Hey everybody! Welcome to Backstage with PV3. This week is Thanksgiving week and such a beautiful time to be with family and friends and to reflect on what really matters and what we are grateful for.
So I want to encourage you to implement this small practice into your life. This is something I do before I step onto any stage. It’s easy. It only takes a couple of minutes, but it makes an enormous impact on your physiology. I want you to just breathe. Yep, right now as you’re reading this. Take seven deep breaths. The truth is, we don’t consciously breathe enough throughout the course of our day. As you breathe, I want you to think about seven things that you’re thankful for. Take deep breaths from a place of great gratitude. Let your mind really zero in on one thing at a time as you slowly inhale and exhale. We all have so much to be grateful for, but we can get so busy that we forget to stop and recognize those things. Maybe this is something you can implement into your life, even just once or twice a day. Sometimes, we can get into a mode where we don’t feel things are going our way, but we can choose to be thankful, even for the challenges.
Everyone faces challenges, and some of you may have had to walk through significant hardship this year. My challenge for you is can you be just as grateful when challenges, obstacles, and difficulties come your way, than when really good things are happening in your life? I think being able to find and operate in gratitude is one of the superpowers of successful people. It’s not always easy, but it can become a discipline if you choose to develop it. Even with this simple breathing practice.
No one is immune from hardship or heartache. I think of a story from my own life that deeply affected my wife and me. Years ago, before we had our four children, we went through the process of adopting a baby. This was our first child. We went and met the birth mom and the birth mom and asked why she had chosen us. She shared with us that she wanted the child to have two parents because that was something she didn’t have in her family lineage. We were elated! We made a commitment to her that we would parent that baby for the rest of our lives and that she could count on my wife and me staying together. We took that baby home. We named her Emma. We were all in on this baby girl.
We called our friends and family and had a big adoption celebration. On the third or fourth night of having her, literally in the middle of her celebration party, we received a phone call from the adoption agency where they broke the news that the birth mother had second thoughts and wanted her baby back. We were told we had to bring the baby to the adoption agency the following morning.
We were in total shock. Legally, that mother had seven days to sign the legal documents. Now, I realize how hard this decision must have been for that mama. We don’t fault her for the decision she made. But at that moment, all we could do was fall on the ground and begin to weep. Our community of friends began to surround us, pray over us, and comfort us- but it didn’t take away the pain. All night long we held that baby girl and grieved the disappointment of not being able to have her in our lives.
I remember thinking I was done with adoption. There was no way I was going to do that again.
Do you realize the hardships, the struggles, and the obstacles in your life that have stolen the dream that was once put in your heart?
Do any of you have a dream or a plan that God put in your heart that you are no longer pursuing because an obstacle or a hardship caused you to throw in the towel and quit? Well, I was there. I get it.
We’re going to be praying that we can give birth to kiddos because I cannot go through this again.
The next morning, my wife, my mother-in-law, and I all went to bring the baby back to the adoption agency where we would meet with the mother. We got into this meeting, and I confronted her. “You told us you wanted two parents to adopt this baby. Why would you do this? How can you do this?” I was so angry, and honestly, I was being someone that I should not have been. Then my mother-in-law spoke her piece, also very frustrated and hurt. And after she spoke her mind, I looked at my wife who was standing between me and her mother. I tapped on her shoulder and asked her, “Do you have something you want to say?” I was expecting her to lay into her just like we had done. But instead, my beautiful wife said seven penetrating words –maybe the most amazing few words that I’ve ever heard in my life. She said, “Thank you for the last three days.”
All I can tell you was the peace of God (I call it the peace of God that surpasses all understanding) flooded that room and brought all three of us peace and a joy that we couldn’t have imagined at that moment. It’s justified to be mad, hurt, and anxious. But my wife, right in the middle of her hurt and pain, made a choice to find gratitude. Gratitude allowed peace into a moment of hardship and pain.
Some of you can relate, and maybe as I share my own experience of total disappointment and hurt, your own painful story comes to mind. You have your own story of an obstacle or struggle that may have convinced you to give up on the business idea, the relationship, the investment, or the dream.
Hardships, obstacles and struggles are real. I’m not saying that gratitude makes it easy. We went home that day from the adoption agency and had to walk through the process of grieving what we thought would be. Our hearts had to go through a process of healing, and it didn’t happen overnight. But I’m telling you, the way that my wife handled that moment shifted and shaped the event and gave us peace that allowed us to decide that we would not let this experience dictate our future. The choice to be grateful, even in that difficult time, helped us to continue to pursue the thing that God put in our hearts, which was adoption. My wife and I went on to adopt three more beautiful children. In the irony of it all, our next adoption after that difficult situation was another baby girl who was already called when we received her. Her given name was Emma! Isn’t that incredible? The very name we had chosen for that first baby girl was the actual given name of our daughter who we adopted just a few years later. We felt that we had received something back that we had lost.
I know we are movers and shakers and we want to get out there and build something, but keep in mind, even the greatest race cars have to pit stop and get their tires changed out. They have to stop for a moment to continue to perform at their maximum capacity.
In this season of Thanksgiving, begin to create the space in your life to be thankful for the good things and for the obstacles and struggles that you’ve had to walk through, too.
As we approach Thanksgiving, one of the things I am most grateful for is YOU, my audience. Week after week you join us in this journey of growth and you share our content in efforts to help others. We wouldn’t be where we are today if it weren’t for this amazing audience.
As a gift to you, I want to leave you this week with a few pieces of advice to help you grow your business and influence. When it boils down to it, if you want to truly succeed, you can’t just grab any product. You need a product that truly has the power to affect positive change for people.
1) Get crystal clear on a transformational product.
You’ve got to get clear on that. For so many of us, we dream of financial success because we want to get to a place where we can use our wealth to give to others or to make a difference in the world around us. If you want to make more money, you need to have a transformational product. You need a product that will solve a problem or that will cause others to find the same success you have found. You need a product that will make life easier, fuller, or more rewarding for others. Make sure that you don’t skip this very important piece to business success.
2) That transformative product doesn’t have to be your own.
What do I mean by that? I’m saying that you can actually affiliate with other people and get paid commissions. Maybe you don’t have a transformational product, but you’re 100% behind a product that has been transformative for you. Sometimes it’s easier to sell a tried and true product for someone else because you’re sold on it yourself! If you don’t currently have a product today, then go market for someone else. Did you know you can do that for Grant Cardone’s products? You can do that with my products! You can promote other people’s products and they’ll pay you. The power of this is you don’t fulfill it because they do that. So there’s no good excuse to stop you from getting going. You could find a product that’s made an impact in your life and make a percentage to market that product.
3) Don’t wait until you’re financially successful to start being generous.
The Bible talks about the generosity of a certain widow. This was a woman who gave just a single coin away. She was poor and had nothing, but Jesus captured her story and it’s been told for thousands of years. The amount of money she gave was not what was impactful. It was her willingness to give so much when she had so little. One of the biggest mistakes that people make in their charitable giving, is that they wait to be generous for the future. Don’t wait until you’re making all this money. That mindset may really stunt your personal growth and keep you from helping others. I know people who are making a lot of money, but when they pull back the curtain on how much they gave away, it’s nothing compared to other people I know who don’t make near the money.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be like those people. I want to have a generous spirit and always be looking for ways to give. I think that’s a decision you make no matter how much money you have. You may have goals to be extremely generous or a dream to give something big to an organization. Just this week, my wife and I and our community had the incredible opportunity to build this unbelievable facility for the Tim Tebow Foundation and join their fight against sex trafficking. But this wasn’t the first time we’ve been generous. It’s a lifestyle and a choice you make no matter where you are financially. Start being that generous person today.
Enjoy this holiday week with your friends and families as we all take time for gratitude.
