can know that when it does come out, I'm going to give you more resources, more habit trackers to help you make these things happen. So hurry over and go get that. But don't forget to come back here, okay? I'll wait for you if you need be, but you come back here. And now what I want to do is I want to share four of them there are 10 in the book, but I just thought I'll just grab four. Four. That would make sense to kind of outline right now to give you a taste. I won't necessarily give you the best ones, my favorite ones, but I'm going to give you some really good ones. I'm going to give you some of the foundational ones. So rather than keep building this thing up, I've literally got a yellow ball in front of my, in my hands, in front of my microphone right now. What's behind my microphone, but yellow ball number one. First off, the single, one of the single biggest barriers stopping people is we're all over the place right now. We have an abundance of negative thoughts. And science shows it's up to 40,000 negative thoughts a lot of people have in a single day. The human brain has in between 50 and 60,000 thoughts in a day. Mostly subconscious. But science shows that a lot of people, up to 80%, that is 12.8 hours in a day, 4672 in a year. I had somebody at one of my talks say it's about 195 days in a year of negative thoughts. It's like, what? And here's the thing, if we got that going on, we got no shot of pulling out our potential. We got no shot of closing the gap on the things we want. Because in the middle of that is things like, oh, I can't do that. No, no, no, I don't have that, man. I'm frustrated with this. All those things counterproductive to an extraordinary life, right? So all we want to do in the middle of this, I don't want to tell you to go home and go, hey, flip the script, you know, catch every one of those negative thoughts. You're cool man, just go do that and you'll be good. Because I know from experience you'll be flippin exhausted. It is so hard to change that amount of negative thoughts. But here's what I know, here's what I did when I had all that going on. All I did was start to get up every single morning and set the tone. And now I have a very specific strategy that if you want to flip the script on negative and give yourself a world, world class foundation to do all the things, all the things that you want to do in your life. One of the things you got to do is you got to get up early, you got to commit and hopefully it's 1530, maybe some of you are willing to do more. But get up early, preferably at a time where there's not all kinds of craziness around you, you're not getting hit up on technology. A lot of times this is a 5am zone. But get up every single morning and here's your first yellow ball NTT growth ritual. I talk about all the reasons why this is so important in the book. But if you'll get up every single morning and rather than picking up your phone or turning on the TV or having all these things that are just wired to point our brain to negative, if you'll push those to the side and say, I ain't touching my phone, I ain't turning on the news, I ain't checking my email. None of these things that give me anxiety or point my brain to things that are wrong, I don't want any of those things. And instead if you just do this in the quiet space, I call it sacred space, if you'll get up every single morning and start to establish world class habits, you'll radically change your life. And here's all you have to do. You've got your book from Amazon coming. If it's going to take a while, write me. You can find my email on my website and say, hey, I want to start now. And I will send you an electronic copy of the book. And all you do is this. You get up early and you start reading the chapters and you point your brain to positive. You don't allow any space for the negative. You don't set the tone with crud. Instead you point your brain to positive and possible. And, and if you'll do this every single day, it will start to form a new neural pathway in your brain that points to those two things positive, that points your brain to possible, that makes you start to believe you're capable of more. But here's the thing. You've got to show up every single morning and do this. And people say, ah, it just seems like a lot. Well, guess what? You have waiting in your day. You have all kinds of things that are waiting to point your brain to crud that will make your life less than what you want it to be. And if you're just willing to put first things first and wake up and point your brain to that reading, it will radically transform your brain over time. And that's it. That's it. 66 days straight of reading will change the way your brain operates. Because when you put that positive first, those books on goals, those books on dreams, those books on habits, those books on establishing the skill sets to go out and close the gap on what you want or to be a better parent. It's taking and pointing your brain to things that are really, really amazing. And if they're things you're passionate about, that's the best way to grab your brain's ATT and say, hey, come on over here. I know there's a bunch of junk going on. No, no, no, no. Let's come right over here and let's start to create some change. And that's it. And if you want more on this, grab the book and read that. You want the exposure and the repetition anyways. Figure you need to see things multiple times to really apply it, but that's yellow habit number one. Number two, one of the biggest things early on in my journey was the idea of scarcity. When you lose something, it's very, very common to do two things to focus on the scarcity of what you don't have. Number one, I was focused a lot on what I didn't have. I didn't have this job anymore. I'm not sure I was going to have the finances for my family. I was also focused on, I don't know if there's enough out there to do what I want to do. And this is really, really common in high level people, all level of people, constantly comparing, looking at others, feeling, focusing on what we don't have, what we aren't. And if we stay in that space, there's a quote in the book by Oprah that says if you do that, you're always, you're not going to have enough ever. You're always going to have scarc. But in the middle of that space, if you're willing to say shh, and not focus on that and instead point your brain to what I call baseline blessings, you will create a foundation for future abundance. And here's all I did to start flipping scarcity, because it is flipping scarcity. It's a wash, man. It's a pain in the butt. It holds you up. We're constantly focused on the wrong things. We're going to continue to loop around the wrong things. But rather than dwell on that, let's not worry about that. Let's instead get up in that morning root growth ritual and add what I call baseline blessings. And here it is, the first part. You know, you hear this a lot, focus on gratitude. But I need to give you more steps than that. You need to go get a notebook dedicated to this growth. I have an actual planner that I use every single morning. But grab that notebook, put the date, put number one above and then number down below 1, 2, 3, 4. And the first thing you do is you write down three things you're grateful for. You can go two ways with this. You can every day write down three different things you're grateful for and try to look for a lot of things. Or you can take what I call baseline blessings. Three things that are so incredible in your life that you just. You have enough right now. And when I got denied tenure, I had a really powerful thing happen. I was reading Man's Search for Meaning, and here's a guy who lost his entire family in concentration camps, and he went out and he did the most extraordinary thing. He went out and he started to create suicide camps, tried to give people hope, Got out of the camp, wrote this book. And I read the book, and I remember thinking, gosh, I'm being a baby. Why? Because I have things right now that I'm so blessed to have. And it was things like, man, I'm blessed to be alive. To just be here is just an extraordinary thing, and I'm grateful for that. I've got this incredible family that are so special that every single day, they're my people. We get to do life together. How cool is that? Three, man. I'm grateful for my purpose, my skill sets. I've got some things that would allow me to do really amazing things and to go out and to impact people's lives. Every single day, I write those three things down. You want to change your life? Find three things, and every single day, not only write them down, feel it. I hope when you're listening this, you can feel that. I mean, I'm passionate about my baseline blessings, and I have a couple more besides that, But I'm sorry. So grateful for those things. And it has literally trained my brain to find good. First off, it gives me a baseline. I have enough right now. Those things are enough. And when you feel like you have enough, you're in a spot where you can go out and chase what I call beyond blessings. Because you have the baseline, you're not fearful anymore. You have enough. So, hey, let's just go for it. Why not? But here's the number four thing you do. For number four, take your biggest challenge, the thing that you're really struggling with. Say, what could I be grateful for? And if your brain says no at first, refuse that as an answer and keep every single day, what could I be grateful for? Maybe you had a rough relationship. You say, you know what? Maybe this is my opportunity to go out and get myself right so I can go out and find Somebody that's worth my future, you know, and there's so many things people deal with that they're struggling with. But if you can find the gift in the middle of it. I talk about in the book, that book, in the book, find the gift and write that down. All of a sudden you can take your biggest challenges and turn them into gifts. You've got the master skill set. That's what Viktor Frankl did. That's the number two habit. The number three habit. I'm gonna speed these up a little bit. When you go out and you start to pursue something big proactive people, and I'm gonna assume if you're listening this, you're a proactive person. When you go out and you have these big goals and dreams, do you want to know one of the most big common barriers, biggest barriers that stop people? Perfection. Flawless. We go out and we have these big goals and dreams and society teaches us that, man, we need to be perfect. We should be able to get it right now. You know what else teaches us that? Amazon, Netflix, social media, the things that will give us instant things all the time. And we look at our goals and dreams and we're like, man, I want to be able to write this best selling book and I wanted to come out and I want to have it tomorrow or I want this, you know, just schedule full of speaking engagements like next week, and none of them are realistic. Listen, I'm all for getting your mind in a spot where you attract abundance, but you got to be willing to show up. And if your idea is perfection, right off the bat, what will likely happen? You won't move. Your brain will find ways to distract you and you'll back off and you won't want to do it. And you'll find yourself in a loop where you keep talking about these things, but months go by and you've done nothing. And you might be saying, coit, how do I flip the script on that? Because that's me. I'm a perfectionist. Well, guess what? I was too. And I continue to be when I'm not cognizant about this. But here's what I did. I have what I call a give and grow ritual. And this is your yellow ball habit. If you want to change that, all you have to do. First off, you can frame this, you know, by getting up in the morning and saying, okay, here's one of my goals. How can I go out and how can I give, you know, meaning if I want to have this abundance of speaking engagements instead of focusing on Me, me, me, me, me. Which brings this just anxiety go. How can I give? How can I add value? How can I add more to the world? And if you'll focus on giving, it will almost always take away anxiety. And I talk about how I used this in my TED Talk when I had nerves and I was holding back. And I talked about how when I focused on giving and delivering for the audience, it made my fear go away, it made my anxiety go away. But that's the first thing. Focus on giving. And when you find yourself in your day hesitating, saying, how can I give? But here's the number two thing. When combined, these are crazy powerful. The number two thing is focus on growth. Every single morning, think about your goals and say, how can I go out and how can I grow today? How can I get better today? And I swear, if you'll focus on giving, growing, it will change the way you feel. Instead of thinking, I gotta achieve this goal now. It has to be perfect. You'll just say, how do I be a beginner? How can I change people's lives in the process? And you'll take the focus off you and you'll put it on something that's always controllable. And this, to me, is a absolute peak performer habit. People that focus on giving and growing are unbelievable at what they do. And you just need to take. And you need to apply that into your life. So that's number three, and then the number four. And before I go to number four, I'll say, you're gonna get more of this in the book, and you're gonna hear it in a different way, and you're gonna hear different examples. So absolutely grab that to reinforce this, especially if you're enjoying this. And then the number four thing is this fitting in. This is one of the biggest barriers facing people as they move through their journey. You might even start to get your thoughts more on positive. You might start to break through and go, yeah, man, I really do think that this is possible. I can do this. You can start building momentum, and then what will stop you? All of a sudden, a little criticism comes and you back off and it hurts you, and it's frustrating. Listen, we've all been there. I've been there. And. And what I've started to realize is one of the problems is, is that deep down we have this desire to fit in. We want everybody to tell us that it's okay. We want them to cheer us on. We don't want any criticism. And you know what? That's not realistic. It's not. And here's the thing, you don't actually have to have most fears. You can get rid of self doubt. And some of these things that are really, really stopping you by training your brain. Not fit in, stand out, not fit in, stand out. And that was the flip for me, is I really started to encourage myself, stop trying to fit in. The most amazing people on the planet, they don't do that. They don't walk around trying to fit in. They legit show up every single day. And they have a desire to be different. Not in a crazy, unproductive way, in a way where they're authentic to who they are as a human being. And I believe, I bet money that there are a lot of times and even days where you feel it, there's things you want to do, there's a person you want to become. And yet every day you go in and you feel yourself backing off because you're afraid that somebody's going to reject that or somebody's going to criticize that. And what I say to you is, start to program your brain, rewire it, flip the script by reminding yourself to stand out. And here's what you can do, though. You can not only encourage yourself to stand out, you can do what I call creating value drivers. Sit down and identify three things that you want to be as a human being. Do you want to be energetic? Do you want to be positive? Do you want to go out and be excellent at what you do? What is it you want to be? How do you want to be remembered? And preferably, these are things that will get you the life that you want. But find three things you're passionate about. Man, I want to be present in my most important things. I want to be a freaking energy person. I want to bring passion to my days. I have about six of these things I write down every single day. And rather than trying to fit in, I don't do that. I remind myself, not fit in, stand out how? By showing up and pursuing these values every single day. And I want to keep going. But I'm at 26 minutes. And the last thing I'm going to tell you is when it comes to all of these things, especially the value drivers, you must show up and have passion for it. And I'm going to tell you more about how to do that in this podcast and you can get more about that in the book. But, man, one thing I want to encourage you to do, don't settle in your life. Don't settle for average. If your life feels mundane, if you feel like you have these emotions that are just average, don't settle, you are capable of extraordinary emotions. You're capable of really extraordinary outcomes. You can legit go out and create a life that you love every single day, but only if you're willing to start showing up every single day and chasing the type of yellow ball habits that will pull out your potential, that will help you get out and do the things you want to be doing. And I'm here to help you do that. I am crazy passionate about helping you flip the script on your biggest barriers so you can go out and you can crush it in your life. And so the first thing is move on these things, but also head on over to Amazon, grab a book and let's do this journey together. Because what I really want to hear about is you writing me, you know, whether it's a month from now, six months from now, and saying, man, I love the way my life is right now and I'm so happy that I started to chase these yellow ball habits because I knew I was capable of more. And now I'm starting to see it come out and I love my life and, man, I'm just going to start pushing more and more. I'm going to start doing helping other people do the same and I'm going to keep going out and pursuing my purpose because that's what I've meant to do. So I hope this was useful for you. If so, be sure to share it on social media, take it on email, forward it, text it to somebody, let's get it in more people's hands and let's get you out, help you flip the script on your biggest barriers so you can pull out your potential and crush it. Starting this week, have an awesome day. Take care. I hope you really enjoyed this episode. If you're looking for a resource to help you find the next level in your life, then head on over to Amazon and pick up a copy of my brand new flip the script book so you can break through your biggest barriers and pull out your highest potential and really just get out and crush it in the key areas of your life.