421: How Changing Your Perspective Changes Everything

[INTRODUCTION]

Hal Elrod: Welcome to the Achieve Your Goals podcast. This is your host, Hal Elrod, and thank you so much for tuning in today. I really, really, really appreciate you, and it means a lot that you’re listening. So, I want to do everything in my power to make sure this is a valuable use of your time. And we’re talking about perspective today and how perspective changes everything. When you change your perspective, you change the way you think, you change the way you feel, you change what you do, and you change your life. And so, we’re going to dive into that topic today. And it’s kind of a mash-up of a few things. I’m going to read you a couple of posts that I put up recently on Instagram, an email that I sent. I’m going to share a story from my camping trip from this last weekend. I’m going to share a Charlie Brown meme. Anyway, you’re going to get a buffet of ideas today that are all around the idea of how do we optimize our perspective to optimize our life.

Before we dive into the episode, of course, I want to take just a minute to thank our sponsor, Organifi. And there is something new here, not a new sponsor, but a new product. Organifi has a brand-new product that was just released, or it actually might not even be out yet, now that I think about it. I know it’s coming out this month, but it is their green juice, apple, crisp flavor. So, it’s all the benefits that you’ve come to love in their classic Reset green juice, which is, I believe, their most popular product, but with a new twist, a new flavor. And so, you’re going to enjoy the same fan-favorite superfood ingredients – ashwagandha, moringa, spirulina, chlorella, all of the superfoods designed to hydrate, energize, and support cortisol balance.

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[INTERVIEW]

Hal Elrod: Hey, goal achievers and members of the Miracle Morning community, this is Hal Elrod. And welcome to today’s podcast, welcome to today’s conversation. And today, we’re talking about perspective and how when you change your perspective, it changes everything. In fact, there’s a great quote from Wayne Dyer that’s really fundamental to this idea. Wayne Dyer said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” I did a podcast two weeks ago on How to Optimize Your Most Important Relationships. That was Episode number 419. And kind of the foundation of that episode was what I continue to learn about having a successful, fulfilling relationship is that has much less to do with the other person and almost everything to do with how I choose to perceive and treat the other person. That lesson, I think, applies to perspective, right? That’s all about perspective, how you choose to perceive and treat the other person.

And what I found is that my perception of someone informs both how I feel about them and how I treat that person. And based on what I focus on, I can change my perception. Just like you can change your perspective based on what you focus on. That’s what a perspective is, right? It’s just what aspect of any situation of your life of world events are you focusing on? How are you framing it? What meaning are you giving it? And like Wayne says, Wayne Dyer, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” In the case of that relationship episode, it was when you change the way you look at your partner, when you hyperfocus on everything great about them, all of their gifts, all of the value they add to your life, it completely changes the way you feel about them.

Then if you were just focusing on all the things they do that annoy you and that bother you and that upset you, you simply change what you’re focusing on, you change your perspective, your perception, and it changes how you feel, and then that changes how you treat that person, in the same way that just like having a fulfilling relationship is less to do with the other person and everything to do with how you choose to perceive and treat the other person, having a fulfilling life has less to do with what’s going on in your life and everything to do with how you are choosing to perceive your life, what perspective you’re choosing to have. And in the same way that that informs how you feel and how you treat the other person, well, your perspective on life, how you’re perceiving life informs how you feel about your life and how you treat it, how you show up every day.

And so, personally, I have experienced in my life whenever I have a hardship, whenever I’m going through adversity, perspective becomes the most important thing. And I think that that’s true probably every day, but you really notice it when you’re facing adversity, when you’re facing really challenging times. And by the way, you might be enduring those times right now. I realize that some people listening to this will be at a really low point, at rock bottom, if you will, in their lives. And for those, today’s episode is maybe even more valuable than it is for people that life’s okay right now. But collectively, globally, right now, we’ve got a war happening overseas. And again, I say overseas from where I’m at, America, I realize we have listeners in Russia, listeners in Ukraine. In fact, one of my best friends just had to get his grandparents, his parents out of Russia. It was like– anyway, it’s another story I don’t need to go into.

But anyway, so I’m aware that there are things going on right now in the world that are really, I mean, really horrific. And our perspective on global events, as our perspective on our individual lives, both inform how we feel and how we experience life, how we experience challenges and adversity. I sent an email recently, yesterday, I think, it doesn’t matter. I sent it recently. Actually, I posted on social media a quote that said, “When we focus on that which is out of our control, we feel out of control.” And you’ve heard me say that many times over the last year or so. But I added to that, “This can cause us to experience unhealthy anxiety, fear, and depression. Let’s focus our attention and energy on that which we can control, beginning with how we show up for ourselves, for those we love, and for those we lead.”

And I accompanied that, I’m going to read you this post. Again, this is an email, so you may have seen this email. I got a lot of responses back saying, “Hal, thank you so much. This is exactly what I needed right now.” And what this email gives is perspective. What I’m about to read you is this is a perspective on what’s going on in the world. Here we go. My 12-year-old daughter recently asked me or said to me, “Dad, you’re lucky. When you were a kid, the world was normal. You don’t have to deal with all the craziness that our generation does.” I paused and looked at her with sincere empathy, then I assured her that the world was just as crazy when her mom and I were kids. I explained that when I was her age, America was fighting a war in Iraq that we referred to as Desert Storm. I told her that we were also facing a worldwide pandemic called AIDS, which, like COVID 19, affected and killed many people. We’re also in the midst of an economic crisis similar to what we’re facing today. And long before any of that, our grandparents were experiencing the Great Depression, the Spanish flu, more wars than I can name, and countless other hardships. Yet I reminded her that her mom and I, as well as our grandparents, made it through all of that, and she will as well.

As I was saying all this to her, it hit me too. I remember that since the beginning of humanity, human beings have experienced adversity, both collectively and individually, and humanity has made it through all of our collective struggles, just as each of us has made it through our individual struggles. I think it’s important for all of us to remember that we’ve survived every adversity we’ve ever faced and been given the opportunity to learn, grow, and become better than we were before we were challenged. Are there people that don’t survive adversities? Absolutely. Tragedy befalls human beings every single day. But you’ve proven that you can handle anything that comes your way, so there’s nothing to fear. And remember that when we focus on that, which is out of our control, we feel out of control. So, let’s focus our attention and energy into that which we can control, beginning with how we show up for ourselves, for those we love, and for those we lead. I love you all very much.

So, I share that with you because again, there are things going on in your life that are out of your control, there are things going on in the world that are out of our control. And it’s up to us, like we get to choose our perspective. We can choose a perspective that causes us to feel anxiety and fear and depression. You have to ask yourself, does that serve you? Does that serve humanity? Does that serve your family? I’m not saying don’t feel, absolutely not. But here’s something to consider, and I’ll probably do an episode on, I think, I might do a full-blown episode on this because this is actually a recent realization that I had. I have a friend who– actually, same friend who’s brought his family out of Russia, coincidentally, but I have a friend, and he’s done a lot of work. He is a personal development, I don’t know, aficionado. I mean, he’s done a lot of growth where he did like a 10-day silent retreat, even idea, like pretty extreme, a 10-day silent retreat where you just sit and meditate for 10 days. So, he’s done a lot of work, and some of the work he’s done has led him, I think, it was Byron Katie’s work actually that he turned me onto.

There’s a question where whenever you have a belief around anything, this is the way something should be or this is horrible or this is wonderful. Whenever you have any kind of belief, the question, could the opposite be true? It gets you to explore what’s possible, right? This person is terrible. How might the opposite be true? Interesting. Like, we’re quick to make up our minds about people and places and situations, but how might the opposite be true? So, when I talk about experiencing positive emotions, that positive emotions are good, and we all want to feel good and it’s helpful and beneficial to do things that make us happy or to create perspectives that allow us to feel good. He’s challenged me and said, “Well, how might the opposite be true?” All emotions serve us, and I believe that they do.

But what occurred to me the other day, and I’ve been just doing a little bit of light research on this, is that certain emotions, what you might call negative emotions like anger or fear or resentment, or whatever you might put into the category of negative emotions, and then positive emotions like joy and gratitude and excitement and happiness, you can generally categorize emotions. But if all emotions serve a purpose, which I believe they all do, well, how could you really call one group negative and one group positive? That’s an interesting concept. Also, how long should you spend experiencing those “negative emotions”? How long should you stay in anger? If it’s beneficial, should you just stay in it indefinitely? How long should you stay in sadness or fear or grief?

And what hit me the other day is that each of our emotions has physiological effects on our body and even on our brain, physiological effects that either harm us or help us, that are either detrimental or beneficial or maybe neutral. But you think about it, and I started just googling, like what are the physiological effects of anger and what are the physiological effects of shame or sadness or grief, etc.? And what I came up with was that there are real, harmful, proven impacts on your physical body, as well as certain impacts on your brain from certain emotional states. So, well, how might an emotional state serve you such as anger? Well, if you get angry about something, that’s usually your nervous system telling you something needs to change, right? This thing is making you feel these emotions that you would categorize as angry, so something needs to change. That’s the value, that’s one benefit of anger.

My take on this is that you should be able to allow those emotions, you should experience them, and then allow them to move through you as quickly as it is healthy. Meaning, if you get angry and then you can extract the value from that emotion and go, I’m angry because this thing’s happening in gusting and I’m not going to let this happen anymore. Dammit, I’m going to make a change. I’m making a change. I’m drawing my line in the sand and making a change. The anger has served its purpose. And that literally, I mean, what did it take me? Five seconds. Five seconds to realize I’m angry about this thing. Why? Because I want it to be different. Okay, I’m going to draw my line in the sand and I’m going to make a change, maybe 10 seconds tops.

And then it’s about transmuting that anger into action into okay, I’m going to do the thing that I’m feeling angry about, that I’m going to do the thing to resolve this feeling inside me. But sustaining anger, living with anger, and this goes for virtually all emotions that you might categorize as negative emotions. When you’re angry, it causes your blood pressure to rise, it literally increases your risk for heart disease when you have sustained anger, when you sit in that emotion, when it comes up for you repeatedly over and over and over if you’re “angry person,” right? There are physiological effects. So, in that way, could you say that there are negative and positive emotions? Yeah, because emotions like gratitude, and I don’t have the studies in front of me. I wasn’t planning on sharing this part, but I have been reading up on this. But there are studies on when you feel emotions like gratitude, your body, your cortisol levels lower. When you have increased, heightened cortisol levels, again, you have all sorts of negative physiological effects. But when you’re in gratitude, your blood pressure lowers, your cortisol lowers, your body, actually, your cells, they’ve proven your cells actually heal and even regenerate when you’re in emotional states like love or peace or gratitude. And you can take emotions like stress, same thing, sustained stress causes disease. In fact, some studies have shown that the number one cause of disease is stress, is perpetual chronic stress.

So, everything that I’m sharing with you, everything that I’ve shared with you for the last couple of years, I’ve talked about inner freedom, it’s choosing how you experience life, it’s choosing how you want to feel. For most of the time, if you want to be happy, how do you choose that? How would you accept the things you can’t change? And you do that by, of course, consciously accepting them, going, I can’t change this thing. Okay, is there anything that I can learn from it or anything I can do about it? This is one of my personal guidelines, beliefs, rules, if you will, I refuse to allow anything that I cannot change to determine how I feel inside. Instead, I choose how I feel inside. You have the power to choose how you feel.

And the entire episode today, we’re wrapping this in the bow or in a package of perspective, you choose your perspective. And some of our greatest opportunities for growth are masked in misfortune. And you probably have experienced that. But that’s not true for everybody, by the way, this is where perspective comes into play. You can go through– so, let’s use this example. It’s one of my favorites because it’s just so simple and it’s just hard to argue. Two different people, Person A and Person B, they experience the same difficult circumstance. They both go bankrupt, or they both lose a loved one, or they both get cancer, you name it. One of them, their perspective is this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and I don’t deserve this, and I can’t handle it. And now, my life is ruined. That is a perspective. That is not reality, like really get present to that. That’s a perspective. This is horrible. The fact that I got cancer, this is horrible. The fact that I’m bankrupt, this is horrible. The fact that I lost a loved one, this is horrible, this is a tragedy. I don’t deserve this. My life is ruined. That is a perspective. That’s Person A’s perspective. Now, how does that affect them? That’s going to put them in all sorts of painful emotions that’s going to cause all sorts of physiological damage, which is that’s a side, that’s like a tangent. That’s not even the point of this, it’s not the physiological effects, but it’s something to consider. But just the mental and emotional toll that it takes to choose a perspective, that is defeating, that is disempowering. You call them a victim perspective.

But Person B who, again, remember, they endured the exact same challenge, difficult experience. They also went bankrupt or lost a loved one or got cancer, you name it. Person A and Person B are enduring the exact same circumstance. Person A’s perspective, it’s terrible. Person B says, “Wow, yeah, this is tough. This is terrible. It’s not what I want.” And notice the difference in the tone, by the way. I never thought of that before, but perspective and tone kind of go hand in hand, right? In some ways, it’s not even the words as much as it is the tone, like this is terrible. Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it’s happening. Same words, different tone, different perspective. But you know what? I believe, and I’m still in character here, this is also what I believe, but I’m saying, yeah, this is horrible, but I believe that everything that happens to you gives you an opportunity to learn and to grow and to become better than you were before you faced the challenge. So, as difficult as this is going to be and as much as I– if I could rub a magic lamp, I’d pick something different. I can’t change that I went bankrupt, lost a loved one, got cancer. So, I’m going to choose to be the most positive person I could possibly be while enduring the most difficult time in my life, I’m going to choose to be the happiest, most grateful I could ever be while I endure the most difficult time in my life. I’m going to choose to take this challenge head-on so that I can really grow from it. I’m going to choose to learn from this so that I can become wiser in the future. I’m going to choose to learn so that I can pay it forward and I can teach other people how to overcome their challenges or how to endure them in as graceful way as possible. Two different people, Person A and Person B, but the challenge was the same, the adversity was the same, the difficulty was the same. Person A was devastated. Person B was empowered all based on their chosen perspective.

Today’s episode, I hope, is going to empower you. And I’ve got more, I’m not done, but my mission is to empower you to choose your perspective, to always choose a perspective that makes you or that empowers you, that choosing a perspective that empowers you to see the gift in the struggle, to see the opportunity in the challenge because it’s always there. You can either be Person A– in fact, I did an episode. I just remember this. I think I did in the last six months or so, who are you, Person A or Person B? So, similar concept, just different way of saying everything.

I want to read you something I just posted on Instagram. And if you don’t follow me on Instagram, I invite you to. It’s hal_elrod, that is my hashtag, hal_elrod. And then also, the Miracle Morning has an Instagram account as well. I posted this, it was a meme or a quote. I found it, somebody else posted it, and it really resonated with me. And simply, it’s a picture of Charlie Brown with Snoopy on his lap. They’re sitting on a park bench under a tree. And it says this, “I am at a place in my life where peace is a priority. I make deliberate life choices to protect my mental, emotional, and spiritual state.” So, I don’t know if that was a Charlie Brown quote or somebody just liked the picture. But here’s what I wrote to elaborate on that, and this is actually what inspired me to record today’s podcast. I was going to record a podcast this week, I posted this and I thought, you know what? This really is a follow-up to the email I sent out about my 12-year-old daughter saying, “Dad, you’re lucky because when you were a kid, life was normal.” And I felt this all was wrapped, I thought, what is the theme here? And of course, it's perspective.

So, here’s what I wrote. “If we don’t make peace a priority in our lives and we don’t make deliberate life choices to protect our mental, emotional, and spiritual state, then we become part of the problem rather than the solution. The problem I’m speaking of is one that we’ve all experienced, including politicians, world leaders, and the wealthiest and most powerful among us, and that is operating from lower levels of consciousness, such as fear, shame, anger, hopelessness, and pride. When our thoughts are born from these themes of consciousness, then our words and actions follow suit. These are destructive forces. We see what happens when people in power operate from these themes of consciousness, and we’ve experienced the consequences when we do it ourselves. Higher levels of consciousness, such as courage, love, gratitude, and peace are always available to us. Each day, make peace a priority in your life. Commit to making deliberate life choices to protect your mental, emotional, and spiritual state. I highly recommend doing this in writing, in the form of affirmations that articulate which themes of consciousness you’re committed to operating from, regardless of what other people choose. And if you want to make your affirmations even more impactful, take time to meditate on each one as you read them. While we can’t control other people and their level of consciousness, we can absolutely control ourselves. We can be the change we want to see in the world. It’s up to all of us.”

So, again, the themes of consciousness, and I just gave a handful of examples for each, the lower levels of consciousness. And by the way, this comes from the work of David Hawkins. It comes from The Inner Work, a book that I’ve referenced many times over the last year or so, six months or so. Themes of consciousness, and I talked about the lower levels of consciousness, our fear, shame, anger, hopelessness, and pride. And then there’s other, guilt, I mean, condemnation, hatred, all of those are these lower themes of consciousness. And when you’re in those themes, you do experience stress and you experience anger and you experience these emotions that we talked about earlier.

But then these higher levels of consciousness, such as courage, love, gratitude, peace, optimism, these are always available to us. Really, these themes of consciousness, these levels of consciousness, whatever you want to call them, are all perspectives. When you choose to operate from a place of peace and love, that forms your perspective, how you see the world. And your perspective determines how you feel, and it determines how you show up for your life. So, regardless of what’s going on in the world right now, regardless of what’s going on in your life right now, you always have both the opportunity and the responsibility to choose your perspective. And if you’re watching the news all the time, then most likely, your perspective is unconsciously being programmed into you, it’s been chosen for you and it is being embedded to your subconscious through whatever media you expose yourself to. This is true for all of us.

I just went camping with my family. We went for a weekend, and it was fun. Actually, it was cool. There were like six, seven families, all with kids who were friends. It was really cool. So, we went for three nights, and a lot of fun and really, really special. There were a lot of times where I just took time with my wife to really go while I would watch our kids play and go, wow, like these are the moments. In fact, I was there, one of the families that were there was the Vroman family. Jon Vroman is the founder of Front Row Dads. You hear me reference him regularly because (A) he’s one of my best friends, (B) Front Row Dads is one of my favorite groups that I’ve ever been a part of, been the most impactful group I’ve been a part of. In fact, we do something every year for Father’s Day. We do podcasts with Jon, bring Front Row Dads to everybody and share lessons and this and that.

But I was with Jon, and Jon’s previous career, not career, I guess, but his mission, he was the founder of the Front Row Foundation before Front Row Dads became his life’s work. The Front Row Foundation was a foundation that he started to send people braving life-threatening illnesses to the front row of the event of their dreams. And one of the themes of the Front Row Foundation was being a moment maker. Jon really believed that you should always be present and that you should make every moment count. And so, Jon has a real gift that he’s cultivated, by the way, he wasn’t born with it. But he has a gift of doing this himself, but just pausing and just really being present, like taking in the moment, really taking it in. And what’s great is that he brings that to his social gatherings and to his friendships.

So, I remember he and I– it was actually Jon that brought this moment where we were standing there. The kids were all around the campfire making s’mores. It was like early evening, so it was still light out. And he had his arms folded and he had his head kind of tilted to the side, and I walked up, put my arm around him, “What’s up, Jon?” And I gave him a little one-armed kind of hug. And he goes, “Hal, this is it, man. Look at this.” He said, “I feel like I’m winning as a dad right now, not because I’m engaging with my kids. They’re over there, but I created this environment for them to be with their friends and to be in nature and to laugh and to play.” And I forgot exactly how he said it, it was something along the lines of just like these are the moments that we’re going to look back on at the end of our life and remember.

And again, as I’m saying this right now, it occurred to me that that was just Jon’s chosen perspective. In fact, I just looked and saw a bunch of kids making s’mores and I didn’t think too much of it. But let’s go back to what Wayne Dyer said, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” All I saw was a bunch of kids around a campfire. I wasn’t present to the miracle of that moment. Jon changed the way he looked at the kids around the campfire. He changed his perspective. He really got present how special that was, how special he was choosing to see it as. He fast-forwarded into his life to when he was 90 years old. And so, when I look back, these are the moments, these are the memories that I’m going to remember that mean so much. And he was able to bring that, that hindsight, if you will, of being older and looking back and bringing it into the present moment. They always say, you’ve heard it many times, hindsight is 2020. And I’ve always thought like I don’t like that. Yes, there’s truth to it, but why wait until some point in the future to see the power of the present? Let’s be more like Jon Vroman. Let’s live in the moment.

Another thing on perspective, it was actually the next morning, Jon and I were having a conversation and talking about our marriages and what’s going on in the world, the good, the bad, everything in between. And I forgot how he said it, he shared just basically that, like, in the moment, I’ll get stressed over things, but then I zoom out and I realize that everything is just short-lived and it’s temporary and life’s just moving forward and I don’t need to get so stressed out or frustrated over things that are out of my control. And it sparked a thought for me, I said, “Yeah,” I said, you know what I’ve realized? Whenever I’m stressed about what’s going on in the world or what’s going on in my life, this is something I do. In fact, I talked to my wife about this right before I did the podcast. I said, I zoom forward to like when I’m 90 years old or 100 years old or the age is arbitrary, but when I’m much older than I am now, 50 years from now, and I think I’m going to look back one day unless I die before then, which in that case, it doesn’t matter anyway. There’s no point in stressing either way.

But if I make it to be, let’s say, 90-plus years old, I’m going to look back and whatever happened happened. Like you follow? Whatever happened happened in terms of, yeah, you look back, yeah, there was that time in my life when I got cancer, man, that was oh, those were a couple of tough years, but I made it through them. And then there was that time when I struggled financially, but I made it through it. There was a time where the world, there was a pandemic, and the world kind of fell apart, and things got really difficult for us, and we were struggling to find, to get food, whatever the thing is. But we’ll look back one day, and we made it through. And if you don’t believe me, if you’re questioning that, I’ll offer you a perspective right now. Look back and realize that you have a 100% success rate of surviving everything you’ve ever faced. If you’re listening to this, you’re still here. Like I told my daughter, “Yes, sweetheart, when we were younger, there was also craziness, there were wars and financial collapses and pandemics, and we made it through all of it. And we’re still here.”

So, there’s a quote that I heard a long, long, long time ago that I often will bring up when my wife and I are worried about anything. It’s simply that worry is a misuse of the imagination. If you’re going to imagine anything, imagine yourself doing something great. I’ll say that again, worry is a misuse of the imagination. If you’re going to imagine yourself doing anything, imagine yourself doing something great. Fast forward into the future, we’re going to look back at our lives and whatever happened happened. There are a lot of things that are out of our control that happen that, again, we don’t have control over them, but we have control over the perspective that we choose. And I always think about that, when I look back, it’s not going to be so much what happened that I focus on, it’s going to be, how did I handle it? How did I deal with it? What level of consciousness did I bring to my life, to my relationships, to my challenges? When I experienced fear or anger or sadness over circumstances, did I do well in those emotions to the point where it was unhealthy and was causing physical damage to my body? Or did I acknowledge the emotion? Did I pay attention? Did I extract value from that emotion in terms of a lesson that I accept all that I couldn’t change to give myself the gift of inner peace and then go back to enjoying this one life that I’ve been blessed to live?

And that is my hope and my invitation for you that you choose the most empowering, encouraging perspectives that you possibly can each day of your life because we only have one of these. To my knowledge, I don’t know what happened after. We have one life that I’m fully aware of and we get to choose how we live it. So, going back to that quote I read on the Charlie Brown picture, I am at a place in my life where peace is a priority. I make deliberate life choices to protect my mental, emotional, and spiritual state. I fully resonate with that, and I hope you, if you don’t resonate with it in terms of if you haven’t been at a place where peace is a priority in your life and you haven’t been making deliberate life choices to protect your mental, emotional, and spiritual state, I encourage you, I invite you to start doing that.

And like I said in my post, for me, the most effective way is in writing. It has to be in writing, or I forget. In fact, just today, I was going through, I was looking at my old affirmations in my computer, in a folder that I have, and I had affirmations. I have affirmations for my daughter, and they’re like two pages long just for how I can be the best dad for my daughter and have a better relationship with her and so on and so forth. But here’s the point, I had transferred them from one thing to another. They were in a folder that I haven’t looked at in like six months. And as I’m reading them, I was like, these are so important, and I have not been living like at least half of them because I wasn’t focused on them. So, my perspective in terms of how to optimize my relationship with my daughter and be the dad that she deserves and really create a fulfilling relationship, it was falling by the wayside, it was being left up to chance, in a lot of ways.

So, if this resonated with you today, I encourage you to put whatever resonated with you in writing. And again, if you want to go grab– you can copy and paste some of this stuff, it’s on my Instagram page, some of these were I read a couple of Instagram posts, hal_elrod is where the post is. I think that’s it for today. I appreciate you listening. Thank you so much. I love you, and let’s all choose the most empowering, encouraging perspectives for not only ourselves but because of the impact that it makes on the people that we love and the people that we lead. I love you very much, and I will talk to you next week.

[END]