Recorded at a Thomas Jefferson Education Conference (SLC, UT) – Making Cents out of Setbacks: How to Profit from your Losses
Are you weary of the fight? Has ‘quitting’ ever crossed your mind? You’re closer to succeeding than you probably know. Let Leslie take the lid off your mind and show you how to view your challenges in a whole new light, so you can turn them into some of your greatest assets. Identify and access the hidden benefits contained in your adversities.
Discover:
Why setbacks are a necessary piece of the success formula
How to pass the persistence test
What you can do to avert unnecessary setbacks
When (and how) to turn off the part of your mind that sets the goal (turn it off too late and you’ll miss the mark)
How to turn ON the part of your mind that achieves the goal
The role of a third part of your mind, and how to reduce the amount of energy required to accomplish the goal
The surprising purpose and meaning of ‘failure’ (and why you’re more fortunate if you experience it than if you don’t)
How to recognize, enlist, and trust your gut instinct for success
and more…
Related:
Making Cents out of Setback Video
Mind Model Video (Stickman)
The Truth About Failure
So… My Husband Lost His Job
Free download:
www.hiddentreasuresbook.com
Transcript:
Announcer: Welcome to the Rare Faith Podcast where the solution to every problem is only an idea away and where the same activity with just a little more awareness always yields better results. Award-winning best-selling author Leslie Householder, brings some of her best information to this inspiring series of life-changing episodes that you won’t want to miss. Show notes for this episode can be found at ARareKindofFaith.com. [Music and applause]
Leslie: My name is Leslie Householder and this is the Making Sense Out of Setbacks class. I’m excited to be here and to share some of these things with you. Mostly because they come from some life experiences that were major setbacks in our life, that we made sense out of and turned for our good. And part of that good that has come from it is the ability to share with others and let our pain save you some pain.
Leslie: “Are you Gino?”
Male Voice: “No”
Leslie: “Oh my gosh I just thought I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in 10 years! Sorry that was a little unprofessional huh? Anyway, welcome glad to have you here.
Alright, so some of you have been to my classes before. There will be some repeated information, but I know a lot of you have not been to my classes before let me just introduce myself and my family to you. These are my pride and joy. I told the youth today, I showed them this picture during their keynote this morning and I said, “this is my proudest accomplishment, and they applauded.” Then later I went back and I said okay how many of you have a large family or a semi-large family and some of them raised their hands. And I said how many of you have ever had a professional photo taken of your family? And they raised their hand. And I said how many of you agree that that was probably one of the most nightmarish days of your life? And their hands stayed up. I’m like that is my proudest accomplishment that we have a photo of all of us where most of us are smiling. So no they are my pride and joy.
And honestly, just to give you a little bit of background. All I ever wanted to be was mom. That was my objective in life. I daydreamed about it, I couldn’t wait to just nurture and raise a family. And part of that probably came from the fact that I was the youngest in my family, and my family lived overseas for a few years during the time that most kids are starting to do babysitting. So I didn’t have that opportunity. And I just craved babies and little ones that I could just play with and have fun with and whatnot.
So when I got married we had ambitions, we had dreams, we had expectations for where our life was gonna to go and what this family life was gonna to look like. And… it didn’t quite work out the way I expected. That first year, of course, I was working cause we couldn’t afford to have me home. I wasn’t a mom yet so that was okay. Then along comes baby number one and we couldn’t afford to have me stay home at that time, but we were committed to the principle and we believed that God would provide a way. So we just took the leap of faith and I came home from work and I was there that first year and we started to fall into debt. Now in my mind I’m thinking “well I’m doing the right thing so where’s the blessing why isn’t this working out for me” And it was the first time in my life I began to question well maybe there isn’t even a God. Maybe, maybe I’ve been lied to maybe uh this was all an illusion a deception. So here a major setback in my life and, it may not sound like a big deal to those of you listening, but to me it was a devastating blow to hopes of what my life was going to look like.
After a year my husband – um…what happened, I can’t remember what happened, but he lost his job and I was forced back to work. I worked as a temp doing data entry somewhere and I remember dropping my little boy off, this one at the top middle, when he was about two years old, one year, he was one. I would drop him off at the daycare in the morning when it was still dark outside, and when I went to pick him up in the afternoon, it was dark again. This was here in Utah during the winter. So it’s like I never saw my kid during the daylight. And that just, it just, kind of reflected how I felt inside. It was just a dark time in my life. And so we began to search for answers and for ways that we might could pull out of our financial hole.
And everything that you know society says, “well if you want to be successful you have to do this. You have to go get an education, you have to work hard, you have to … whatever”. We tried to do everything that we were told to do, but we were already behind the curve and we could never seem to get in front of it again. And so we started attending seminars trying to figure this out, and I counted it up for the next seven years we attended more than 100 seminars that taught prosperity, and success principles, business development principles, whatever. And every time we’d go to these events, we would be filled with this hope and inspiration and excitement knowing that ahhh! We can do this, we can do this, we can break out of this rut that we’re in I know it.
And about two weeks later we’re like no… why isn’t it working for us? I thought I had it figured out and another setback would just pummel us down again. And so we’d just kind of claw our way to the next seminar. And really what those seminars did for me, it didn’t necessarily change our financial picture . If anything it put us into more debt, because we were spending grocery money on seminars and we started spending credit to go to seminars. And I began to wonder is this just a sick addiction? (laughs) What is this?
But what it did for me during those years was it kept me from just, I don’t know, checking out and leaving the planet. So it kept me going it kept me hoping every few weeks I’d get another infusion of hope. But finally it got so bad that I remember being at a little apartment where we lived it was a two-bedroom apartment. We were not smokers but there was smoke that would come through the outlets from our neighbor next door. That was not comfortable for me. And we had moved and so I didn’t have a job at this time. My husband was washing windows for I think, $10 an hour and this was not in the 1950s, this was not that long ago. And so we really had a hard time with that and it got to a point where I just felt numb.
I questioned the existence of God. I wondered what happened to this, feeling that I could accomplish anything, that I could conquer the world. Where’d that go? Because I had been raised with that. I had some great teachers that inspired me to believe that I could become anything, have anything that I wanted out of life. And I just began to think well maybe there, maybe it was all a lie. There was one day I walked outside. And do you agree that our results are affected somewhat, by our mindset? Because our mindset affects how we respond to the world around us. True? Absolutely!
So let me give you just an idea of where my mindset was at the time. I walked outside of my apartment one day and I looked on the ground and there was my broom broken in half. Some neighbor kid had snapped it in half and I just… It was like one of those last straw moments. Why was that a last straw moment for me? Cause I didn’t have seven dollars to replace the broom. And I knew it. And I thought “I can’t even control how swept my house is now unless I’m down here like this! And I’m not gonna do that!” I’m, I’m just mad! And so who can think of an idea on how you could solve the problem of a broken broom?
Random Voice: Tape!
Leslie: Hey who said tape? What kind of tape?
Random Voice: Duct Tape
Leslie: Duct tape, we all know about it. Never crossed my mind! Never crossed my mind. That was not where my mindset was.
Woman’s Voice: I would have gone to the to the mother of the boy and said “You’re gonna buy me a new broom.”
Leslie: So you would have gone to the mother of the boy, he didn’t have a mother, he was with his grandmother. But no, I didn’t think to even do that either. I didn’t even think to do that.
Anybody else?
I called the police. That’s where my head was. So is it any wonder that things just couldn’t go right for us? And I didn’t know it was my fault, that I was keeping us so stuck with the way I was thinking, but every time I get some kind of a setback I’d respond with this uncontrolled anger and irritation and cynicism.
And so that’s who I was about the time that another seminar was coming along and it promised to change everything. You know. And I thought, “I don’t want to go.” Finally decided, there was something inside that said, “you need to go ‘cause that’s what keeps you alive! Remember? You know. I didn’t wanna because I couldn’t, I couldn’t justify this habit that didn’t ever seem to fix anything permanently.
So finally I told my husband, “all right fine I’m gonna go to this one, but this is the last one if something doesn’t change after this one I’m done! Go as many times as you want do your thing, but I’m just gonna have to figure out how to be happy with the way things are.
That was the one that made all the difference. I think God knew what was going on with me and he showed me some tender mercy that day. And he sent a teacher, a mentor, who taught me something that helped me understand how my thoughts were affecting my results. I’m gonna share with you the diagram that he shared with us.
So here’s the um, apartment where I came out and called the police, on the kid who broke my broom. Behind that wall is a little patch of grass about the size of this area I’m standing in, maybe a little bigger. But we went back and took a picture of it, so that people could have a visual of kind of where we were at after we learned these principles and started applying them, after three months we tripled our income. And I’m not showing you this to impress you or anything. This is the house that we’re in right now. The reason I show you this is to show you the difference that a switch, an adjustment in your thinking can make. I could have done this, if I’d use these principles to show going from overweight to healthy, it doesn’t matter what it is I’m showing you. And it’s not to me about money. We’ve had plenty of setbacks since then, I just want you to know that there is a difference. And this is the diagram that he shared with us.
This model of the mind it’s a visual representation of how our mind works. This was originally developed by a man by the name of Dr. Thurman Fleet. He was the founder of Concept Therapy in the 1930s and he splits up our mind into three parts our conscious mind, our subconscious, and our body. The conscious part of our mind is the part of us that has awareness. It’s also the part of our mind that adds meaning to the data that comes into our mind. For example, I go outside I see a broken broom. That data input is just a picture of a broom there is no meaning behind that image until I assign meaning to it. I decide if that is a good thing or a bad thing by my choice on how I view it. But fundamentally there is nothing good or bad about this pole that’s on the ground, right? It just is, what it is. How I respond to it and that response is a conscious choice that I make that either assigns a positive or negative meaning to it.
For example if I were to say “would it be good, just think about in your life, would it be good if I were to give you a ton of gold? What if I just put a ton of gold right there with you right now would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
Indistinct answer:
Leslie: Depends. What if you’re in a rowboat?
Indistinct answer:
Leslie: Okay so what happens is relative whether it’s good or bad it’s going to be relative and the conscious part of your mind is also the part of you that has the ability to accept or reject ideas. As I’m talking to you right now your your discerning whether or not it fits your belief system. Whether or not it makes sense, whether or not it’s logical and if you don’t believe that it is then you’re going to kick it out. And that is a function of your conscious mind. It’s also the part of your mind that has the ability to create a new idea.
So for example, these children downstairs in the Love of Learning classes. Yeah, you give them a crayon and you ask them to put something on the paper, they’re not going to look around and wonder what the right answer is. They’re just gonna go to town and create, a whole new idea. And that’s a function of the conscious mind. We also have that ability but it usually lies dormant in adults.
Subconscious part of your mind is the part of you that controls your automatic life-sustaining functions. Its job is to keep you alive. It keeps your heart beating all day long. It keeps you breathing through the night. It helps your cells divide. It handles all those things that you don’t have to think about, consciously. Thank heavens, that we don’t have to put on our daily checklist beat your heart. Right? I need to remember to keep my heart beating. If we had to remember some of these functions we would not be here. So it is a part of you that keeps you alive.
This part of you does not accept or reject ideas. It only accepts ideas, in other words if you’re in a movie theater watching a horror flick. And as the viewer, it appears that your life is in peril in this scene. Your subconscious mind does not reject the thought that this is not reality. Consciously you’re saying “this is not real! This isn’t real! This isn’t real! This isn’t real!” True? Subconsciously your heart is beating faster. It is supplying adrenaline so that you can flee the monster.
So your subconscious mind takes the data in it has not filtered, it has not judged, it accepts it, it sees it as danger and it triggers its job to help keep you alive. Fascinating, really when you think about it. The subconscious part of your mind is also the part that responds to your thoughts that are charged with emotion. Your thoughts that are charged with emotion. In other words if you are emotionally charged about something, it is a command to your subconscious mind that says, this is very important, pay attention to this. This is very important.
Let’s talk about the body. This is a tool of the mind, that’s why it’s included in the mind model. The body is your physical tabernacle that is a tool of the mind. This is the part of you where your health conditions show up, where your behaviors are manifest, and it’s also the part of you that takes action. That’s where (stutters) speaking is an action. Moving about doing things are actions.
What’s interesting is that, there’s an author by the name of James Allen who wrote a book called As A Man Thinketh about 150 years ago. And he said that the outer conditions of a person’s life will always be found to be harmoniously related to his inner state. Men do not attract that which they want but that which they are. So according to James Allen with this mind model, as a man thinketh in his heart so is he. Whatever’s going on in the subconscious mind is actually going to control the kind of results that you have no matter what you’re thinking consciously and no matter what you do action wise.
So that’s kind of the basic premise of this whole thing, but here’s why we get stuck when there’s a setback. Here’s why we find ourselves, not getting the kind of results that we want in our family life. In our business work. It’s because we have these five senses. We can see, hear, taste, touch, smell. And uh I put them up on top of the head as little antennae to represent the intake spot for this data. So let’s suppose you have in your subconscious mind an idea or a thought. And I’m just going to talk from my experience, from where I came from. I believe I had a program in my subconscious mind that said, “money is hard to come by, we’re always broke. Money is hard to come by, we’re always broke.”
And it was a program that ran, and so anytime you gave it data. It would process the data and it would help support ,evidence, to prove that I was right. And so that X in the subconscious mind represents money is always hard to come by or we’re always broke. Whatever the thought is it’s gonna move me, into a state of being that feels anxiety when money is tight. I might hold back from taking a risk that looks too risky. It influences my actions because of that fear, and then as a result I’ll get results that reflect to that original paradigm.
Here’s why we stay in bondage though, we look at our results. We have those results in our in our world. We can see what the checkbook says. We can see what our relationships look like. We can see ourselves in the mirror if we’re concerned about our health. And we take that information in, through our five senses and it causes us to think about the way things are, consciously, we start thinking about it, we start analyzing it. We start picking it apart. And so as we think about it consciously, there are two factors that determine the kind of programs that will run in your subconscious mind. And remember it’s important to know which ones are running because, if we want to change our results we’ve got to change the program that’s dominant.
Um and, like on a computer there’s, there’s a lot of programs on my computer that don’t run they’re just kind of sitting dormant because they’re not activated. I can open them up and activate them or I can shut them down and let them just be a file. And those two things that determine which ones will run are, thoughts that are repeated often and or thoughts that are charged with emotion. So if that’s the case. The question is as you’ve taken that data into your conscious mind how do you feel, about that, what you’re perceiving?
In my world I was looking at the broken broom. I was looking at the darkness when I’m dropping my kid off at daycare. I’m looking at the physical data that supports this belief that things are always hard, and I would think about it consciously, and then I would get very seriously emotionally charged about how it was. I’d get angry, I’d get frustrated, I’d have despair, I’d throw tantrums, I’d cry. I had no coping skills. And what I didn’t realize is that I was giving my subconscious mind a command, and as a result I’d get more of the same.
So here’s how you break that cycle, you have to be able to use your imagination and picture how you want things to be instead. And as you do and you think about it consciously and allow yourself to get emotionally charged about that instead. Or repeat the belief “you know what, life is abundant, we have all we need”. Fact is, we did have all we needed. I was not as bad off as I thought I was, it’s just the way I was looking at it. I mean compare my world to some third world country,uh, where, maybe a young widow is living in a hut and can’t find clean water for her kids. I was mafia rich compared to that.
I didn’t see it that way though. Does that make sense? So I had to allow myself to first of all picture the way I wanted to be and allow myself to get excited, and have faith, that it could happen. Long enough for it to show up, long enough for those processes to go through. Because every idea seed has a gestation period. Every one, every one of them does. You have an idea to become a best-selling author. There’s a gestation period for conception of the idea to fruition. Whatever it might be, and if you get this far down the path and you do not see evidence that anything’s happening. The natural reaction to that is say, “oh I guess, I guess it’s not for me. I guess I can’t.”
And so this is what we kept doing we’d set a goal and we’d get halfway and frustrated and we’d kick it out and we’d start all over. And this was wearing us out! You can spend your whole life doing this, and never get all the way over, because you’re not allowing yourself to hold (pause) with faith in what you have in your plans. So as you go through this process you do get different results.
So what happens, if this is true? What happens when you dream a a grand goal, and you allow yourself to think about it consciously, and then you get emotionally involved with it, and you don’t kick it out with disbelief and what shows up instead is a setback? Well that used to really throw me off, and I didn’t know what to do with that. And so what I learned was that having a setback show up is actually part of the plan, it’s part of the process. You set a goal, and what shows up is not the goal, but something opposite of the goal. And what that is is an opportunity, it’s a gift, because if you can respond properly to that setback, then the thing you wanted is just on the other side of it. But most of us fail the test without some education.
I like to look at it like a set of gears. Imagine that you’re sitting on one of those far gears and the goal you want exists down here in the bottom corner gear. In order to get from one spot to the other, you’re going to travel around this one gear and it’s going to come down and it’s going to hit this other gear. And if it’s not what you
expected maybe this is a setback. You come and engage with this setback and if you don’t like it, the natural reaction is to (aghhh sound) just resist it and then you’ve got friction against the gears (grinding sound) until it just freezes and melts together and you’re stuck. On the other hand you come around, you set the goal which starts the gears turning. You set the goal you come around and as soon as you hit the setback you feel like “huh, interesting where is this gonna take me?”, and you allow it to move (pause) through your life (longer pause) with an open mind. Wow! This is not what I expected. Where is this going to take me? And you picture it like a gear, and if you respond properly to that setback that shows up. Properly meaning what? What does it mean to respond properly to a setback? Any of you have read Hidden Treasures? (murmurs from the audience)
Leslie: You have an idea.
Unknown woman: I think would be to not allow your brain to go back to the old belief system.
Leslie: To not allow…
Unknown woman: indistinct answer to continue on…like riding gears.
Leslie: to ride the gears. Let’s go back to this picture here. When the setback shows up to stay focused on where you’re going. And I have another image that will help you understand what I mean by that. So when the setback comes along the more flexible you are about going with it and looking for the opportunity that it contains — cause it
does contain an opportunity. A lot of times the thing you’re looking for shows up as a setback, but it has a hidden
opportunity within it. And to respond properly to it means that you look at it and say “huh that’s interesting“. You don’t assign a negative meaning to it. You choose, consciously, to assign a positive meaning to it and say “well I think there must be something hidden in here I’m gonna go looking for it”.
When you approach a setback that way, you’ll find it. Seek and ye shall find. And in fact I found that the more catastrophic the setback seems to be — In some ways it’s a little easier to, to kind of hope for some grand thing out of it. It’s, it’s when you bonk your head on the cupboard that it’s hard to look for something good. You know it’s the little things that get to you. Take a look at this. There was one day I was facing a really tremendous setback, and I felt like my whole world was turbulent and just going crazy and I couldn’t see straight and I just wanted it to stop. And in that moment this picture came into my head, and I had to go looking on the internet to find one that actually represented what was in my mind. But this kind of a picture came into my head of a surfer sailing through a wave tube. And I felt like, “man, I feel like I’m in the middle of this turbulent wave tube” and what I want to do is I want to turn to the tube and say “stop, just go away!” But what would happen if you tried to do that a wave tube? Oh yeah, you’re toast! So the best thing to do when you’re riding a wave like this is to focus where?
Indistinct audience response:
Leslie: Straight ahead where you’re going. Let the world churn around you. Stay focused on where you’re going, because it’s the wave that is propelling you. Without the wave — you’d be sitting there and in fact uh surfers who really love what they do they go looking for the biggest baddest wave they can find!
And you know I’ve heard it said that those who want to make the most progress in life — are willing to take on the toughest challenges, ‘cause they know that it’s that challenge that will PRO-PEL them. And here’s a visual representation of how that works. Now here’s the life we think we want. (laughing) We just think we want it to be smooth and no turbulence and just easy and whatnot but I like to call this shark bait. Um I don’t know how long we could really stand to sit there without getting antsy. It’s the change, it’s the drama in our life that makes us human. And as we learn to deal with it, great things come from it.
Say you have this setback you take it in you’re looking at what it is you think about it all the time and you get emotionally involved negatively with it. In other words you feel bad about this setback. That’s gonna put you into a negative state and you’re gonna end up with negative results. On the other hand if you use that filter, to recognize that you do not have to accept the idea as you perceive it, but instead dream about how you want things to be instead.
Picture it! Stop and put it on the screen of your mind! Put it there! And I’m serious when I say that, because I heard that for seven years, from all these seminar people saying, “picture what you want, dream big!” I’m like yeah, yeah I got it, but what do I do? Picture what you want dream big okay got it, yeah get it, I know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah what do I do? Why isn’t this working for me? And the answer was always picture what you want and it was finally, I was like, so mad, at the world. So tired of these seminar speakers, who had my money,(self deprecating laughter) telling me that I needed to picture what I wanted. I finally just said, “alright fine I will! Fine I will, I’m gonna go go to bed, I’m gonna check out, I’m gonna close my eyes, I’m gonna pretend like I do not exist, and I’m gonna go live in a fantasy world some where else”. (more self-deprecating laughter) And in the back of my mind I’m thinking “Leslie has it really come to this? Are you really that bad off that you have to resort to fantasizing?” And so, I’m beating myself up for this exercise.
It wasn’t an exercise it was an escape. And after a little while you know, you can only do that so long. But I imagined myself being in a home of our own. I imagined having freedom to be with my kids and just do other things and and I actually started to wonder, “well I wonder what that would feel like? I mean it was such a foreign experience to me, I hadn’t lived it. I had to wonder what would it feel like? And so while I’m sitting there picturing it.
It wasn’t just like picturing myself watching a movie of me playing it out. It was like me being there, in the house, with the children coming up behind me, and running in the room, and I’m holding groceries and I’m, I’m (stuttering) literally trying to pretend like I am there, so that I can answer the question, “how will it feel when…?” How would it feel? The answer to a question like that is nothing more than a feeling. You can’t say it would feel great (spelling out the word) G R E A T because that’s not a feeling that’s a word. How do you answer a question with a feeling?
The only way you can is through feeling it. You have to feel it. And the reason you can create that kind of an
experience for yourself is because your mind, your subconscious mind, cannot tell the difference. It can’t distinguish the difference between an experience that is real or imagined. It doesn’t know the difference. That’s why you can totally (long pause) fantasize through an experience and your subconscious mind will trigger responses. I mean you can imagine the train wreck at the end of the month that’s going to happen if you don’t solve the financial problem. You can be imagining that and the phone calls that you’re gonna have to deal with and everything else. And your subconscious mind will cause you to perspire, it will get you this anxiety, your heart will start to contract. Those are all physiological responses to an image that it thinks something bad is really happening to you right now, and you’re only imagining it.
And so we use this process for our advantage. And so that day that I was imagining how things, what would it be like to have that kind of a life. When I was done I was ehh, back to my world, and a year later we were living that dream. After seven years all of a sudden things started changing and we were living that dream. The thing is is I did not know at that time that I had done anything to change me. I didn’t know that by changing me all of a sudden opportunities coming our way I would recognize that one, as oh that’s what we need to do.
If I’m in the wrong state of mind it’ll come by and I won’t even recognize it for what it is. Or I’ll be afraid of it because it’s not quite in harmony with my subconscious mind. So it’s really important to change your own state of being, through this imagination process. So as you do that you think of a new idea, you can assign a positive meaning, get excited about the setback even. And the reason you can be excited about setback is because there is a Law of Polarity in all things that “says every, (long pause) every (long pause) circumstance has good and bad in it.” Every bad circumstance has an equal, a seed of equal or greater benefit as Napoleon Hill said. And so in other words if something is (long pause) really catastrophic, then on the other side of it there’s something amazingly tremendous. If it’s only a little bit annoying then the good on its only other really a little bit good. And so who’s the lucky one? The one who has THIS setback or the one who has this setback?
The bigger your setback the more fortunate you are. Twisted I know, it’s just kind of bizarre that way. But it’s true, and you can get positive results by viewing it that way, and that’s a choice to view your setbacks in that positive light. And what you do when you reject an idea is you just refuse to think about it, the negative situation in an emotional way. Don’t add an emotional charge to something negative.
So do you still deal with the overdue bills? Yes
You make the phone calls you need to? Yes
But you do it without emotion.
Stop that right there and you’re gonna see tremendous differences in the kind of results you get. By not handling the negative experiences emotionally. Handle the negative experiences without emotion. Stay in your head on those. But when you start thinking about where you want to go, and the things you want to do, and the mission you want to fulfill, that’s when you turn on the emotion. And you’re training your subconscious mind to go to work for you, and and help you recognize the opportunities and open your mouth with the person in the elevator that you may not have opened your mouth to before. It’s, it’s that inner, it’s that inner knowing that is at your disposal as you allow these processes to work. So, uummm, I don’t know what this slide was for. Basically choose positive and you’ll get positive results. So a successful person isn’t made as he sails his way to the top or she. A successful person is made in the moment of disaster when he chooses to think right anyway.
So again what does it mean to think right? There are Laws of Success there’s seven of them and I’ve only listed six. We don’t have time to go into ‘em here. I talked about the Law of Polarity. That right there, is a tremendous tool for looking at whatever setbacks you have with a positive view.
Another one of my favorites is the Law of Relativity. Law of Relativity says that whatever happens to you is not good or bad it just is. It’s only good or bad when you relate it to something else. You could name any experience possible in in the human world and say well this is an experience that is fundamentally bad, and I can show you how no it’s only bad relative to something better. But there is worse it’s better relative to something worse. And so as we use the Law of Relativity to view our experiences in a more positive light, it keeps us in the right state of being to be receptive to the right ideas, and the right inspiration we need to achieve our goals.
Here’s an example of the Law of Cause and Effect. You know what? You don’t have to be a genius to know what’s going to happen here. These two women are looking inside a bakery and said “let’s just go inside and see what happens.” Your choices are going to determine your results, and and the results become predictable based on those choices.
All right so here’s what you may not know. We, we put out the Jackrabbit factor in 2005 and in 2006 we started to have new setbacks that we had not expected. Here I am the Jackrabbit lady teaching people prosperity, and and people are writing me letters from all over the world that are saying look what your information has done for our life. And this is what we’ve accomplished, and these are the great things that have happened. But in my world all of a sudden everything started turning upside down. And I’m like what is going on? We’d been riding high for probably four or five years and things were going great. And all of a sudden it’s like the rug got pulled out from under us. So that life could say alright Leslie, what are you gonna do with this? And it got to the point where it felt like all the laws that I’d been learning and trying to live by were suspended on my behalf. Working for everybody else but me.
And so I go falling into this tantrum phase again. And it was like the old me all over again and my husband’s like “oh no really?” (self-deprecating laugh) we going back to this? And uh, for example, we had invested in some property that um, we were trying to uh, if you know what a 1031 exchange is, you buy a property and rent it and then you go to sell it. But you don’t want to get the money from it ‘cause you don’t want to pay capital gains tax on it, so you want to roll the proceeds into another property. And at a time when we were trying to figure out how to respond to our setbacks, we thought well maybe we ought to sell this property. It had a negative cash flow. Let’s roll it into a property that can have a positive cash flow that’ll help us with one of these setbacks. And so at the time we sold the property, put a bunch of money into this 1031 exchange while we waited to find another property to roll it in – and you’re given a certain amount of time that has to happen 45 or 60 days I’m not sure.
And so while we’re looking and things are just getting harder and harder in our other interests. We thought, you know what maybe we ought to just go ahead and cash out and use that money to just keep us afloat until we can figure out how to respond to these setbacks. So we decided that’s what we needed to do. So we called the exchange company up and said you know what never mind go ahead and release the money to us we’ll go ahead and pay the taxes on it we need the money right now. And they’re like um we just went bankrupt.
Our money had been there maybe two weeks, and they went bankrupt during that window and our money was gone. I’m like, really, okay umm. We had some spec homes that we bought on a killer deal…not really! We thought they were a killer deal, find out we can’t sell them for even what we bought them for. And so we carried them for a year putting out $5,000 a month just to hold this empty property. And that was a setback, that I mean we were eating into savings trying to keep our credit good. I mean it was just a mess.
Trevan, what was the investor funding? I don’t remember that one. Oh, he started working for an investor helping people prevent foreclosures for their homes, and that became our source of income during this time that we’re trying to hold everything together, trying to hold the business together. I’m wondering, do I need to pull the books off the shelves, that everybody’s raving about. That “oh this is making my life so prosperous,” and I’m in this mess. I just felt like the biggest hypocrite and didn’t know what to do about it.
And so his investor funding dried up and so he was out of that position. Our air conditioning, we lived in Arizona this was in the summer, and our air conditioning was out of commission for six weeks out of that summer. Because it would break down we’d call ‘em up they’d “say well we’ll be out there on Thursday” which is like a week later. They’d come out, they’d fix it, it would be broken call ‘em back they’d come out a week later. In the summer if you want your a/c fixed there’s a backlog. A lot of people need that, cause it’s almost unbearable when there’s 120 degree temperatures or whatever. And so having no air conditioning through this was tough.
And then we had Hidden Treasures is a book called Heaven’s Astonishing Help with Your Money Matters and it’s all about these universal principles. It’s the book that explains the seven laws, and what’s ironic is there was a time where I realized there is somebody __ these books are selling really well. A lot of people are buying these books. We were getting orders, we were getting bulk orders, and case orders and and I’m like this is really kind of exciting!
And they were all being shipped to one address but the cards were being processed from all over the world. I’m like what is it this girl? what’s going on here interesting? So we got to the bottom of it just because I was curious and found out people were buying truckloads of my books with stolen credit cards! Did you read the book? (laughing) You know I’m thinking “wow this one’s gonna come back to bite you, you know”. But what happened is I became liable for all of those bills. I had to pay all that money back and I was out in the books.
And so here I’m thinking what am I supposed to learn from this? Setback after setback after setback, and I thought this is just too much I can’t handle this anymore. So I was working through this trying to respond to each one positively. And I have up here some of the conclusions I came to. Okay on that 1031 exchange we only lost $20,000. There were people in that bankruptcy claim that lost ten million dollars, three million dollars, their life savings. There was one man who was a paraplegic lost everything. The man who was responsible for that mess mess is in jail right now. But I had to look at my situation that it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The spec homes that, that just were upside down, it became a nice offset to the capital gains that we had earned so tax-wise it was a benefit, I guess. The investor funding drying up it put my husband on a path to better opportunities. The air-conditioning it, it was just a test that helped us prove our own endurance. Are we going to continue to do what we do even with how uncomfortable it is?
And I tell you many many times I prayed to know what do I do? How can I teach these principles when I feel like they don’t work for me anymore? How can I with integrity do that? And the answer kept coming back as clear as anything (long pause) “keep teaching you do not make them true or false by how well you’re living them,” and so to keep doing it was nothing more than “a okay but I am so uncomfortable doing this, I don’t want to do this anymore”. But I found out that the principles are still true. They do still work and I’ve learned quite a bit about making sense out of setbacks because
I’ve had plenty to practice with.
“In times of change the learners will inherit the earth while they learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with the world that no longer exists” Eric Hoffer. So (long pause) you will have unexpected things happen in your life. And those who make it through and come out on top are those who keep their minds open to learning new things. We are not done, if we’re, if we’re still here there is still more to learn and the more I learn the more I know there is so much I don’t know. And every experience gives me more knowledge and more wisdom and more understanding. So the only constant thing we can depend on is that there will be change. That’s the only constant we can depend on and it’s not always pretty. Umm, I don’t know if you can read this. This is a, a board room and it says “as you both know here at Front, Cuttle ’n Housen, failure is not an option, so that only leaves blame.”
And that’s what we wanted to do, we wanted to blame other people for our problems. We wanted to blame the the crook who did the 1031 fraud. The we, we wanted to project our blame to someone else. And I realized that you know (sigh) with what I teach I know that there has to be something that I either need to learn, or something I’m not quite doing right. And so as my mind was open and pondering these questions.
(and let me just check the time again okay)
I had the most horrific setback that I could have imagined at that time. This is my daughter Bethany when she was just between two or three years old. And is she cute or what? Yes she’s cute. There’s one day I was working upstairs in the, in my office and my son came running in. My five-year-old son came running in and yelled “Mom, Bethany’s lips are blue”! Like I could take anything else right now, and so I bolted down the stairs. I don’t think I even touched the floor I was down so fast, I knew she was out at the pool. And so I went out and she was lifeless my son, my seven-year-old son had pulled her from the pool and I ran to her.
(pause) And (long pause) I pi, I picked her up she was, she was blue and I um (pause) I tried to give her the Heimlich. Well the first thing I did, was I picked her up and put her over my knee to like pat her back because my children when they’re babies and they are not breathing that’s the first thing you do. You try to see if they’re choking on something. Well she wasn’t choking on anything, she had drowned and so I (pause) did that it didn’t work. So I put her down on her back kind of hit her head on the deck a little too hard and she didn’t complain. How I wish that she could have complained. Have you ever wished your kids could complain? (pause) A Law of Relativity right there. And I remembered okay I just need to get some oxygen to her brain and so I gave her mouth-to-mouth. And I gave her breath and it came rushing out her nose. I’m like (huffy snort) got that wrong. So I plugged her nose gave her another breath it filled her chest and it just sat there full, Which was the strangest thing, I’d never heard of that. You always expect, you see these movies. And it filled and it just sat there, and I’m like well we’ve got to push that through so it’ll get to her brain. So that reminded me to start pumping. I pumped and I gave her another breath and she began to revive. And umm (emotional pause) She spent the night in the hospital and she’s okay. No problems, no residual effects, grateful for that. And I should have been overjoyed, but I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I, it was like I was too numb to feel joy, I was just numb of what I had just gone through, what she had just gone through, the trauma.
And it was a few months later I was working on my home study course. That was kind of documenting these lessons learned as we were going through them. And as I was pondering, how do I wrap up this program? I don’t even know what the conclusion is yet, I’m still looking for the conclusion in my own world. It dawned on me that four times I had failed my daughter. First of all I failed to keep her safe in the first place. I gave her the Heimlich which you don’t do to a drowning person that doesn’t make sense. And that was another mistake I made a mistake. I hit her head on the deck too hard that was a mistake. I didn’t plug her nose that was a mistake. But how foolish would it have been if I had (long pause) gone out there seen that I had failed to prevent this and thought “oh man I’m such a failure.” “Oh, I’m so dumb!” “I can’t believe I did that!” While she’s there on the deck. No time for that, none, ran did what I could.
Every time I made a mistake I could have said “oh that was really stupid! I just did the hi, hey guys I just did the Heimlich on her! That wasn’t even right! I can’t believe I did that. Oh my word I just, just can’t get anything right!” No time for that. Try the next thing. Bumping her head on the deck no time to bemoan that. No time to beat myself up for not plugging her nose.
This was the day we brought her home. Do I look a little tired? The little boy in front is the one who called for me, the the boy in blue is the one who pulled her from the pool, and my daughter’s the one who called 9-1-1 for me while I did CPR. So I learned a shallow lesson, yeah watch the kids better around the water. I’m so glad nobody (pause) told me that after that experience, “well you should have watched them better,” I didn’t need __ don’t ever do that to somebody! ,Okay? They don’t need they get they get it, they already got it. Deeper lesson that life is fragile. All of a sudden our family is more tender towards one another. That was a huge blessing from it. Never be too busy to cherish your family.
But then it was while I was working on my program that it dawned on me what the life lesson was for me through this. This was a lesson delivered straight from God, with an intention to teach me the answer that I’d been looking for. Failure is feedback, it’s just feedback. Getting no response with the Heimlich was data input feedback, that allowed me to try something else. That taught me what not to do, but only if I didn’t stop too long bemoaning the mistake. So don’t look too long at your setbacks, cut your losses, get busy creating again. Grateful for the wisdom gained. Keep moving, and what I realized is that my financial life was on the line, just like her life was on the line, and whether it died or survived depended on how quickly I learned the lesson without beating myself up. How quickly I tried something else. Without kicking myself for making a mistake. And I had spent a lot of time bemoaning the mistakes we made with the real-estate investments. Bemoaning our mistakes with the (pause) whatever. All the different things we’ve done. That we hadn’t paid attention to these fraudulent credit card purchases. All the mistakes we made, I’d spent too much time thinking about the mistakes instead of dreaming again and going for it. Japanese proverb “fall down seven times get up eight”. Umm By the way I just skipped that last slide. I want to invite you to just come to my booth and give me your name and email address so you can join my newsletter. I’ll show you where you can get a free download.
I want to show you this to wrap up. This is a dog who does not have front arms. And most people would look at this poor animal say “what a sad poor animal this is”. And there was one day where this dog was laying there. His owner had brought him some food and some other animal in the yard, I think it was a pig came and stole his food from him and ran off. And this dog something welled up inside of him and he got so angry and upset that he leapt to his feet and started walking like a man. And now he goes around the country inspiring people to recognize that their setbacks are what sometimes bring out the hidden talents and the hidden gifts that no other dog on the planet even knows it can do. Well no, that’s not true there’s poodles I’ve seen in circuses, but really this dog has no other way to get around now except to walk like a human. I see him going out the door. He inspires me. There he is.
It’s bizarre to look at but you think about, what’s your handicap? What’s your weakness? And when life throws something at you that is so traumatic like a pig stealing your food, you wouldn’t want that to happen. Something inside of you can be sprouted and you’ll discover new things about your capacities, new things about your potential, and that’s what these setbacks are for. They’re not pointless every one of them has a purpose. And they’re for our good. As long as you expect to find the good that’s in them. And I promise you that if you do that you will. There’s a final picture of this amazing dog. Steals the hearts of everybody. So I hope that you remember that whatever comes your way and it’s not what’s expected, trust that it has a purpose. Look for the blessing that’s contained in it. It’s there, it’s there, and thank you very much for coming. [Applause]
This concludes today’s episode of the Rare Faith Podcast. You’ve been listening to Leslie Householder author of The Jackrabbit Factor, Portal to Genius, and Hidden Treasures – Heaven’s Astonishing Help With Your Money Matters. All three books can be downloaded free at a rarekindoffaith.com. So tell your friends and join Leslie again next time as she goes even deeper into the principles that will help you change your life. [Music]
Show Notes:
Background, newlyweds, seminars – “What, is this a sick addiction?”
Conscious Mind
Assigns meaning – good or bad: a ton of gold? What if you’re on a rowboat?
Accept/reject ideas
Create new idea
Subconscious Mind keeps you alive
Only accepts ideas, doesn’t discern
Responds to YOUR thoughts charged with emotion
Body – tool of the mind
Health, behaviors, action
As a Man Thinketh
Why we get stuck after a setback
Why we stay in bondage
2 factors determine the programs that will run:
Repeated often, or charged with emotion
Break the cycle with imagination
Gestation
Gears
Respond properly to setbacks
Focus where you’re going
Hidden opportunities
Turbulent wave tube
It’s the wave that propels you
Shark bait
Those who want to make the most progress in life, are the ones who are willing to take on the toughest challenges
Picture what you want
How would it feel when?
The only way you can answer it is through FEELING it
Seed of equal or greater benefit
The bigger your setback, the more fortunate you are
Handle negative experiences without emotion
Approach your hopeful plans with emotion
A successful person isn’t made as he sails his way to the top. A successful person is made in the moment of disaster when he chooses to think right anyway.
Laws of success
Life said, “Alright Leslie, what are you going to do with THIS…”
Laws were suspended on my behalf, working for everyone but me.
List of setbacks
“Keep teaching, you do not make them true or false by how well you’re living them.”
“In times of change, the learners will inherit the earth while the learned find themselves … to a world that no longer exists.” Eric Hoffer
The only constant we can depend on is there will be change.
Failure is not an option, so that only leaves blame.
Bethany’s lips are blue
Home study course – www.prosperthefamily.com
Failed 4 times:
– to keep her safe
– heimlich
– hit head
– didn’t plug nose
No time to bemoan mistakes
Shallow lesson – watch kids better around water
Deeper lesson – life is fragile. Family more tender with one another
Life lesson – delivered straight from God to teach me what I had been looking for: Failure is feedback.
Cut your losses, keep moving
Bemoaning mistakes. No time for that.
Japanese Proverb – Fall down 7 times get up 8.
Dog without front legs, owner brought food, pig stole his food. Learned how to walk.
Our setbacks can bring out our hidden talents and gifts
What’s your handicap? What’s your weakness?
When life throws you something traumatic, you’ll discover new things about your capacity and potential. None are pointless.
It has a purpose. Look for the blessing it contains because it’s there.
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