A prudent way to learn more and guess less in ten minutes or your money back – wait! You didn’t buy anything! And there’s a gift at the end!
By the way I am NOT anti sci-fi but a lot of us are preoccupied with what the future holds, and in my opinion at least, we waste a lot of time worrying about that and what to study while anticipating what might happen in the future. No, there there is some wisdom to that and yet in comparison, here’s the thing about the past – it never changes! You can actually count on that 🙂 You don’t have to guess .. you don’t have to speculate about what might have happened – it happened! Go find out and study that.
Unless we can figure out time travel and can screw up the past, studying the past will probably give you the bigger bang for your buck every time. Now there’s two sides to this:
I think there’s value to be had in both worlds. I want us to be able to embrace every past event as being the key to who we are today. That’s what made us. If you look at life this way, nothing is wasted.
I want to share a cute example from my past – I think it’s cute 🙂 – and how studying my past turned out to be a huge investment for me. This is a story about the Smurfs and Banjo the Wood Pile Cat. So the Smurfs – you’ve probably heard of them .. Banjo a lesser-known cartoon. These two cartoons never knew about each other. They didn’t live in the same world, they didn’t happen on the same channel on Saturday morning cartoons – just up here [points to head] .. and they used to tug-of-war in my head and change channels up there a lot. Until about age nine, I had all kinds of original tunes and images floating around in my head – very creative, I thought this was fun, this was a normal part of life – but once I was nine, I was put on my first mental health medications and at that point I started distrusting my creativity. I started believing what everybody else had described my creativity to be:
.. and these are my doctor’s, my parents, my teachers – well-meaning folks but I listened to what their description of my creativity was and I started getting really worried about myself – and so back to Banjo the Wood Pile Cat and the Smurfs – I would have these two playing in my head all the time and I’d come to my younger siblings and confess to them: I’d be like “I don’t know what’s going on! First Banjo the Wood Pile Cat [singing] and BANG! the channel changes then all the Smurfs [singing] and BANG! then back to Banjo the Wood Pile Cat and these channels keep changing – I’m losing my mind! And then fast forward now to about two years ago: I’m sitting down writing some multimedia for one of my speeches. I use a lot of multimedia in my speeches (they’re more like “speech-formances”) and in this particular piece I’ve got an old-fashioned TV set with some cartoons and video games playing on it – of course Banjo the Wood Pile Cat and the Smurfs also take their turns on this TV but I start slowing myself down as I think about this and I start paying attention to the tunes that each of them have and OMG .. they are so similar I mean “la la la la la la” [singing] .. Smurfs, then “Banjo the Wood Pile Cat” [singing] .. Banjo, so it wasn’t that I couldn’t focus back then – it was that I was hyper focusing! I could listen to the patterns and recognize the similarities between those tunes and that’s what was so intriguing to me! And now I think about how this has helped me in my past as a software developer winning all these awards. You really need to be able to be good at pattern recognition and being able to modify patterns, mimic patterns. And then I became a musician – again, important being able to recognize patterns and mimic and modify! Something that I thought was a disability back then, really was an ability that I had discarded.
All right, so what does this have to do with you? Here’s a question for you:
Are there any parts of your past that you’ve accidentally or purposefully discarded, and if so, could you maybe instead, look for the hidden clues in those moments that would help you make less choices but more bold and heartfelt decisions?
Hmm?
Now I say less choices because the world we live in offers many distractions to choose from when we don’t know who we are!
So as I said earlier in an earlier video it’s it’s been a lot harder and much slower to go backwards through life like I’ve had to just removing all the things that I didn’t want so I could make some room to focus on the things that I did want. I mean, it’s so much easier to go forward learning from other people’s mistakes …
… experiences, seriously that’s been the biggest takeaway for me. The biggest thing I’ve learned is to seek mentors. After studying your own past, learn from their pasts, you know, seek and learn from people that are doing the things you want to be doing one day and similarly from the same people who are avoiding the things you want to be avoiding. What did these guys do to get there? Right? Invest in yourself by investing in the knowledge that these guys have. It’ll save you years of trial and error.
.. and on that segued note, I’ve got a small gift for you today. Whether you’re going backwards through life like me or you want to save time by going forwards through life by learning from people like me, I want you to find that intersection we talked about earlier where your passions brought others AND you the most smiles. So you’re gonna want to turn your phones to landscape for this one and if you’re on a desktop .. flip (** LOCK ORIENTATION TO PORTRAIT 🙂 ) your heads? Tag a friend, share some hope, see you soon! I’m Rene Rafael and thanks for traveling with me.
Up to now, what’s been your life story?
Do you get how valuable it is? How valuable you are?
Half a million dollars and 4 decades of trial and error – that’s what it cost me to come to the conclusions in my own story! But was it all bad? It certainly wasn’t all good! God’s kept me mostly objective about how I look at my own story. I’m not interested in wasting time on blame or guilt or the trappings that those two provide. In the end: love, compassion, forgiveness – these are gonna be the most important things to give to others and yourself! So if you think you could benefit from the wisdom that I personally gained on my journey to sobriety, I’d like to offer you my Rebirth Program entitled TEN Ways to Embrace your Past and Rewrite your Future. While creating this, I needed to dig really deep into the archaeology of my life story, you know, forgive myself for quite a number of things and eventually make the bold decision to fuel my keynote performances with my story. We all have stories! This is the group hug part right? 🙂 Yeah, you all have stories! You live long enough, that’s generally what ends up happening – you have stories! But the strange thing is that we often don’t think of these stories as being as valuable as they really are. Your stories are valuable .. not just to learn from yourself but to share so that others can learn, and more importantly, to embrace as the unique ongoing dream that God has for each one of us. Use these! Use these to make a better today and a more beautiful tomorrow. There’s no “too late” time to start dreaming again!
Old stories can create new ones.
So if you want to discover the value and the power of your own stories and then use these to fuel your dreams, this program could be a very encouraging tool for you. It definitely was for me in writing it.
God bless!
Hey, looking to fill a 90 minute spot with some reflectively humorous and life-changing ear candy? Download Rene to your device and take him in the woods on your next hike.
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