This audio recording comes from a special event by the same name, which took place in Rexburg, ID in October 2018.
Topics Covered:
- How “choosing” a negative situation causes suffering to end
- What it means to “lean in”
- The story of my executive assistant/program director getting arrested
- The story of my son and our fight
- What it means to “Bring nothing” so that you can create new possibilities
- …and More
TRANSCRIPT:
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Rare Faith podcast where the solution to every problem is only an idea away, 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
CARI: Welcome and good morning, thanks for being here. My name is Cari Skrdla and I am Leslie Householder’s project coordinator and executive assistant, and I’m really excited about that.
I met Leslie about four years ago, and we were in the same ward and had just moved into the area. And after, I don’t know, one night, I was with the women in the neighborhood eating an enormous amount of lemon bars.
[Laughter]
I woke up the next day and posted that I was looking for someone to walk with, and if you know anything about Facebook, you can see where everyone saw your message. You know, it’s like 53 views but Leslie was the only one that said I’ll walk with you, right? So we started walking and for about a year, we were walking together and we got really close.
I have another good friend, her name is Amanda and she has red hair, and I was talking to Amanda one day and I said “you know what, Amanda I have an unusual amount of friends with red hair.” And I said “doesn’t it make sense because you guys are in a large percentage of the population, you know?” And she said “yeah, it’s true. Like, how many friends other than me?”
I said “I think it’s like 18.” So I started counting… “Erin Freeman, Cathy Castilenti, Leslie Householder… ” and she goes “and she’s also an author?” I was like “no, I don’t think so. She’s a stay-at-home mom like me.” She said “well, that’s not a common name, Cari.” I was like “it’s not, huh?” So I started bringing up Google because I was going to prove that it wasn’t my friend.
[Laughter]
You know, not the same Leslie Householder and she started laughing. She’s laughing at me and she said “well, if it’s her, I’ve read all of her books” and I go “all of her books??”
Because everybody has at least one book, right?
And I put the H in after Leslie and Householder populated and there was my friend, and I couldn’t believe it and now my friend, Amanda’s just really laughing. She said “and how long have you been walking with her?” I’m like “a year!”
[Laughter]
CARI: So I had my daughter-in-law order some of her books. I figured like well, there’s a reason I don’t know about all of this but I was curious about the book, and I read some of the reviews and I didn’t want her to know I was ordering them.
And the more I was reading, I started with like Hidden Treasures and then Jackrabbit Factor, just things started to shift in my life. You know, not like it wasn’t great before but it started to get… what does my friend’s son say? Gooder.
[Laughter]
CARI: And we were walking, this is like six months later after I made this discovery and we’re walking one morning. And she said something to me and we stop right by this pomegranate tree that we used to always stop at, and try and figure if it was legal or not to pick the fruit. And we stopped and she said “you just quoted me!” And I go, “I did?”
[Laughter]
And she said “yeah, do you know what I do?” And I was like “yeah” and she’s like “oh man!” And so I said “it’s okay, it’s okay” you know and, and she said “I’ve just been having so much fun with you” and I was like “let’s keep having fun!” And that was like the beginning because I could just really come out at that point and indulge in the work.
The program that absolutely made the biggest difference in my life and my family’s life was her Mindset Mastery program. And it was that program that even though I enjoyed working for the university at the time, it had been maybe ten years that I wanted to leave and come out with Leslie full-time so I created this job.
And one day, my husband said “you know what, I see it too” and he said “I want you to resign your position at the university.” My family was going crazy, like who leaves the university?!! And I said “yeah, I’m going to do that” and if Scott was here, he could tell you what obedience looks like with me – it’s kind of slow.
And I knew I was going to do it and my husband called me one day and he said “today is the day.” He said “when you get on the phone with your boss, tell them that you’re done.” And I was right in the middle of my one-on-one when I got this text from my husband that said “did you quit your job?” I was like “oh my gosh, he’s serious!”
And he says “if you don’t quit your job and go where God wants you to go,” he said “then I’m going to come home and quit that job for you.” And if you know anything about my husband, he’s this big guy and he, he doesn’t talk very much but he was loud and clear that day.
So I decided to obey and here I am, and very happy to be introducing my good friend and the author of the work that changed my life, Leslie Householder.
LESLIE: Thank you, Cari. I have just been so excited to get to know Cari more. Like we’d be walking and we’re telling stories that we’ve experienced and life experiences and whatnot, and every time she would come up with something else she had done in her life, it got to the point where we’re like ‘oh, of course you did because … .’ ‘Oh, of course, you were a professional clown.’
[Laughter]
‘Of course, you were a minister of another religion. Of course, you were in charge of cleaning up Detroit for the Super Bowl. Of course, you were… .’ I mean, this resume that she brought, I’m just like in awe at all that she’s accomplished and what you’re going to get today, a lot is stuff that I’ve just learned from her this week because I am just always soaking up from her, her wisdom.
She was raised in an amazing family. Her father was a minister, an evangelical minister back in Detroit, right Cari?
CARI: Yes.
LESLIE: Super influential. He organized the first Martin Luther King march and she was there in utero for that march and upon his funeral, there were over 20,000 people that came to attend it.
And a lot of what she shares with me are things that he had taught her, and I just feel like I’m sitting at the feet of a giant to hear his wisdom coming through her. And a lot of it is so relevant to the principles of personal freedom. We’re going to get to talk a little bit about that and I’m going to bring her back to share at least one particular story with you a little bit later.
So first of all, we just did an event a couple of nights ago in Cache Valley, Utah and I totally forgot to hand out. What this is, this is just an order form if there’s anything here that you want to take home with you.
Most of the stuff that gets circulated the most often is a free download anyway but some people don’t like downloads. They just want something in their hand and so I’m going to pass this out now.
It’s kind of tacky to pass out an order form at the beginning of a meeting but it’s a notepaper for you. How’s that? Does that work? So pass it around and then I can check that off so I don’t have to remember to do that again.
Thank you everybody for being here. I am excited to share with you. I have to kind of coach myself through telling myself that it’s okay to tell my story again. Although I feel like I’ve told it so many times that people are tired of hearing about it but there’s always somebody who hasn’t, and I just need to give a little bit of context before we go into the actual material.
When my husband and I married in 1991, we’d decided that I would be a stay-at-home mom. That’s what I wanted, that’s what he wanted for his family and so we were agreed on that. We married young and between the two of us (before we started our family) our two jobs together wasn’t cutting it.
A year later, I’m having my first baby and we’re going to operate on faith. We felt like this is what God wanted for us, for me to be able to raise the children at home and so we decided to act on faith, “act as though” you have what you need, you hear that principle.
And so I quit my job and I stayed home with the baby for a year and that was a really, really hard year. I’m thinking ‘okay, we acted on faith. Where’s the miracle?” And there was no miracle. After a year, we are deep in debt and my husband loses his job and we are without an income from either one of us and I’m forced back to work.
I take a temp job at Geneva Steel, back in the day and I go to work in the morning before the sun is up. I drop my baby off at daycare and the whole time, I’m just dying inside because this is not what we thought this was going to be and where’s the miracle? I applied faith. And then after work, I would come out and it was dark again. I mean, I’m sure this happened also during the summer weather, I don’t remember that.
All I can remember is it was cold and dark. I think it was the theme of how I felt inside, and so I’d come out in the evening. It was dark and I’d go pick up my baby and I thought ‘I never see this child during the daylight except on the weekends’ and it was a depressing thing and I’m feeling angry. I’m thinking ‘what’s going on?’
And what I didn’t realize is that was just the beginning of this seven year odyssey that things were not going to get better but only worse. Baby number two comes along with a heart defect. We’re having surgeries, we’re having another job loss, my husband breaks his shoulder blade slipping on ice, our cars won’t start… it was just like one thing after another after another.
And I remember when he went to work at a gun safe company, doing their interior upholstery of the gun safes and he came home. And we were trying to build a business on the side, knowing that the job he had was kind of a dead-end job and that if we wanted to have the life we pictured, we’d have to do other things too and so we were doing this side business.
And one night, he left home to go do a meeting with somebody with this business and walks across the street, slips on black ice, lands like this and breaks his shoulder blade and can’t do the upholstery because that takes a lot of arm muscle. And they’re like “alright, take a month or three months off and we’ll try to place you when you come back.”
In other words, we’re not holding our breath you’re coming back, and it wasn’t the best job anyway for us at the time. It was far away and he was, we had a Volkswagen Bug. Some of you have seen the picture of that bug. It was smashed in on the front from a car accident. We put one of those covers, the, the car bras, on the front to hide that and one of the lights had popped out.
It was a 1969 Beetle in 1991, which is kind of cool and retro and everything but in the summer, the heater was stuck on.
[Laughter]
LESLIE: And in the winter, you know, how these things work! The hot air that comes in is just the air that ran over the engine. It’s nothing really super tech but we had that, plus he had a dune buggy. Those were our two vehicles and it was kind of like, what was that old cartoon, the dune buggy cartoon from the 70s, those of you who are old enough to remember?
You know, it had the eyes on the front and the fenders and it looked like that. It had no top. I think it had a canvas plastic top that you could put on it but that’s what he would drive to work was this dune buggy. And he would use one of those space heaters that belong in a house in the dune buggy, plugged into the charger, going down the road (in, this is Provo weather, you know) with this canvas and plastic cover.
And so because he had broken his shoulder blade, he took some time to recover. At the same time, you know, I’ve got this baby who’s now going to appointments for the heart surgery recovery that he’d undergone and he decided that he wasn’t going to go back to… .
Oh, about this time those of you who are from Utah Valley may have remembered in around 1995, there was a snowstorm that whipped up a lot of salt from the Salt Flats, stirred it up and then snowed salt everywhere! So when the snow melted, all that was left was this white blanket of salt everywhere. Does anybody remember that? Probably not.
I remember it because he decided to make some money and wash somebody’s windows to get the salt off and with what he made that day, he’s like, he started running some numbers and he thought ‘if I did that, if I did five houses a day, I could make $70,000 a year!’ You know, we were coming from like about $12,000 so he thought ‘I’m just going to go into business for myself!’
So he got the equipment and he started going around washing windows and made some good money and we’re excited, we’re in business, you know. This was as we’re going into the summer. Summer was really great, winter’s coming and he’s like ‘oh, winter is not the best time of year to be a window washer you know, in Utah.
And so we’re like ‘we’ve always wanted to go back to Arizona, let’s just move now. We’ll go do windows in Arizona’. And so we picked up the family and moved to Arizona, and moved into a small two-bedroom apartment in this seedy little part of town and just tried to set up shop.
The market for window washing in Arizona was different than Utah. He was doing all the same things and it wasn’t working, and so the only thing he could think to do was to get hired on with a window washing company out of Phoenix which is about, at the time, a good half hour, 45 minutes away (this is before the big freeways). But he found a job there washing windows so he would drive.
By now, we had in 1976 Grenada from my grandmother. He was driving that around doing corporate window washing for $10 an hour with no gas compensation and trying to support a family. So this was at the beginning of all that, and we started attending seminars because some friends could see that we were down on our luck. Things just weren’t turning around. We were frustrated.
This was the first time I started questioning whether or not there was a God. I felt like I’d had a really great relationship with my Father in Heaven through my youth and, and then I just felt abandoned, absolutely abandoned. Like, haven’t I done everything that I’m supposed to be doing? I’m trying so hard to live by faith. I am trying to be good. I mean “be good and you’ll prosper” right?
So we started attending these events with our friends and it was related to the business we were trying to build on the side. It was a network marketing company and at these events, we were learning personal development, business development, positive thinking and the speakers were always really dynamic and had great stories, and you know, Zig Ziglar, rah rah.
It was entertainment and empowerment and all great things, and music and all the drama that comes with the best-of-the-best events. And we’d come home pumped like ‘man, we can change our life! Look they told their “down by the river” story, we’re just like that. We can be like them. If we do what they did, we can have what they have.’ That’s what they would tell us, and they would say “dream big, picture what you want!” I’m like “got it, got it. Yeah, yeah!”
Okay, so we’d go home and we would do the things that they would say to do. They would say “okay, make yourself up a fake checkbook and go to the mall. Your job is to spend $10,000 in an hour. Where are you going to spend it?” So we’d go shopping like ‘as if’ we really had the money to pretend. They were trying to get us to pretend because they said that would do something and I didn’t understand, I’m like okay.
So we went shopping and, and we’d write a check in this fake checkbook every time we’d find what we would buy and the point was at the end, we’d show our friends. We’d get together and say look this is what I bought with this and this, just for pretend. And we’re looking at the Rolexes and we were doing, you know, anything that you could do to spend $10,000 quickly.
We would go to the car dealerships and get in the cars that we would dream of driving, and pretend like we were really shopping and we’d take them on test drives. And this whole time, I knew what they were, I didn’t know what they were trying to do. They’re just saying “it’s just the dream, it’s the dream. You’ve got to focus on the dream.” I’m like “yeah, yeah, got it!”
I’d been hearing that for seven years now and nothing at home was changing and I couldn’t figure out what the disconnect was because other people were succeeding. Other people were crossing stage for their rank advancements. You know, and honestly, after about seven years of this and every time we’d go to an event, I counted it up. There were over one hundred seminars that we attended during that time and we were spending grocery money on these things.
There was one event that was going to be in Florida, a big weekend event that our upline was promoting to us and we’re like ‘oh man, we’ve got to be there! What if that’s the one that’s going to change our life? We can’t not go!” And so I’m shopping around for the cheapest flights we can. We’re on $10 an hour, how do you do this? You know, well, you go into debt or you sell your wedding dress.
I sold my Young Men medallion once to pay a bill. I didn’t know that, that wasn’t just a piece of jewelry you could pick up from Deseret Books. So later, when I got an assignment to work in the Young Men’s organization and I’m like I wish I had my medallion and I didn’t find one at the store. My bishop was kind enough to get me a replacement but you should have seen the lady at the yard sale “ooh, oh I got one!” But anyway…
[Laughter]
LESLIE: So I sold my flute. We were selling off everything we could think of just to hold things together so that we should keep going to these events. We were that hungry to understand what these speakers were talking about when they said “the way you think changes what goes on in your world”. If you dream big then miracles will happen.
Okay, we’re dreaming big, what’s missing? We’re trying! We’d go to these events, we’d come home pumped up and two weeks later, we’re like, you know, and then about two weeks later, another event. Okay, we’ve got to go again. We were like addicts. We’d get the high and we’d get the crash and it’s time for another high and another crash, and you do that often that, and you just want to break.
But this one in Florida, I’m shopping for the cheapest flight I can find and did you know that from (where were we flying from? It was either Arizona or Utah, I think it was Arizona) from Arizona to Florida, it’s cheapest to go four places on the way? You know, we did that in four legs. We saw more of the country on less money. It’s like a really great deal if you have all kinds of time on your hands, right? So we did that.
We get to the event, or get to the airport, and the goal or the plan was we were going to rent a car and sleep in the car for the weekend to save on a hotel. And we get to the rental place and there’s not enough room on our credit card to rent the car. So we’re homeless at this event in Florida and my husband had thrown a can of corn in his backpack, like that was going to be our food for the weekend.
And I’m, I’m mad because I’m like… a lot of marriage problems in here too because he’s supposed to provide for the family, and now I’m stressing about money and that’s not my job. It shouldn’t be my job to stress about this. I’ve got children to worry about and it was just because we had this agreement at the beginning.
For some people, it doesn’t have to be angst like it was for me but it wasn’t what I thought I was signing up for. And so, of course at that event, we had huge epiphanies and we were so glad we went. By the way, we ended up getting an emergency increased limit on our card, that’s how we did it. More debt, right?
So long story short, if it’s possible, another event comes along. This one was going to be at the Dee Events Centre in Ogden and it was going to be another three-day event with this organization, and their guest speaker for the weekend was Bob Proctor… and we actually heard him twice.
The first time we heard him, I wasn’t paying attention. I was too checked out, I was kind of tired of learning and so I was there with friends, not listening. Plus, he wasn’t super entertaining. He wasn’t the Zig Ziglar jumping around the stage. He didn’t have a big projector full of exciting things to watch. It was just very plain and simple.
In fact, he gets up there, he’s not a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but he got up there and the first thing he said was “there is a scripture in the Mormon text that says: there is a law, irrevocably decreed before the foundations of the world that when we obtain any blessing…” help me out… “it’s based on obedience to the law upon which it is predicated.”
So in other words, you learn the law that’s connected to the blessing you want and live it, and you’ll get the blessing. It’s that simple and … so he got my attention when he starts with that scripture. I’m like ‘interesting, I want to know where are these principles because I’m missing something. There’s something missing here.’
And he starts laying it out and about halfway through, my husband and I look at each other and our mouths drop open, and we’re like “that’s all it is?? That’s all it is??” And we go home and in three months, tripled our income and this is after seven years of what I just described, and I was lit up. I’m like “oh my gosh, this is amazing! This is amazing! It’s so simple!”
He showed a diagram called the Stick Man and I have a full-length video that explains the Stick Man and what that was that he shared with us that day that finally turned on the lights for me. If you want to write this down, I’ll tell you where you can go watch the whole video for free. It’s called RareFaith.org, RareFaith.org
At the bottom of the website is a section called “Freebies” and you’ll see “Video” under there “The Visual Aid That Changed Everything” and you can go watch that. It takes a while to develop and so I’m not going to take that time here today to do that. Today is more about principles of personal freedom. We are going to talk a little bit about it but that’s where you can get the whole thing.
By the way, the name ‘Rare Faith’, I chose that because all those years I’d been listening to speakers talk about this ‘Law of Attraction’ thing that, by the way you think and by your energy, things are going to be attracted to you or you’re repelling them. I kind of got it, that makes sense to me, that if we think positive, good things will happen to us. I thought I was thinking positive but I was more often angry that things weren’t working.
But one thing that I heard said, at one point, Boyd K. Packer said that there are two kinds of faith. One of them operates ordinarily in our day-to-day life and I’m going to botch this quote. I need to memorize it but he says the first one is how we relate ourselves to things that are scheduled to happen.
We know the Sun will rise, we can expect it. Do we have faith the sun will rise? It always has but he says there is another kind of faith, rare indeed. It is the kind of faith that causes things to happen. It is worthy and unyielding, and has great effect and comes with great effort but that is what everything I write about, everything I talk about is centered around is this faith that causes things to happen.
And someone once said that to worry is to have faith in the worst. To fear is to have faith in what you don’t want to happen and what we need to learn to do is have faith in what we do want to happen or what we need, our needs being met. To have faith that what we need will be there when we need it and that is a mental exercise that is like gymnastics.
Sometimes, it is so hard to get the coordination right, all the pieces getting them lined up and it felt like for me there were too many pieces to keep track of to make it work but this “Visual Aid That Changed Everything”, this Stick Man gave me a symbolic illustration of how my mind works. It’s called the Mind Model. It was originally developed by a man named Dr Thurman Fleet in the 1930s.
Since I don’t have the whiteboard and I didn’t bring whiteboard markers and because I was going to point you to the video, I didn’t plan on sharing this with you but if you can use your imagination with me, I’m going to describe it a little bit. If you can picture the circle like this. This is the part of your mind that we’re going to call the ‘conscious’ on the top half. So we’ve got a circle and we have a line through the middle, a horizontal line. You can draw it if you’d like.
The top half is your conscious mind, the bottom half is your subconscious mind. Underneath this circle, we’re going to draw a little neck and a tiny circle to represent our body and in the diagram, it shows little arms and legs coming off just to kind of represent the body but those are three parts of your mind – the conscious, the subconscious and your body; the body being a tool of the mind.
We are not a body, we live in a body and so it’s based on that concept, so the body being a tool of the mind, and you’ve heard the old adage that “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Our results are going to be a reflection of what’s going on in the subconscious mind more than it’s a reflection of how we think consciously and what we are doing physically.
In other words, I can think I’m setting a goal to be able to afford being a stay-at-home mom. Okay, that was a conscious decision that we made together. We decided that; that was a conscious decision. We went through the actions we thought that would get us that – building a side business or the action being okay, I’m just going to claim it, stay at home and trust that somehow things will work out.
So we’re thinking it and we’re taking actions towards it and our results were not reflecting either one of those. It’s because we didn’t understand what was going on in our subconscious. Now what’s going on in the subconscious mind, a lot of it comes from who we were when we were children.
Here’s a new diagram. Instead of a full circle, I want you to imagine a half circle in a bowl. You’ve still got the neck, you’ve still got the body but there’s no filter and there’s no conscious top part, and that is an illustration of who we are as children before we have developed a filter to decide whether something is right or wrong, true or false.
So every data that comes into our mind as adults, it comes into our conscious mind. We are looking outside, that is, you know, we’re using our five senses. We’re taking this information in – that it’s Fall, it’s chilly outside. We’re feeling how it feels inside. We hear things, we see things, taste, touch, smell. All of our five senses bring in this data into our conscious mind and what we do with it determines what happens next.
When there is repetition of thought or emotion, or thoughts charged with emotion (emotion attached to thought), it sends an impulse down into the subconscious mind. It accesses the subconscious mind and plants a seed there. So whatever lands in our subconscious mind is accepted as ‘truth’. It does not do the filtering. It’s our conscious mind that decides whether it’s right or wrong, true or false and we do that oftentimes by comparing it to what we’ve already determined is true.
You guys are doing this right now. You’ve brought with you things that you’ve already determined are true about life and as I’m giving this data to you, it’s coming into your conscious mind and you are either letting it in, or just pondering it or some of you may be rejecting it which we have that prerogative. But whatever we think about often or emotionally is going to have an impact on what’s going on in the subconscious mind.
Now back to when we were children, we are this open subconscious mind and all this data is coming in and remember the subconscious mind cannot do what? Determine if it’s true or false. And so whatever was coming in as a child, we were just like “oh, that’s true! Oh oh, got it, got it, got it!” And so a lot of our beliefs about life were established then.
And I remember back when I was younger, I don’t know where it came from except that I did see my folks struggling a lot with money to the point where I decided I hated money because it was always the root of arguments or stress or worry, or why we couldn’t do this or that. So to me, money was the root of evil, right?
So number one, I would look at families or people who were prospering. They had the nice house, they had the nice clothes, they had everything going for them and I had decided they must be evil. I had decided they must be either evil or they’re going to be suffering in some other way because I am so much better off that I don’t have that.
This is what was in my subconscious mind. I didn’t realize it was there, you know, because I was spending a lot of time at these events that were teaching me to think differently. So I’m spending a lot of time in my conscious mind thinking differently about money and thinking I’m accepting it, and there was enough repetition there that it was making its way to the subconscious.
It was making its way and there was a lot of emotion at those events. Have you ever been to one of those? They are very emotional, emotionally charged events that you can do anything and you come away feeling so empowered. So the feeling was there, the repetition was there. What was, what was stopping it, you know?
If, if repetition and emotion are what turn it over to the subconscious mind and if your subconscious mind is what determines the results you’re going to get, what was wrong? And I found out that it’s because of what I was doing with those feelings and let me explain it this way.
So we’ve got this mind model again. Here’s the circle. Here’s the horizontal line – conscious, subconscious, body. Data coming in… I like to draw five little antennas on top of the head to represent the five senses where we gather data through. Again, hear, taste, touch, smell, see.
So if you are taking notes, what I’d like you to do is draw a new circle. Draw a new horizontal line. Draw a new neck, a new body and out to the right, I want you to draw an arrow from the body with a big letter R representing results. And again, the results are a reflection of what’s going on in the subconscious, not the conscious and not what you’re doing, so those are the results.
As we observe our results, as we’re looking at our relationships, as we’re looking at our health, as we’re experiencing what our finances look like, we take that information in consciously and if you were me, you’re like “oh, another past due bill” and I’m getting angry. I’m getting stressed, I’m frustrated. Okay, that’s a thought charged with emotion. BOOM!
And our subconscious mind is designed to keep us alive, that’s what it’s there for. It’s the part of our mind that keeps our heart beating all day long. What if we had to remember that on our to-do list? It handles it, it keeps us breathing at night. It releases the adrenaline when it senses we are in danger.
Do you ever feel adrenaline when you’re watching a scary movie? It doesn’t know the difference. It’s seeing the data come in, there’s “Jurassic Park”. It sees the data coming in, it’s charged with emotion. It doesn’t know it’s not true so it gives you the adrenaline you need to escape your death.
You see how the subconscious mind doesn’t distinguish. It doesn’t care what’s real and what isn’t real. It’s keeping you alive, and the thing about being stuck in a rut is that you are so used to being in your results the way they are. You’re so used to being there and you’re still alive so your subconscious mind has determined that how things are is safe.
You’re not dead therefore it must be safe and it’s gotten comfortable with it. It’s accustomed to it, it’s ‘we’re good’ and so whenever there is the threat that something might change, it’s going to kick in fuss and actions, and things that affect you that sabotage what you’re trying to do. Now the key to freedom, the key to freedom is a faculty of the mind that you were born with and that is called creativity.
So if you’re taking notes, again we’re going to have this circle for the consciousness and subconscious. We’re going to have the neck, we’re going to have the body. We’re going to have the R pointed out here with the results and up to the other side, up above the head, you’re going to draw a big idea cloud.
Now as you’re in this cycle looking at your results or like I was, I would look at my results, I would see how bad things are. I would see how things aren’t the way I want them to be, I’d take that information in. I would get emotionally charged about it, I’d get angry.
The thing is the subconscious mind doesn’t care what kind of emotion it is. It punctuates whatever you’re thinking about and saying ‘this is very important’. It just interprets that as ‘important’. So I’m looking at things not going well, I’m getting angry about it. I’m getting angry that things are a certain way and it’s telling my subconscious mind the way things are, it’s ‘really important’ that things are this way. You see how I’m reinforcing exactly what I don’t want?
So next to the R, put a little X kind of like a pharmacy sign RX. X is going to represent results, the old results, the results we’re trying to change, we’re trying to get away from. As I take X data in, you can put a little X in the conscious mind so we’re taking that in. You might want to draw an arrow up and around that, that’s what we do in the video.
As there is repetition with it or emotion attached to it, that X lands in the subconscious mind again and it’s already there because that’s what produced it in the first place but it just reinforces it. So now we want to change that. We want to break free of this and so we’ve got this idea cloud.
I want you to put a Y, the letter Y in the idea cloud, and what that looks like is picturing what you want, dreaming big, imagining how do I want things to be different? And I had kind of gotten to this place where I knew what I didn’t want. I don’t want a past due notice. I don’t want the stress. I don’t want the fights. I don’t want the depression. I don’t want but I’m saying all about what I don’t want: X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X and it’s all just reinforced.
And sometimes you get in that rut so much that it’s hard to stop and say “well, what would I want instead and how would that look? How would that look? If I were to draw a picture of how that looks, what would I draw? That’s work. That’s the hardest work you’ll ever do and you’ll finally do it when you’re tired of this but it is the key to freedom.
It is the key and so here, I have this Y and at the time I was thinking ‘well, we want to be in a home. We want to be in a home of our own.’ We were renting in this little two-bedroom apartment. We weren’t smokers but there was cigarette smoke that would come through the walls from our neighbor, and I’m raising my kids there and it was just a depressing, dingy place to be.
And this was also, for those of you who have heard this story, this is also where I came outside one day and found my broom had been broken by a kid and the only thing I could think of to solve it. Okay, so this is data: here’s a broken broom from the teenager down the way. That’s data, it comes in, I get mad and my reaction to that is to call the police; that’s where my mindset was. This is how bad I had let myself get is that I’m calling the police on a kid who broke my broom.
Funny story, a couple years later, I called the police on a five-year-old who stole cookie dough from my fridge.
[Laughter]
He shouldn’t have been in my home. He was just like, we weren’t home. He broke in, he broke in and the only reason we found out is because we came home and there was cookie dough sprinkled out the, out the door and my jewelry was missing. I mean, it wasn’t just cookie dough but we called the police and we’re like ‘I think we’ve been broken into.’
He started going around the neighborhood looking for who it might have been. I’m like ‘it’s really not a big deal but you know, I do feel a little bit violated and here’s a clue: cookie dough.’ And so he goes around the neighborhood and he’s talking to kids, and he finds out that it was this little five year old boy who lives over at this house.
So he goes to the house and he knocks on the door, and the mom comes to the door and he’s behind her legs. And he’s like “there’s been a break-in over on this other street. Do you know anything about that?” He’s like “okay, well…” he looks at his shoes and he says “we have footprints” and he’s like, and he says “and we have fingerprints too.” “On the white plate?”
[Laughter]
LESLIE: So he got caught but it was really sweet. The police scared him enough hopefully that’ll never happen again but this is just where my thinking was. This is how I was solving problems. It was very reactionary and desperate, and coming from a depressed place and I’m sure it was clinical depression. I was never diagnosed officially because when I went to the doctor for it, she ticked me off and I got out of there.
Anyway, so I imagined being in a home of our own. What would that look like? What would it feel like? I don’t know. I imagine coming home from the store and getting groceries, and having my kids run up from behind me and we’re opening the door, and they’re running inside and then they run this way. And I’m just imagining what it would be like to be a mom with a home and letting myself imagine it.
Now remember: your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between an experience that is real and one that is imagined, and so as I’m creating this picture and letting myself think about it. You think about it long enough, pretty soon you feel it, like you’ve tricked your subconscious mind into believing it’s actually happening and so it gives you that endorphin, right? And when it does that, a smile spreads across your face and you know it’s landed.
So now I’ve got a Y idea that I’ve created. It’s in my head, now it’s in my subconscious and it puts me into a, I’m going to call it, a vibration. It’s kind of ‘out there’ but in the book Hidden Treasures, it talks about seven laws of thought and one of them is the Law of Vibration.
The Law of Vibration just says that everything in the world is vibrating at a molecular level. This lectern, if you could put it under a strong enough microscope, you would see atoms and molecules buzzing around and bumping and we, as human beings are made of material matter that are doing the same thing.
As I vibrate, you will feel differently when you’re around me. Have you ever walked into a room and someone’s been mad? They didn’t have to say anything. You could just, you feel the chill, right? Or if somebody’s buoyant and happy, you can feel that too. You’re uplifted when you’re with them.
A feeling is nothing more than a conscious awareness of a particular vibration, that’s all that is. A feeling is nothing more than a conscious awareness of a particular vibration. We’re in the vibration whether we’re conscious of it or not but if you think about it, our vibration has everything to do with how people respond to us.
You think about how if you have this program or this image in your subconscious mind that is controlling your outcome, it’s because your subconscious mind, not only does it give you the adrenaline you need to escape the bear or the dinosaur, it also gives you the endorphins that cause you to smile and light your countenance. It’s also what controls your vibration.
It’s your subconscious mind that controls your vibration and as Bob Proctor says, “you can be talking to a prospect if you’re building business and you can say all the right things, you can have all the right body language but if they feel weird around you, you’re not going to get the sale.” And why do they feel weird around you? It’s when your vibration does not match your body language and your words.
So take a job interview, for example. You go into the job interview. You know how to interview well, you’ve been trained. You know all the right body language but you go in there with an image on the screen of your mind that says ‘I have been out of work for a year. Nobody wants to hire me.’ That’s a vibration that they’re going to pick up on. It’ll be subconscious. They may not be able to pinpoint something’s off but there’s something off.
And so for a little tidbit, if you’re going in for a job interview, don’t go in there until you imagine yourself coming home and saying “honey, I got the job!” See it, feel it, get in that vibration because once you see it, think about it, feel it, let it land.
You know it’s in your subconscious and you know it’s going to control your vibration. After you put it there, then go in and do your thing. You can say all the right words, you can do all the right body language but this time they’re going to feel it. So simple, so powerful.
It changed the way I pray, it changed the way I pray. I used to pray “Heavenly Father, please send a miracle. I don’t know what we’re going to do because if something doesn’t change, this big train wreck is going to happen at the end of the month and I don’t know how we’re going to deal with that!” I’m already feeling that stress, you know. I’m already seeing it.
What am I doing? I’m picturing it, I’m feeling it and then I’m speaking a request that doesn’t line up with what I’m really asking for, and so now before I pray, I see it done. I feel it, like what would that feel like to have that done? It puts a smile on my face and I find myself saying “thank you” in my prayers for things that haven’t happened yet more often than I find myself asking for them.
“There is a law, irrevocably decreed before the foundations of the world…” The blessings connected to prosperity are not “be good and you’ll prosper”. The blessings connected to prosperity are: see it, feel it, do not fear, do not doubt, fear not. A people without vision shall perish.
You think about the downward spiral that we get ourselves in when all we’re doing is focusing on the way things are instead of creating what’s possible. Everything that happens, everything that we ever do, everything that we ever say begins with a thought, and are we saying the things that our default output of the programs that are already running? Or are we downloading a new program?
We are like a computer. Those programs that are in there from childhood, they may never go away but they can be turned off. They can be overwritten. But here’s what happens when you have this deep-seated paradigm that “money is evil and that I’m better off without it” like I did. That program’s running to make sure that that’s all that ever happens.
I download a new program that says: we have a house of our own. We’re out of debt, we have the freedom to serve and do whatever I have pictured. I download that and say it’s accepted in the subconscious mind because it was through repetition or emotion.
I say repetition or emotion because sometimes it’s hard for people when they start to do this for the first time to see it real enough to convince your subconscious that it was actually happening, that’s really what you’re doing. You’re trying to trick your subconscious mind into believing – that’s why we involve all the senses.
Oh my gosh, can we tell them about this cute little boy? Do you want to share about his scooter?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Sure.
LESLIE: Come up here a second. I want you to share this.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I haven’t had any warning.
LESLIE: On the fly.
FEMALE SPEAKER: So, so he’s three and like you said, you know, the Stick Man for a kid, it’s just wide open. So we started teaching him these principles and he just lapped it up, and he started getting results and it was almost frightening!
[Laughter]
But I remember with one thing, he told me he wanted a scooter and so he’s standing there and we have a little vision board for him now to remember, you know, what he’s looking for. And he stood there one day and he says “okay mommy, I’m going to do my vision board” and he starts pretending that he got on a scooter and acting the whole thing out.
And whether a week maybe, I can’t even remember, I’m on the phone with my mom but I was telling her about this and she says “he wants a scooter?” So she calls me back five minutes later and said “oh, your younger brother was about to send a scooter to B.I.” So it was just mind-boggling how fast that just happened and we weren’t seeking a scooter. We weren’t ‘trying’ to make it happen for him. I told him if he wants it, your faith is going to get it and it worked.
LESLIE: Thank you for sharing that and what I loved about it is that when she brings it to him, he’s like “is that my vision board scooter?” And she was able to say “yes” because they’d been at the store and they’d seen a scooter, and he’s like “is that my vision board scooter?” She goes “no”…
[Laughter]
LESLIE: Because that wasn’t something that they were going to put out for at that time. So the same thing was with my son who’s now running this conference. When he was eight years old, he really wanted a Lego set, like those super expensive $50 for this much kind of set, and we were new to the principles. We’d had some breakthroughs with it but we weren’t, you know, “rolling in the dough” and I couldn’t justify a $50 Lego set for my kid.
He really wanted it and so I’m like “alright, I’ll teach you these principles” and I taught him to see it, to imagine it and then don’t doubt – that’s the key. It doesn’t matter if the feeling is strong. It doesn’t matter if it’s intense and constant. You can do it once. You can see it, feel it once, call it done, it’s planted. The thing that determines whether it will come about or not is whether you doubt, whether you fear and that’ll happen.
You know, you’ll wonder ‘oh, I wonder if it will… .’ No, I choose to believe that it has been planted and then you get to work. So what’s different though is now your work is going to be more productive because you’re in the right vibration for it. What you want wants you and a scooter has a particular vibration. This little boy put himself in a harmonious vibration and they attracted; that’s what that Law of Attraction thing is about.
So with the Legos, my son, he wrote it down what he wanted and he just believed like a child. It was easy for him to believe much easier than someone who’s been through this pain for seven years and all the while, I’m like praying “oh, please work for him!”
I mean, because I’m having doubts and I’m hoping my doubts are not killing his faith, which I found out it only does if he thinks it will, which is kind of nice to know.
But we start shopping the eBay auctions, thinking maybe we’ll find a good deal on something. And we’re shopping and we’re finding out that even on eBay, they’re pretty expensive and there’s a good resale value on these Lego things, and he didn’t want just plain Legos like I’d grown up with – blocks and bricks. He wanted the pirates and the alligators, and the flags and everything that are specialized.
And one day not long after that, my husband’s at work and a co-worker comes up to him and she says “hey, my 11 year old son is done with his Legos, do you have any use for them?” He’s like “actually, yes” and she said “okay, great. Well, I’ve got family that also have Legos. I’ll check with them.”
And so, by the time she brought him the Legos, it was a trunk four feet wide, three feet high, about two feet deep with a stack of booklets this thick. You know, of the creation booklets that come with those specialized sets, and we boxed them up and we put them under the tree. It took four boxes and I just found the video of him opening those and one day, we’re going to put that on my blog. It’ll be fun!
But he opens the first one, he’s like ‘ohhhh! and he was so excited and we’re so excited for him. He created that, he created that for himself and then he opened the second one and he’s shocked. The third one, he falls to the floor.
[Laughter]
He’s just so amazed and, and then that gives me encouragement to apply it in my life again and again and I tell you every time, it’s a little bit of a stretch even now. I’ve been doing this for 18 years and it’s still a stretch because we still get the opportunity to choose whether we’re going to believe or doubt. It’s always a choice in front of us. No matter how good we get at it, no matter how many times.
I started a journal about eight years after the breakthrough and we’d been doing well, and we started investing in real estate at the top of the market and we were going to flip homes and bought several only to find out that the market was already tanking, and we didn’t get the memo.
And so we were a little bit slow to realize that the houses we bought on an investor special were actually overpriced for the market itself. So the rug pulled out from under us. Things are falling apart and we’re just like ‘whoa, do I even know what I’m talking about anymore? How are we going to turn this into something good?’
One of the laws in Hidden Treasures is that contained in every adversity is a seed of equal or greater benefit. Okay, this is a huge adversity, what’s the benefit? We did end up finding it but it was a long painful process. But at the time, I was recovering from all of this and I was still getting people emailing me saying “your book changed my life, this is what happened… blah, blah, blah,” and I’m like “awesome, we’re struggling!”
[Laughter]
You know, we’re trying to recover but we know the principles are true. I’m just feeling a little black and blue, and a little gun-shy to dream again because part of the reason we were in that mess is because I had set a goal to obtain these properties against the odds even though we didn’t entirely qualify ‘by the book’ for this but I’ll use ‘rare faith’ to get more than we should have gotten.
Be careful what you pray for because these principles are independent of what you apply it to, and so there’s the Law of Attraction and then there’s rare faith. And to me, rare faith is using the principles responsibly, using them. Being careful, if you’re a believer in God, to choose goals that are in harmony with His will for you. And if you’re not sure what that is, take your time figuring that out, you know, because it does work whether it’s something you’re going to be glad you got or not.
So I’m still kind of learning through this setback and my son comes to me. My husband had quit his job, we were working this business full-time and real estate, and juggling a lot of balls in the air at the same time, and my teenager, one of my other sons, comes to me and says “mom, will you help me get a job?”
Okay, I’m already stressed and already to the limit of what I felt like I had time for, and this request, has anybody helped a son find a job before? It’s not a small task because you’re also dealing with their subconscious issues and then training them on how to get past those so they can get this job but one thing he said was “I want it to be on the weekend. I want it to build some muscle. It needs to help me make X amount of money by a certain time. Can you help me do this?”
I’m like, okay and I was just like ‘ah, where do we even begin??’ And so I said “I’ll help you as soon as I can” and he left the room and I’m just overwhelmed. I’m just, I think probably in adrenal fatigue. I was just, just so overwhelmed and tired, and I’m like ‘how am I going to do this?’
And I had a thought and the thought was to get a blank journal, and so I got me a blank journal specifically for this purpose, and the thought said ‘on the left side of the page, write what I needed and then just write it’. And I teach people how to write goals effectively because the word choice that you pick is so important. So many people say goals like “I am so happy and grateful now that…”. By the way, present tense, write it in present tense.
You’re convincing your subconscious mind that it’s real now so that it will change your vibration, so that you will be in harmony with the thing you’re trying to connect with so present tense but they’ll say “I’m so happy and grateful now that I am able to do X, Y and Z. One little tweak. No, I am so happy and grateful now that I do X, Y and Z because I am able to and I do are two totally different things that have an effect on your results.
So I do coaching on effective goal statements but I was too tired to do this right. You know, I was too tired to worry about my word choice and I thought you know what, I just need to get this out what I needed and I’m not going to scrutinize how I’m saying it. I’m just going to be real with the Lord and trust that He knows what I need, and trust Him to make up the difference for my imperfection in this little thing and so I wrote it down.
The first thing I wrote was we need this thing that’s $1,700. We need this IRS bill forgiven or settled $1,400, we need this bill forgiven or settled. I mean a lot of bill statements, right? And then I put ‘my son wants a manual labor job to earn at least X amount by this certain time, and I just wrote it down and in my head what I was picturing (because I found that what we picture has an effect on what actually happens), I pictured unseen help just orchestrating things because I’ve got these other obligations I’m working on.
I can’t help Nathan but I want Nathan to have the help, so I’m asking for help and by putting it in writing that is my official permission for help to be received. Like, I know you want to help me God more than sometimes I let You help me, here’s permission to help and I wrote down and then I let it go.
And 20 minutes later, 20 minutes later, my brother-in-law, Eric (who does remodeling, bathroom and kitchen remodeling) calls and asks “is Nathan available?” He says “we’re gutting a bathroom, we need some manual labor. We need some muscle on the weekend to help gut this bathroom. Is he available?” and I’m like “actually, he is!”
You know, and I used to put what I needed and then I’d write today’s date and then on this side, I put How He helped, capital H, How He helped and I would document what happened afterwards. And I used to put the date that I asked for it and the date that it happened, and now I put the date and the time stamp because sometimes, it’s within minutes.
Sometimes, it’s months but the point is my job is to see it, feel it, do my best and not doubt, not fear and because it’s rare faith, because I want to be responsible about it, I always also ask if this is good for me, if this is the right thing, if this is Your will. I’ll do that but I just want to make sure I am NOT the limiting factor that it didn’t happen because I was scared or I doubted.
There’s another verse in Mormon scripture in the Doctrine and Covenants where it said “ye endeavored to believe that you would receive the thing that was offered unto you but behold there were fears in your hearts therefore this is the reason you did not receive.” That’s been there, how long has that been in there? And I realized again, it doesn’t have to be intense, it doesn’t have to be constant. It just needs to be a seed and then no doubt and doing your best.
So what this book has become is a documentation of the things I’ve needed and how it came about. So you do something like this and what do you think it does for your confidence the next time you ask for something you need? And sometimes I’ll put what I wanted. It’s not always just about what I need but what I want. I want this… that would be really great.
So these are principles of personal freedom and I want to take a minute and let Stephanie, if you don’t mind, she’ll come up. She’s going to share a little bit about how she’s used these principles in dealing with anxiety and before I turn it over to her, I want to point out that as I was picturing the house and what it’s like to be in a home of our own and everything, I was successful at planting the seed, putting the Y idea in my subconscious mind.
But what would happen with the computer if two programs are running that take data input in but the process that this program wants to do with it contradicts the process that this program wants to do with it? So it’ll like, old video games do, it would cause a problem and in our mind, in our subconscious mind, when we have one program running that says “money is evil and I’m better off without it” and I turn over this new idea that says “life is abundant and I have all I need”, those are two programs that are in conflict with each other in my subconscious mind.
So this is where it gets exciting to me because it makes so much sense. This program is putting me in a vibration that repels money, this program is putting me in a vibration that attracts money. Two conflicting vibrations in the body show up as anxiety or a sense of dis-ease. If it’s there too long, it can turn into disease. You know, it can cause disruptions in our body systems and so it’s like having two discordant notes played at the same time. It’s uncomfortable, it doesn’t feel good.
And what we were doing those seven years of suffering, what we were doing is we would go to these events and we’d plant the ideas, and we would feel it and we’d be so excited, and we’d have those two programs running, and it would, and when it came time to take an action on the new idea, we’d feel this discordance, we would feel this anxiety. We would feel this discomfort and we’d be like ‘this is bad’ and we would retreat.
But what I learned through this diagram was that when there’s an X idea and a Y idea in my subconscious mind and it’s causing two contradictory vibrations that, that feeling is just a physiological response to the fact that I was successful at turning over the new idea. I wouldn’t feel that if I hadn’t been successful at turning it over.
And so those three months that we tripled our income, my husband and I, we planted the idea what we were trying to accomplish. An opportunity shows up, and there will always be an opportunity that shows up to help you get to where you’re wanting to go after you’ve changed your vibration, and not only does it just show up but sometimes it’s always been there and you’re finally seeing it because you’re in the right vibration to see it.
There’s a funny story on that video. You’ll see where I’m looking for my packaging tape in the closet, in the utility closet and I’m in a hurry. I need it to do some shipping before this other deadline, blah, blah, blah and I’ve got to find this packaging tape and I can’t find it. I know it’s in there, I know it’s in there, can’t find it. I’m even doing like this with my hand to make sure I don’t miss a single centimeter of that room. I know it’s in here, I couldn’t find it.
I’m like ‘Leslie, you know what to do’. So I go, I sit on this chair and I’m like ‘alright, I got to become one with this packaging tape.’ So I’m going to imagine that I have this packaging tape, I’m holding it, I’m feeling for the little edge where I’m going to peel it up with my fingernail. I have to be grateful that I have this packaging tape and I’m kind of frustrated because I don’t have time to do this but I know I need to.
And so I’m like… it took a while to change my vibration but I, I saw it, tricked my subconscious mind into believing I had it. I’m grateful, okay alright and I walk back to the room and it’s right there in front of my face, eye level, kind of leaning out of a box. I’m like, either it was there all along and I just couldn’t see it until I was in the right vibration. I know it sounds so 70s but whatever, it works or I created it out of thin air. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. I got it, right? So it works. Try it in these little things and you get confidence in the bigger things.
But with this, this new vision that my husband I had, we would, an opportunity came up. It was a “no money down purchase” real estate program, this was the opportunity that came up. We didn’t entirely recognize it in connection with this new life but we thought it might get us there. So I started going through the program and I worked with one of their coaches to buy my first investment property.
This is the year 2000 and our life started to change but what we felt is this discordance. We started to feel that anxiety. We’re about to buy a property that’s nicer than the one we’re in for more than what we can afford right now but we know it’s right. How could this possibly feel right?? It makes no sense but it does. But I mean, we just have this going on in our heads but we knew it was right. Deep down, we both knew it was right. We had two witnesses that this was the right thing to do but it didn’t make sense.
So we’ve got this scary thing happening but we feel that anxiety and we’d look at each other. “Do you feel that?” “Yeah, I feel it!” “You know what that means?” “I know! It means we’re successful at turning it over” and we would take action on it anyway. That was the one thing we didn’t do those seven years – we would retreat or we would push through and have that meeting with the prospect with this fear. We would bring fear to everything we were doing and nothing was working.
So we ended up closing on that new home, moving into it and I think it was the week that that first mortgage payment was due, my husband landed a job and his first paycheck showed up that week that tripled his income. Now we’re buying the home before he’s even got the job. I would never counsel anyone to do something so stupid, okay?
[Laughter]
LESLIE: Don’t do that. This was back when it actually went well and we got cocky and we’re like ‘oh, we’re so savvy at real estate!’ And didn’t stop when we should have eight years later when the recession hit, you know what I’m saying?
So at the time we did that, we ended up buying another home. We then had three homes, two were rentals and we’re like trying to get back to Arizona to live where our family was from and we decided well, we really want to be with the family. Let’s just make it happen, let’s just move to Arizona and so we put our house up for sale, ‘acting as though’ doing, living, you know, what we had learned before. And when all was said and done, it wasn’t time to sell and we felt that but when we did finally sell, we came away with about $250,000 cash which to bring with us to Arizona and start over in a new location.
So we went from these seven years of just so frustrated to things working like they hadn’t worked before, and it was all because of this idea of how our minds work and how to relate ourselves with it.
So now Stephanie, if you’ll come up and talk with us about what you learned on the anxiety piece.
STEPHANIE: With our family, this was not something, it seems like things have become a lot more intense in our society, right, with, with the anxiety and so forth but in our family, we have five, I have seven children but my five girls are the ones that have struggled the most with anxiety and thankfully, we did find a supplement that has really helped.
However, there are those times when you have extra stress that comes up or just different circumstances, and it just kind of re-emerges. So in all of the things that I’ve learned from Leslie, the thing that has probably been the most surprising is how well it has helped with anxiety, for me specifically. I think my kids are still learning it but I’m getting there, and I just want to share a couple of stories that I have seen from that.
So just a tiny little bit of background. Big crowds, big crowds are tough for me. A lot of noise is hard for me and I don’t mean where I’m going to go crawl in the corner and suck my thumb but I mean just, you know, it causes that inner ‘ughhhh’ kind of a feeling and I like peace.
So a couple of years ago, I went to a huge event and the entire way there, I was literally, I was in the car. I had, my eyes are closed and I’m just trying to breathe because I knew I was going to be in this great big space that I did not want. When we got there, we’re talking loud music, lots of people, there’s probably about 750 people that were there, and it was a miserable experience. I never wanted to go back to that.
Well, just a couple of months ago, so this is where, step forward, I have the supplement so I’m doing better. I’ve learned the principles, I’m really doing better and I’m getting ready, and I hear an announcement that there is going to be 1,500 people there but I knew I was supposed to be there. So I remember the morning of, and this is what you had to know about I call it ‘rewriting my story’. So I’m in the middle of an experience and I think I don’t like the story I’m living right now so I choose to do the little Y in my little cloud and I’m going to come up with something different, something that I actually want.
So that morning I thought ‘okay, here I am and I am seeing myself talking to my husband after the event, telling him that was a really good experience and I felt calm the whole time’ and then I thought ‘okay, what really would help me feel more calm?’ And I thought ‘well, if I ran into somebody, I ran into somebody that I knew, not somebody scary. Somebody that was an old friend or something, a connection that mattered to me for some reason, that would help the anxiety.
So I did, I went there and the first person that I ran into was a lady at the first Genius Boot Camp that I had attended and she was giving me the name tag. It was like, seriously?? I saw her. I saw my daughter’s mother-in-law and her sister-in-law, and then one of my dear friends when I was working at the non-profit organization. She was my secretary, hadn’t seen her in a decade.
So a second one – in the Orem library. The first time I’d ever been in there and I had this three year old who was my first child and I do not know how she got away from me. I don’t know where she went but all of a sudden, the alarm goes off and I’m really panicking now because you know, that horrible, awful ‘ahhh, where’s my child…’ and you don’t see them any place. And I get closer over and this elevator comes down, the door opened and she had slipped onto the elevator that quick, it had closed and she was so scared, she pushed the alarm.
Okay, so with that, I’m dealing with old programming but I’m like, two weeks ago, and I go into the library in Logan. I’m not familiar with the Logan library but my kids have just started having some classes there and I get in and I go to meet them, and the people tell me “oh well, our class was out 30 minutes ago” and I said “do you know where my kids are?” “No, I don’t have any idea.” I’m like ‘oh my gosh!’ That same panic stepped in.
So here I am and I’m doing this kind of thing, looking through the aisles and then all of a sudden, I’m like, I know how to fix this problem and so I saw my children in my mind. I felt the gratitude. I just thought this is easy, it’s all good, right? I walked straight to them. I mean, it was like, straight to them. Okay, so that’s another one with the anxiety.
I play the organ in church and I am the one that gets up there and my knees will do this, you know and you can look at the sheet music and I forget what the notes mean. I mean, seriously and so I get frozen on the organ many times. Thankfully, I’ll take the supplement usually a little more than normal before I go.
However, about three weeks ago, I’m looking out and all of a sudden, there’s this great big crowd I didn’t know was coming. So there’s more of the pressure on me and I froze in my mind, and I’m waiting and there’s this speaker. I’m thinking about the fact that I’m going to plummet and die sitting at that organ that day and so again, apply the principles.
I’m walking out of the church, not to run away, walking out of the church, knowing I did a really good job and I remembered the notes, and it was great and I felt calm. Honestly, I don’t think that I played every note perfectly but I was able to listen to the speaker and when I messed up, it didn’t bother me because the anxiety was cut down.
Next one, angry customer. I had somebody text me one morning and they said “you know what, this auto ship went out and it wasn’t supposed to go out, and they should have cancelled it and I don’t have the money” and so I total panicked, right? This was a friend, an older friend, but she’s one of the very intense types and I thought ‘oh, this whole relationship is going to be totally ruined and I don’t know what to do!!’
Anyway, I told you I am getting good at remembering to just shut up and sit down and chill out. So I did and I saw in my mind that she was texting me back. It was a good text and she remembered that we had the conversation and I had done my part of it and that she was the one honestly that had messed up.
So I had not finished feeling the gratitude before I got the text, and the text came back and she said “oh, you know what, I worked it out. I called them, everything’s fine” and she said “I just remembered…” (no joke) “…I just remembered you told me that and I’m so sorry, I’m the one that blew it.”
And then one more, this was last week. Traffic is a big trigger for me, a big trigger. So I already told you about being in the car with my husband, my eyes are closed – that was part of it was the traffic, it was really bad. This last week, I had to go by myself. So whenever I have to go someplace that’s going to take me through Utah county, Salt Lake or whatever, I just go with somebody else. I just don’t do the driving or I hand the keys over to whoever’s with me. My son-in-law has done a lot of driving when my husband’s not around.
I went ahead and I was thinking ahead of time, this is going to be fine, it’s all good but one time it isn’t and there’s traffic all around me, and you have to do something that’s just a little bit different and I’m just going to tell you to write this down. Go read A Little Princess, I’m not kidding. A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, I think I’m saying that right. She lives the Jackrabbit so it doesn’t teach you the principles of Jackrabbit but it’s one of the most powerful books as far as applying.
So I had just finished reading that to my kids and part of it was again, you’re in the moment, what are you going to see that you don’t see with your eyes that you’re going to see in your mind? So here I am, driving down the road, there’s traffic everywhere and I said “I am so grateful the roads are clear.”
I’d look in front of me and then I’d look at my rearview mirror… “I am so grateful the roads are clear behind me” and I really am seeing empty pavement in my mind, even though they’re everywhere. And there’s guys darting in and out of traffic and I’m like ‘I’m so grateful I have a bubble around my car. It is a force field!”
[Laughter]
And I tell ya, I was actually, I didn’t tell you this, Leslie. I was listening to one of Leslie’s podcasts so I was already at a better vibration and I kind of zoned out because I was only really listening to her conversation. And all of a sudden, I kind of keyed back into what I was doing.
There’s this huge wolf pack of cars in front of me with about three car lengths of clear traffic. Same thing behind me and I’m like, I am like in my own little world here driving down and my vehicle’s GPS is saying “you are coming upon traffic. It’s going to get worse then you’ll be 20 minutes late” but I was able to say “I’m good!”
And then as I leave, people are coming around me. At this point, I was just going “I’m so grateful I have this force field” and there was zero anxiety, there was none. It was really, probably one of the most amazing things I’ve seen so far so but I wanted to tie it together with, you see the anxiety in so many different ways.
You’re talking about too many people, feeling claustrophobic. You’re talking about how you are showing up in the world with presenting on the organ, right? I had to perform in that moment. Fear of loss… where’s my children, where are they? You know, that type of a state and then facing a fear, and so the fear’s a trigger with the anxiety but remember, anxiety is on a really low frequency, a very low vibration. And like Leslie was just explaining, when you are taking in emotion, I mean, that is your frequency, right? That’s the vibration is just the emotion.
So if I don’t want that low, I’ve got to change what I’m thinking about to change the emotion. So if you’re just trying to shift it up, you’re talking: gratitude. You’re talking: go drink some pure water, have healthy food, exercise, call somebody and tell them how much you love them. I mean, anything at all that is going to change your emotion – that changes that vibration.
And so that is my challenge to you is to do that and one more thing that I wanted just, just to throw out there. I briefly mentioned that 13 years ago, I was introduced to Leslie’s information and I didn’t do anything with it, and I really regret that. I really regret that because of how much of a shift I have seen in my life.
So I would just say wherever you are, if your next step is to get The Jackrabbit Factor and to read it, go do it. If it’s to actually sit down and dream, do it. If it is to write it down and actually start reading it every day, please do it. If it’s to attend a Genius Boot Camp, attend a Genius Boot Camp and then please Mindset Mastery, I will just sing its praises. That 12-week course, that’s when I really did the hard work and started to do the experimenting.
So don’t do what I did and wait for a decade before you go maybe, I should pay attention to that. Go ahead and write down whatever comes to your heart now and do it and you will do fantastic.
[Applause]
LESLIE: Thank you, Stephanie. With what time we have left, I just want to share with you some things that I learned just this week. Like I said, I’ve been learning and practicing and trying to understand this more deeply for 18 years, and it never gets boring or old because I keep learning new facets to it. It just keeps expanding and growing and my understanding.
And one thing that I’m excited that I’ve learned this week is I had a tiff with one of my children, and it was not pretty and it was painful, and when it was over, I was really apologetic for, for what I had brought to it that didn’t go well and the child didn’t respond with forgiveness. And in my head, I’m thinking ‘okay, this is going to be like where the Nephites and Lamanites separate. Like, this is going to last for centuries and decades and generations!’ And my mind’s going crazy on what this could turn into if it’s not repaired and I have to remind myself: okay, don’t create what you don’t want.
You can do that with repetition and emotion and all that kind of stuff, and so I knew what to do with it but I was having a hard time holding onto a better vision for the outcome. And so what happened was I was talking with my friend, Cari about this and she taught me a principle that I’d actually written about already but I hadn’t seen how to apply it here.
And that is when my children were little and they would come wrestle with me or whatever, there was one time I’m laying on the floor and one of my children is on my hair. And I had long hair at the time and I go to stand up and it’s pulling my hair and I’m thinking ‘aaaaaah!’ And it dawned on me in order to not have pain, I need to lean in, remove and get up because if I just fought against it, it would only create more pain for me.
And so what she was telling me in this situation was “in every situation, we have the power to choose.” Not just how we’re going to respond to it, which is cliche and we all know that, but she says “choose the way it already is.” To me, that’s like leaning into the pain which releases the pain. Leaning in to what’s causing me pain makes the pain go away.
She says “if you choose this experience you’re having with your son, that it’s just perfect the way it is, just choose it. Choose this pain, you stop suffering.” And okay, I chewed on that for a while – if I choose the pain, I stop suffering. She says “and then from that place, you can create something new.”
“Next time you have a conversation with him, bring none of that history to that conversation. You guys had this tiff because of all this past history that built up and blew up, and he brought all this past history that came together.” And we were having this conversation from history, from the X stuff that was still causing pain so we’re bringing this to the conversation. She said “bring nothing to the conversation. Leave that in the past.”
Now I want Cari to come up and share a really profound example on what it means to choose what you already have. It’s like choosing these X results that you don’t love long enough to change your energy about it. Sometimes we’re in so much resistance about the way things are, that that is only adding more energy to it but when we choose to accept it the way it is, that’s when our vibration changes. That’s when our ability to think differently shifts and that’s where we can start creating from a clean place.
So you know, which story I’m wanting you to share?
CARI: Okay.
LESLIE: Make sure this is up because it’s too good not to share.
CARI: So and just to be clear like what we’re talking about is choosing, not deciding, right? Deciding, you actually have an opportunity. You walk into an ice cream parlor and you choose chocolate or you choose vanilla, based on what your preference is, right?
But choosing can really be understood in what I’m about to share and Leslie and I, you know, we were planning to walk this particular morning and I called her and I said “well, I won’t be able to meet you to walk because I’m being arrested.” True story.
So some years back prior to relocating to Arizona, I had my identity stolen and until it happens to you, you really don’t get how bad it can be. And the individual who had stolen my identity used my identity to work in my name, secure credit in my name, an apartment, utility bills, even health insurance was in my name.
And it was a long time before it caught up to me. It was when she went delinquent on everything that I found out because the notices and phone calls came to my home. I didn’t have credit in my name. I left my father’s house and went to my husband and everything was in his name, and all of a sudden, I’m getting notices.
So I went and I filed a police report, and it’s not as easy as that because the creditors don’t care. They just want their money and I’m on the phone with them, “I didn’t do this, and how come you weren’t calling me before this happened?” You know, how was it so easy that somebody had gotten my name?
Well, long story short… you know, I ended up paying a lot of money for attorneys, standing before courts to get everything satisfied. She had even been arrested at one point and so they had her in custody and the story that she told them was that someone had stolen her identity and that that wasn’t her. And you know, it was just a mess but the fact that she did that helped me because I was able to prove that I am me, you know, through birth certificates and it was just a long drawn-out process.
And what I didn’t realize is that in the state of Michigan where I came from originally is that one department of law enforcement does not communicate with the other. Isn’t that great? So I addressed it on the state level and then I had to address it on the city level but there were still warrants for my arrest because this was felony.
And one of the things that she had done was she had worked in my name and then filed for unemployment while she was working and cashed a check. That’s definitely a felony so the state of Michigan is looking for me for that. And I was in financial services with my husband and I submitted for a background check, and that triggered something in Michigan and they sent a request to expedite me, to arrest me and to expedite me.
So these were marshals now coming to my home. They had been casing and watching the place, your face, that’s how I felt and so they stopped my husband. He’s leaving out for work in the morning. They had been watching all of us for a while and they tell him “if you have to go back to the house, we’re here to arrest your wife.” They took this phone and they said “when you open the door, do not warn her or anything, okay? Or you’re going to jail.”
So he comes in the house and he said, he said “honey” he said “there are police officers here and I’m in the back of the house and I can hear them say “ma’am, we need you to come out here.” So I come out, and this is one of those things, I don’t have a decision here to make and my husband is upset, and my daughter comes out and she was 16 or 17 at the time and she’s upset.
And I’m looking at them and I’m trying to explain to them, and they said “we have orders to expedite you and that’s what we’re going to do” and in that moment, I said “okay, alright. Well, let me get dressed” and I said “how does this go?” And they said “well, first you have to stand before the judge here in Gilbert and then after that, we’re going to put you on a bus and then you’ll travel to Michigan.”
I’m like “on a bus from Arizona to Michigan, seriously?? In the wintertime and with criminals??” And they said “yeah” and I was like, okay, and I looked at my husband and he said “well, can’t I just drive my wife there? We’re not trying to run away from this” and he said “no, we have to take her into custody.”
And in that moment, while I’m listening to my husband talk to him, I said “okay, well, I’ll just choose this. I’m going to jail and I’m going to be on a bus for like, five or six days because they have to make pickups along the way, so this is happening.”
And I looked at my husband and I said “stop.” I said “we’re choosing this right now. We choose this” and I looked at my daughter and I said “sweetheart, we’re choosing this” and my family understood what I meant and the police officers were like “okay, they’re choosing this.”
[Laughter]
And so I said “well, how do I dress to go to jail?” And they said “well, you’re going to want to wear something warm” and I said “okay” and then I look at the two police officers and I was like “he’s the grouchy one, the one on the right, right?” And he said “yeah.” His partner, he’s like “how did you know that?” I was like “I can tell.”
I said “you were a grouchy baby too, weren’t you?” I said “the kind that doesn’t like taking the naps and you were like this…” and his partner is laughing and he was like “I don’t know. I don’t even know what you’re talking about!” He was like, really grumpy, right? And I said “yeah, you’re the grouchy one” and his partner is engaged now because somebody is in his world.
[Laughter]
And he said “yeah, I try everything. Nothing pumps this guy up.” He said “I’ve tried coffee in the morning, everything. He’s just grouchy all day.” And the partner’s like this, and I said “okay, well, I’m going to go and change my clothes.” I said “I promise, you know, I’ll be right back out” and he goes “don’t try and like, leave out the window or anything because we’ll be listening.” I was like “do I look like I can climb out a window?”
And then I’m laughing.
I go and I get dressed, and I come back out and I’m like “so do these boots work for jail?” And the one on the right, the grouchy one, he goes “what do you have laces on for? You can’t wear laces to jail.” And I was like “oh, that’s right because I could like hang myself or something, right? Or turn it into a weapon.” I’m like “okay, I’ll be right back. I’ve got something else in mind.
And so I’m all excited because at this point, it’s like “man, I’m going to jail! I get to interview people and like, have this great story and then if I’m going to Michigan, I can see my mom. Like, all of this stuff just started opening up for me, you know. I haven’t been home in a while. I can see old friends once I’m out.”
[Laughter]
And, and my husband was on the phone with an attorney and (with our attorney and who’s familiar with this), and I get on the phone and I’m talking to him, and he’s saying what he’s saying and I wasn’t even really listening to the attorney. I said “can you tell my husband all of this because my ride’s here? I gotta go!”
And by the time I said that, the grumpy one, he walks out to the police car and he’s gone for a while, and the other officer started saying “you know, I’ve never gone to arrest anyone and they were like you guys.” My daughter was offering them like, you know, some pastries.
[Laughter]
We were like just ‘with it’, you know and my husband said “well, you know, you’re just doing your job.” And he said “yeah, we pick up people and they call us names, they yell at us” and he said “ma’am, whatever paperwork you have, make sure you take that with you” and I was like “yeah, sure!”
And then the other officer comes back in, and he looks and he says “well, Michigan, I, I just phoned them. They’re not interested in you.” And I said “well, does that mean?” And I said “what, I’m not jail material?? They’re not interested in me?”
[Laughter]
And like, that really happened! And he said “no’ and he said “sometimes, they do that, they have this. In your case, it’s probably just not big enough for them” and he said “but here’s a sheet of paper. You want to reference this number. If anybody else comes looking for you, that they decline you being expedited.” And he said “just put that with the other documentation that you have and I’m so sorry that this has happened.”
I was like “no problem!” You know, I was like, can you smile before you leave? It’s a great day. I’m free!” And he just kind of nodded and walked out and that was it. I just remember my husband just grabbed me, and he held me and my daughter, and that was it. We chose it and that’s how life comes at you. It comes at you… cancer, choose it. It comes at you… bankruptcy, choose it. Whatever way it shows up, just choose it because it’s your access to freedom.
[Applause]
LESLIE: Now you see why I love that she is my sidekick, my new sidekick. I love being with her. I’m excited because she now helps me at all my events. We’re having a Science of Getting Rich seminar, three-day seminar. We still have a few seats open for that. We’re also doing a Genius Boot Camp in Arizona but with that, I just want to thank you again for being here.
Hopefully, something that we’ve shared today helps you understand more about personal freedom and how we have the power to choose. And what Cari did wasn’t to choose jail because she saw herself being in jail forever. She just chose to be happy and changed her vibration in the moment and that had an effect. She didn’t share this but when she shared it with me, when she found out she wasn’t going, it was almost disappointing.
[Laughter]
She’s like “oh man, I was all ready. I was like… .” You know, it was because she had changed how she felt – that’s how powerful our emotions are. And so think about in your life, what have you been fighting? What have you been wrestling with? What have you been hating about your life? Choose it and you’ll find how quickly things can shift and you can move away from it.
On the order form, we do have books here. If you don’t like the download option (the free downloads), we do have some books here. The Hidden Treasures book, let me just tell you the difference between some of these things. The Hidden Treasures book covers the seven laws that when you are facing a challenge or in a rough spot, you can look at the seven laws and see which one can I think about now that shifts my energy?
Another one of those laws is the Law of Relativity – no matter what’s going on in your life, you can choose to feel good about it by relating it to something worse. No matter what it is, you can think it’s the worst thing on the planet, you can always find something worse and then choose gratitude that it’s not that. It’s those little things. It’s a great book for keeping your head in the right place after you’ve set those goals.
Jackrabbit Factor is also available for $15. Portal To Genius is the combo – Jackrabbit Factor plus its sequel, Portal To Genius which is the book I wrote after the recession. It’s like what I learned trying to bounce back from the real deep trauma, and that just puts so much color and detail for me around these principles.
The Jackrabbit Factor book is like a primer to help you understand what you can do right now to see something change today but what if you are bouncing back from trouble? What if the first thing that shows up when you set a goal is something worse than what you set the goal to be? That is common and a lot of times, it’s because what’s on the other side of it, after choosing it, is what you were looking for.
Sometimes it’s delivered in disguise and so often the setback or the negative thing that shows up, we look at it as ‘oh, that’s not what I asked for. This doesn’t work! I hate that…’ and we just disqualified ourselves. Instead when it shows up, we’re like ‘okay, Law of Polarity says there’s an equal or greater benefit contained in this. I’m going to find it. I’m going to choose this. I’m going to make the most of this!’ And then what you’re looking for is on the other side of that so that’s what Portal To Genius can help you do.
It also follows not just the couple here at the end of their financial rope in Jackrabbit Factor but also now follows a man who needs a medical miracle for his son and another man who needs $4.5 million by Wednesday, and it’s fun to see how these principles play out in real-life kinds of stories. My co-author and I put in stories that were related to experiences that we’d had, kind of fictionalized so that it would work well in a book but there’s that. We have all those on CDs.
I want to call your attention to the Working With The Seven Laws Of Success – eight CD set. That one is where I did a class like this once a week for eight weeks where we talked about all the seven laws, plus a bonus law at the end. That’s $129 for the full CD set but if you notice, the little asterisk says this audio series is included in streamed format inside the $37 Mindset Fundamentals e-Course which is an online lesson series. It comes with four ebooks and 20 lessons and then this audio series.
Join us for Genius Boot Camp. Stephanie is a fantastic facilitator, she is phenomenal. She’s done several and people keep coming back to it as alumni because once you go once, you can come back for a small fee to repeat it again because it’s powerful.
What it focuses on, Genius Boot Camp, is focusing on this period where there’s that anxiety in the middle right before you break through and so we spend three days working on that. And you go through some experiences that help you see it differently than you’d ever seen it before, and it gives you the power to just go. It’s super powerful.
The difference between Genius Boot Camp and The Science Of Getting Rich, the difference between those is The Science Of Getting Rich is based on the book by Wallace Wattles, which is over 100 years old. Super powerful, but it focuses on the elements in the world around us and how they’re responding to our thoughts. It’s a really deep three day study of what the elements are doing and that is powerful.
So Mindset Mastery… we have the physical version that is shipped to you which comes with my assistance at the mid-term. It walks you through two phases. Each lesson has a task at the end, and you go and do the task before you go onto the next lesson. And step by step, I walk you through Phase One where you actually see a direct connection between the way you thought and what shows up in an inconsequential goal – something that doesn’t have childhood trauma wrapped around it.
You know, we pick a goal that doesn’t have any history like repeated failure on that thing. We pick something that’s clean so that you can see how it works and then in Phase Two, we go tackle the thing that does have stuff attached to it, the baggage that you get to work through. Super powerful. So we have the online version which is much cheaper too but that is an option. So with that, we’re going to wrap up and thank you for being here.
[Applause]
ANNOUNCER: 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 ARareKindofFaith.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.
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