
"Humility is not about weaknesses. Real humility comes from a place of strength."
Jon Berghoff
In today’s episode of the AYG podcast, Jon Berghoff shares the unexpected origin story of how he and Hal Elrod first met, when they were teenagers, and then he provides you with his counter-intuitive secrets for sustaining massive success.
Jon starts out by taking a trip down memory lane and recounts how he and Hal first met back in 1999. You’ll find out why Hal moved across the country to live with Jon AND why they were embarrassingly forced to share a bed for 4 months!
During this session, Jon shares his real world experiences and reveals the habits held by those who are able to sustain success and fulfillment, over the long haul. You’ll learn about what the spirit of generosity can do for your life and business, how to use humility to your advantage, and why curiosity is so crucial to achieving greatness in all areas of your life.
You’ll also discover what a sense of adventure and an appreciation for nature can teach all of us about collectively achieving success.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- [00:30] Jon provides context for why he’s filling in for Hal as the host for the AYG podcast. (Get the full scoop in episode 152)
- [03:43] Jon shares the origin story of when he first met Hal way back in 1999.
- [08:00] The power of generosity and using enlightened self-interest to design the life you’ve always wanted.
- [13:00] Why you should stop treating hard work like it’s a badge of honor.
- [17:00] The value of curiosity and creating magic moments.
- [24:36] Why humility never comes from a place of weakness.
- [26:20] What nature can teach us about being connected and succeeding together.
- [31:40] How to tap into the wisdom you already have within you!
- [32:40] QUESTION: What do you value in life? How can you find opportunities that behave in alignment with those values?
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
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[00:00:33] Jon Berghoff: Achieve Your Goals Podcast listeners. We’re now recording episode 153, at least I think that’s the correct episode. You’re going to have to forgive me. This is my first time ever recording my own solo podcast episode. I’ve been a guest on this podcast, several times on other podcasts but I’ve never stood here and been given the empty space to speak into for whatever period of time I speak into. I appreciate your patience and willingness as I explore this journey for the first time with you. I want to start by just explaining for those of you that might be listening that are wondering where’s Hal? What happened to Hal? Who is this guy Jon?
So the short is if you would please go back and listen to episode 152 that should really help you. And the longer answer I’ll give you right now. Most of you know this, many of you don’t and for all of you, thank you for your patience. I’ll probably be re-explaining on, I don’t how many episodes moving forward just to make sure that people who drop in for the first time understand what’s going on. I’m standing in for my dear friend, a best friend and business partner of 18 years Hal Elrod because as many of you know, he’s battling cancer. Hal was diagnosed with a form of cancer not long ago. Just several months ago.
[00:01:59] Jon Berghoff: He’s in the middle of his third or fourth round of chemo treatment. As part of an effort that many of Hal’s closest friends and family are making to give him the space to heal and to recover, I have accepted Hal’s request to step in and to deliver his podcast episodes on his behalf and I know that I cannot fill his shoes in exactly the way that he has done this for now, 152 episodes on his own. But I am very confident that because of what I know about Hal and what he represents that I can continue to add value in a positive way for those of you that choose to keep listening.
Thanks for being here, thanks for committing your time and energy, I honor you and my highest hope, my highest, highest hope for you and for us together is that as you listen in while I’m standing in for Hal today and as many episodes as I need to in the future that you get a ton of value. So let’s do it. What do we want to talk about today? I can’t help but recognize that I can jump in and start sharing ideas but I also can’t help and recognize the unique opportunity where I have a microphone and Hal’s not here to stop me from sharing any stories about him or about our past.
So I kind of feel like you’ve had three years to get to know Hal and he asked me, he said, “Hey they need to get to know you.” And I’ll make sure that over this next handful of solo episodes that I record before I start bringing on any guests I’ll share with you my backstory and my journeys and my life lessons but I also have to mix in some stories about Hal and I, in a no particular order. I think I’m going to start by sharing with all of you today what I would call the origin story of when I first met Hal and how we first got connected. So this goes back to, it was 1999 was really the first time we met.
[00:04:00] Jon Berghoff: That was the year that it was either early 1999 or late 1998 that was the year. I should go back and get the history correct at some point. That was the year that Hal had his famous accident where he was hit head on by a drunk driver. Many of you know the story that he wrote about in his first book, ‘Taking Life Head on’ where he was pronounced dead at the scene for six minutes, airlifted to a hospital where he came back to life, was told he would never walk again and not only did he walk again but he went on to be a national sales champion for the Cutco company where he and I, we really met in person for the first time about six months after his accident.
He and I met at a sales conference and that first time that we met it was really interesting because here we are the first time we’ve met each other and we made a comment, I made a comment to him that was kind of like a gesture comment. Those kind of comments where you offer up something but you’re not sure if you really mean it. It just sounded like a nice thing to say. So made a gesture comment to Hal. I said, “Man wouldn’t it be cool if we lived together and we competed selling Cutco together.” I don’t know if I really wanted that but I said it and two weeks after that sales conference I get a call from Hal and he says, “JB, hey I just want you to know I’m two and a half hours out.”
I said, “two and a half hours out from what?” He said, “I’m two and a half hours out from arriving in San Jose. I’ve packed all of my clothing and most of my belongings into my car and I’m moving in.” That was about, I don’t know, 18 years ago. 18 years later we’ve had many, many, many stories to look back on, to laugh about, to cry about. I was eventually asked by Hal to officiate his wedding between he and his beautiful wife Ursula. I had been there to witness not only that moment in their life but the birth of their beautiful children Halsen and Sophie and I can think about all the stories I have with Hal.
[00:06:03] Jon Berghoff: One of the things that stands out and I want to make sure as I share some of these stories over time, not just the humor of him volunteering to move in… Oh, and here is the part of that story that you may have never heard that makes it really funny. It’s that what Hal didn’t realize is that as he’s two hours away from moving in with me, I lived in a studio apartment with one bed. So we ended up sharing a bed together for the next four and a half months. Those four and a half months were months that we created a lot of memories during those months.
We remember in the present moment 17 years ago saying to ourselves, we’re always going to remember the fall of 2000. That has become true. Hal and I have found ways to come back together and find ways to work together over the years and I really hate the circumstances through which I’m here today. The fact that I’m here while Hal is healing but I’m so glad I can be here to fill in for him. As I reflect on all of my stories with Hal, which I’m going to share a lot of them in the coming episodes, I’ve had a kind of a behind the scenes look at who he really is as a person in a way that I don’t know if anyone else has had a chance to see.
One of the things that describes Hal really accurately in terms of his qualities is generosity. Hal has always been incredibly generous. Any of his close friends know this. Anyone who’s done business with Hal knows this but he’s always had this selflessness that if you’ve ever had him talk about it and you’ve ever wondered, “Is this just like a marketing ploy? Is this just a way of getting people to like him?” Well, maybe it does that. Maybe it is a marketing ploy. I don’t know but I will tell you this. That as someone who’s gotten to know him better than anybody, Hal has always lived with an authentic generosity that is as pure as what he says when he offers to help people in any way that he can.
[00:08:00] Jon Berghoff: I share that with you because as you tuned to this podcast originally and stumbled into this episode in your own way, I would encourage you to think about how generosity can become a part of your strategy in achieving your goals. Our good friend John Ruhlin who recently published what has become a mega best seller, the book Giftology. He has set an example for our peer group about being really smart about gifting. Just as one simple example of generosity. Another friend of ours John Vroman who founded the Front Row Foundation 11 years ago he has created an incredible life for himself and so many others by teaching us to give by making magical moments for others.
It cannot go without being stated in case any of you don’t know this, Hal Elrod is the single greatest financial supporter. In fact this community the Miracle Morning Community is the single greatest supporter of the Front Row Foundation in history. This community alone in the last year has contributed well over $200,000. More than that when you add it all up to create wishes for people battling life threatening illnesses.
If you want to know more about the Front Row Foundation, go check it out frontrowfoundation.org. I just challenge and invite all of you in honor of Hal to ask yourself how you can bring the spirit of generosity into your lives and into your businesses, into your families. There’s a great research book on this too called ‘Give and Take’. Interesting insight from the research that Adam Grant the author of ‘Give and Take’ does. He talks about how in life you have givers and takers. In his research, he presents a question in his book and he asks the readers, “Who do you think comes out on top? Who are the winners and who do you think end up being the losers? Is it the givers or the takers that end up with the winners and the losers?”
[00:09:59] Jon Berghoff: Very interestingly, he shares and reveals that in his research the givers actually end up as the losers but they also end up as the winners. The takers end up in the middle. If you can follow that train of thought right there. In other words, we can all be givers but there’s also nothing wrong with being thoughtful about how we give, who we give to and where we give because our time and choice around who and where we give is scarce. If I give everything I can and everything I have to everybody that presents itself to me that might generate positive feelings for me and for others but also my choice is as to who I give to, where I give and how I give are limited so there’s nothing wrong as Adam Grant presents with what he calls enlightened self-interests with intelligently giving in ways and in places where I recognize that might also help me to further my initiatives, my goals.
Think about that question for yourself. How can you strategically give by creating value through generosity by solving problems for others, by creating connections, introducing new relationships to people in your world. I think that’s one way that we can honor Hal, is by thinking who he is and he who he has always been and how that has helped him to be successful and how we can learn how to embody that. Hey, I want to take just a couple of minutes here in finishing this episode. I forgot to ask Hal how long should these episodes be? Laura is over here texting Hal, “How long should JB talk for?” Maybe I’m already too far. Maybe he’s going to say I should fill another 30 minutes. I don’t know.
I thought I would just share a couple of ideas on this one and get out of here. Hal did ask me, he said, “Hey, your first few episodes you got to share a little bit about yourself, your story, who you are,” so people can decide if they want to keep listening to me, which is totally fair. So I’m going to just introduce myself which is a little bit of awkwardness, Hal would tell you, he’d be the first to tell you that I have all my own insecurities and awkward reasons why I don’t put my name on a lot of things or I don’t necessarily like promoting myself as a brand.
[00:12:10] Jon Berghoff: Some of that is strategic, some of it I’m sure is unconscious insecurity so in many ways this whole idea of standing here and recording this on a personal level is just a unique moment in my own journey. In the spirit of you getting to know me, I told you I got know Hal back when I sold Cutco and so I’ll give you a little bit about my journey and then in the coming episodes, some of the lessons I’ve learned during the journey. I grew up in the Bay area of California. I share that because my home town was Cupertino and many of you know and many of your Apple devices were designed in Cupertino where the Apple headquarters is.
I share that because I grew up in Cupertino in a time in history where there was really a pioneering energy to that part of the world that I couldn’t help but to see and notice. Both my parents grew up working full time in the technology space. They worked really hard when I was a kid. I just remember my mom and dad working really long hours day after day after day. That didn’t necessarily bother me, that was the life that they lived and they were building a career for themselves and a future for their kids, myself and my two older brothers.
One of the things I learned just by my environment and my influences was about hard work. I look back on that and I don’t know that I necessarily value hard work as something that should be a badge of honor. I see people always talking about hustle and grind and maybe those are just nice catch words that happen to be attractive to certain generations and that’s fine. But I don’t think that hustling or grinding for the sake of hustling or grinding is a good idea. I do think, one of the things I learned early on from my parents is how valuable it is for each of us to learn how to be able to flip on and off that switch to where we can get focused.
[00:14:12] Jon Berghoff: For a dedicated focused period of time we can turn up our sustainable energy that we have towards any specific goal. I don’t believe in keeping that switch turned on indefinitely. In fact if you listen to the last episode when Hal shared some of the big lessons that he feels cancer have taught him that was one of them. He really felt like not stopping, not turning the switch off was a key contributor to cancer. Now, whether he knows that or any of us know that is a mystery but I believe that we all have an innate wisdom, an internal radar, a deep knowing and I believe that if he believes that there’s a possibility that it’s true and I’ve believed that for a long time that there’s got to be a balance between working really hard and the ability to work really hard is important but not a badge of honor because I do it every day, all day.
And the ability to stop and renew but that was a lesson I learned early on as a kid. Some of you know my story but I’m not going to give the whole thing beginning to end here. I’ll spread it out over a series of episodes and the lessons I’ve learned. But the short version of the part of my story that many of you know is I was really fortunate that when I was about 17 years old that was a time in my life where I was actually struggling a lot. I was written up as a case study by Susan Cain in her book Quiet if you’ve come across that book, it was a mega best seller and New York Times best seller for weeks and weeks and weeks of the last few years about introverts.
I met Susan years ago and she wrote about me in that book and she even tells me a little bit about my story when I was in high school I was so introverted but like in a negative way that I was almost afraid to connect with people socially, physically I was probably in worse health and worse physical shape in high school than I have been since that time in my life.
[00:16:04] Jon Berghoff: I was struggling intellectually. So it was a really down moment for me. I think the only reason I share with you is because there was this kind of crazy convergence of events in my life that turned it all around. I don’t always know how these things happen but I was lucky or fortunate, whatever you want to call it. Whether or not you believe in luck I had a great series of events where I was introduced to this opportunity to sell Cutco knives. If you followed Hal or have been a fan of his you’ve heard his story, you may have heard his story and mine combined but I was fortunate that I had great mentors and that company teaches incredible lessons to young people about entrepreneurship. In about four or five years with that company I was at that time the number one rep in their history of their company.
I’d done really, really well for myself. One of the lessons that I learned very early on selling Cutco, there’s quite a few that stick out. I’ll share some of those with you today. One of them is the value of curiosity and not just any type of curiosity but what I would call an insatiable curiosity like a deep unquenchable curiosity to learn. My first manager, Dan Casetta used to say all the time, “Life doesn’t get easier, your skills get better.” He used to say that your life is only going to get improved to the degree that you develop yourself personally or he would quote Jim Rohn and he’d say, “Your income would seldomly exceed your level of personal development.”
Here I was at this time in my life when I first met Dan in Cutco that I just described that was really a down moment. What I loved about selling Cutco and I love about sales is that I quickly had this observation, this aha that… And it’s true of being an entrepreneur, it’s that it’s just like life. Life doesn’t respond to need or want. It responds to deserve. Just as I want something or need something or declare something or affirm or intend on having something.
[00:18:05] Jon Berghoff: That’s not how the world works. The world responds to deserve. What have I done? What value have I generated for somebody else to deserve these things that I want or need or demand or set goals to have? So that was a bit lesson early on. It all began with the value of curiosity and so for those of you that are with me for a while, you are stuck with me on these episodes of all the things that I value in life curiosity is right up there near the top. I would encourage you to consider what role curiosity plays in your life.
Even 18 years later after nurturing that value I can tell you that my mentors, I have advisors for the company that I lead today that are billionaires and advisors that have led global transformational initiatives and I can tell you that the commonality that these mega successful achievers have and they state this explicitly in terms of what they value is they all share this childlike wonder about everything and anything, a deeply rooted curiosity. That’s a value that was instilled in me a long time ago, along with the value not of hard work but the ability to turn it on and to get focused and to persevere and to be disciplined.
Over the years my journey took me from selling Cutco to being in sales in a handful of different industries, living in different places in the country. I then started my own coaching business and this is great time to share with all of you a part of my story that many of you don’t know, that’s an amazing part of Hal’s story. I was working in the health club industry. I was selling corporate health club memberships and Hal called me one day. He told me all about this new thing that he was doing in his underwear. Where every day in his underwear he would get on the phone and he would talk to people and they would pay him money for giving the advice.
[00:19:59] Jon Berghoff: I remember thinking to myself, my first thought was, “I would love to go to work in my underwear every day.” Then I thought, “I can’t believe he’s doing that,” and then I thought, “Maybe I should try that.” That was when my life took a significant turn for the better when Hal invited me to start attending different mastermind groups that he was a member of as a partner of his. So for those of you who are in our Quantum Leap Mastermind which is a private mastermind of entrepreneurs that Hal and I run together, that we started three years ago you’ll find this really entertaining.
If you didn’t know the backstory that 12 years ago the first mastermind program that Hal invited me to join with him as a partner was these two guys that were awesome, Bill and Steve Harrison, the Harrison brothers. I think that was their last name. They ran a mastermind program on how to generate free publicity and the name of their program was the Quantum Leap Mastermind. So that was maybe 12 years ago that Hal and I started on that journey together. I spent six years as a coach. On one of these future episodes I’ll talk all about what I learned as a coach. During that time I think I conducted north of 3,500 paid coaching calls.
A lot of people raise their hands and call themselves coaches. I was really fortunate that I had a ton of paying clients for many years and a lot of mistakes that I made and I’ll share to save many of you from some of those same mistakes whether you coach others or you’re just giving yourself advice. Then the last part of my journey that leads me up to today, I was fortunate to spend a number of years leading sales for the Vitamix Corporation. We had an incredible journey where we grew a team from 200 to 600 people. I learned lessons there about leadership that money could not buy. I’ll share some of those lessons on the future episodes and I’ll share a little bit more about what I do today but I want to finish this episode by going back to some of the values that I’ve developed over the years.
[00:22:01] Jon Berghoff: Hal asked me, he said, “Look on the first episode give people some tangible insight that will help them in achieving their goals as a way of getting to know you.” I see Mike McCarthy ask me to share with you… It’s kind of funny that he’s asking this, a few things about my personal story. For example I got married on top of Half Dome in Yosemite. So I’ll talk more about that on a future episode. I’ve also run a number of ultra-marathons, 100 mile ultra-marathons. One marathon where I attempted to run 400 miles in eight days and I didn’t hit the goal. I made it 332 miles in eight days.
So we’ve got to do a couple episodes in the future where I share that journey and some of the lessons learned and some of the techniques that I’ve developed over the years to create the kind of mindset skills that allow us to push through the types of mental barriers that we might normally think we can’t push through or physical barriers. I’ll talk about that in the future episodes. But I’ll share with you today before I’m all done. Some of the values that I’ve developed over the years. One is curiosity. Another one is an appreciation for adventure. Really I would call that creating magical moments. My wife and I when we were thinking about when and where we wanted to get married, we wanted to be designers of our life. I invite all of you to ask yourselves, how well are you designing your life? Not just living life but designing it. That’s something I’ve always been inspired by.
When we got married, first thing we thought was okay, where do we want to get married? We thought of all the places we’ve been and we thought where’s the most inspiring place we’ve ever been? It was the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. The first decision we made is that’s where we are going to get married and then we had to invite 35 of our healthiest friends because it’s a 19 mile round trip hike about ten miles straight up and then back down. A lot of people do it over several days and we convinced 35 people to do it with us starting at 4AM and then get to the bottom by the end of the same day, which was crazy.
[00:24:07] Jon Berghoff: If you want to go watch our wedding, the whole thing was filmed by our good friend Cal Drew, who’s eventually a featured on the Learning Channel, The Wild Wedding TV Show and it’s all on YouTube so good luck finding that. But then we also asked ourselves, when do we want to get married? We selected a date that had significant meaning to us. We got married on 8/8/08 which as a side note is a helpful way for me to not forget my wedding anniversary but that’s when we got married, that’s where we got married and I just share that because I encourage all of you to think about lifestyle design.
It’s something I’ve always valued, creating magical moments. One of the other things that I really value is humility and I’m going to share with you one of the things I’ve learned about humility. It’s that humility has a relationship with curiosity. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re still listening 30 minutes after I started recording it, that’s because you believe in learning. I just noticed someone posted a question, “Where is this podcast normally available?” This is Hal Elrod’s Achieve Your Goals Podcast. You can get it on iTunes. Thank you for subscribing. If you’re listening to this or watching the live stream that means you value learning.
If you want to elevate that value for yourself, I believe that humility is the fastest way to deepen our curiosity because it’s only for a place of really humility that we can actually have the type of sincere curiosity that generates the kind of rapid learning that allows us to create more value and in the world. There’s one other thing I want to say about humility that a coach and a mentor of mine taught me several years ago. It’s that humility is not about weaknesses. We often think of humility as it’s a recognition or awareness of weaknesses. I don’t look at it that way. Real humility comes from a place of strength. Real humility comes from a place of knowing my strengths so well that I’m aware when I’m not playing in my strength.
[00:26:03] Jon Berghoff: Do you ever get that right there? That’s where real humility comes from. It’s knowing your strengths so well that you’re just in real time aware when you’re not dealing in your strengths which is very different than saying humility is about knowing about everything I suck at. No. There’s a difference there. So I believe in the importance of humility but from a strength based perspective. Something else that I really value and I hope you get some value from me sharing this with you. It’s I really value nature.
When I say nature I mean several things by that. Number one I mean nature in a literal sense because I believe for me personally when I spend time in nature I find that all of my most challenging problems, the solutions seem to show up. On another episode we’re going to talk all about lessons from nature. There’s science, there’s biomimicry, there’s reasons that everything from airplanes to the most cutting edge automobiles to medical advancements have come from looking at nature saying, “What could we learn from nature?” Business strategies coming from asking, “What can we learn from nature?”
We’ll talk about that in a future episode but for now I will share with you that I believe that if we can learn more from nature there’s a deep wisdom within nature that is not available anywhere else. If I had to give you just a small piece of why I think that is, it’s because if you think about it, nature has sustained itself for arguably billions of years depending on what you believe or study, three to four billion years. I would ask you this question; have you found any business that has lasted for three and a half to four billion years? We haven’t, right? When we look at nature and we say just from a practical perspective, “What are the principles that are at pay in nature?” Kind of like gravity. In other words, whether or not you’re conscious of it, gravity is working right now.
[00:28:02] Jon Berghoff: Whether or not you’re doing anything about it, gravity is keeping you in your chair or on the ground. I believe and there’s a whole science, you could study complex adaptive systems, you could study biomimicry and just like gravity is always at work, I actually believe that there’s a whole series of principles that whether or not you know it are always guiding what happens in our lives. If you study nature, you see what these principles are and you realize, oh my gosh, we really do live in this cool matrix and when we become aware of these things that were invisible until we became aware of them, we can now actually put them to our advantage.
So I just really encourage all of you to spend time in nature. On a future episode I’ll share with you a lot of what I’ve learned about nature. I’ll give you one example of a lesson right not. When I go into nature, one of the things I can’t help but help be reminded by and one of those principles of nature is that nature has an interconnectedness to it that is undeniable and inseparable. It’s undeniable and it’s inseparable. So when you stand in a forest, you may or may realize this but every single living tree in that forest is exchanging nutrients with each other. Trees are exchanging nutrients with each other. They actually have ways of communicating with each other.
You either think I’ve gone off the deep end and this is your last episode or you’re wildly curious and you’ll listen in the future. But when I’m in nature, one of the things that I find to be very profound is the sense of connectivity and the reminder that in life we’re all connected and that politics and the media and some of our old ways of thinking about competition can cause us to think that we’re not connected and to think that living is a zero sum game that I have to win at the expense of somebody else and to think that we have to have…
[00:30:03] Jon Berghoff: Every idea we have to have has to have an opposition or somebody opposing it. Well, all of those things could be true and part of everyone’s reality but I also think we are all connected. The more we can understand that connectedness, the more power we have in our ability to achieve, not just our own goals but to collectively achieve goals as well. So, we’ll talk more about that in the future. When I’m there in nature, I can’t help but look at the tree and remind myself that what allows that tree to live is that its roots are being nourished.
I have to ask myself, “What is it that’s nourishing those roots?” What’s nourishing it is the earth and that earth is what gives us everything in our lives and that allows us to build everything that we build. Every resource that we have in some way eventually came from the earth. So, remembering what has given us life and staying connected to that makes us stronger and makes us smarter.
And whether you believe in the importance of protecting the environment or not, you could also see that as a profound metaphor. That that earth, that one thing that connects all the trees in life there’s something that connects all of us as people. I think it’s our collective connection to each other, it’s our collective sense of purpose. Another way of looking at that is, when you lead a family, a team, a community of any size, if you don’t have something that connects you then individually we become weakened. When we do get connected to a shared sense of purpose, a shared sense of vision, that shared purpose and that shared vision fuels the collective. We’ll can talk about that more in the future.
So that’s something else I value as nature. I’ve shared with you I value wisdom. I also value highly creativity. I’ll say this again both about wisdom and creativity and I think this has a lot to do with achieving your goals. I believe that every one of us has within side of us, all of the wisdom that we need at any given moment and time.
[00:32:05] Jon Berghoff: You don’t necessarily need this podcast. Now, it might enable something to emerge. You don’t necessarily need an idea from somebody else, now that might enable it but I believe that we can eventually get to a place where all of the wisdom that we need, we discover it it’s within us. We can learn how to tap into that more frequently. An example of that is the idea of being creative. We are all able to tap in into our creative capacity. We’re going to talk a lot about creativity on a future episode.
It’s not something that is just reserved for people that you think are born with that capacity. I think we all have it and can learn how to tap into it. So those are a few things that I value, a little bit of myself. So Hal he told me, he said, “Hey, when you run these episodes, make sure you finish with something actionable.” So the actionable question I have for you when you leave this today is to ask yourself, number one, “What do you value in life? What do you value?” One of our Quantum Lead Mastermind members Mike Merriam just wrote a wonderful book called Closer Than You Think.
It’s about accelerating your own personal evolution. One of the things that he teaches is asking this question, “What do I value?” So I ask all of you to ask yourselves what do you value in life? And then as you answer that question, by the way that should be an open question. This isn’t an event. It’s a never ending process to ask yourself that question.
As you continually answer that question, my next question for you is: How can you go out of your way to proactively find opportunities to behave in alignment with your values? So as an example, I think of one of the greatest opportunities to express who you are and what you really value and to really define who you are and to define what you value is when you are facing adversity. Hal and I talked about that on the last episode, where I interviewed him.
[00:34:00] Jon Berghoff: Where he talked about how much he’s learning about himself through this adversity. I believe that our adversities are our greatest opportunity to sharpen the definition of who we are. To in that moment in real time transform who we are into the best version of ourselves because it’s in our adversity and in our challenges that we have the clearest opportunity to decide what do I value and how can I express that value through how I respond to this adversity.
So that’s a take away for you as you leave this episode. There’s probably a laundry list of things I should be saying on every episode. I will figure out what those things are like, “Hey, thank you for your subscribing, reviewing, renewing, sharing this, commenting on this,” whatever it is. I’m going to finish with that right there. I’m looking forward to coming back and being with all you the next few weeks. Forgive me now I live in the middle of the country, I talk a lot more slowly than when I lived in the east coast. So if you are listening to this in 1.5X or 2X speed, I don’t take that personally, I value your time. And I’ll see all of you on episode 154 so signing out on behalf of Hal Elrod. Take care everybody, make it an awesome week. Bye bye.
[END]
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