In this episode, Megan shares how five of her favorite books changed her life, delving into topics such as thinking yourself to wealth, habits that shape success and the power of living in the present.
Books have the potential to reshape your mindset and enhance your self-care practices. Megan emphasizes this through anecdotes from her own life, touching on the contents of each book and how it can change your life.
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Takeaways
- Thinking Yourself to Wealth and Happiness: Explore the timeless wisdom of “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill, a classic that unravels the secrets of building wealth and attracting positive influences into your life.
- Habits That Shape Success:” Atomic Habits” by James Clear, a book that simplifies the process of developing good habits and how small changes can lead to significant improvements in your life.
- Living in the Present Moment: “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle is a transformative guide that emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment and escaping the trap of constant thinking about the past and future.
- Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins: How can you find release from life’s challenges and the emotional baggage we carry? This book prompts self-reflection on resentments and the freedom that comes with letting go.
- Mindset Shift with “The Gap and the Gain”: During the hardest time in your life, you can adopt a life-changing mindset. Instead of focusing on the negative, shift from a gap to a gain perspective to appreciates incremental progress, leading to increased gratitude, accomplishment, and motivation across various life areas.
Resources Mentioned
Caro Jensen – Food Videography Services
Promote your food blogging services:Â www.eatblogtalk.com/audioclip
Books
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Atomic Habits by James Clear
The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender by David R. Hawkins
The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy
Transcript
Click for full script.
EBT487 – Mindset & Self-care
Intro 00:01
Hey, food bloggers. Thank you so much for joining me in this mindset and self-care focused episode here on a blog talk. One of the reasons I started a blog talk was to hold a space to talk about the importance of mindset and self-care. Being an entrepreneur can be a lot. If we are not taking care of ourselves, then getting actionable information about SEO, Pinterest or whatever else is all moot. I will meet you back here every Wednesday to discuss various mindset and self-care topics. So you have the energy and space to tackle the rest.
Sponsor (Caro Jensen) 00:37
Thanks Megan for the opportunity to share my video services with your listeners. My name is Caro and I have a food blog called Caroha.com. Video is time-consuming. It’s another skill that you might not want to master right now. And that’s where I can help you. I confidentially shoot for bloggers who need videos for existing or new recipes. I mentioned look and feel it will help establish a new video style as well. I can create simple hands and pens, videos or more complex edits that include multiple angles and those really captivating slow motions. I deliver a variety of edits for all platforms horizontal vertical square edits, I just want to make sure that my clients can leverage my work as much as possible. All videos are color graded, have engaging transitions, branded titles updated, etc. You can check off my portfolio on carojensen.com, CAROJENSEN.com. If you need help with video on 2024, please get in touch.
Megan Porta 01:29
Well hello again food bloggers Welcome to a another self-care and mindset focused episode of eat blog talk. Today I am going to talk through five books that will change your life that might seem dramatic, but just hear me out. I feel like books are such a great way to get a ton of information and value in a compact little package that you can fit in your hands. Right? Authors, if you think about it spend so much time sometimes they spend years and years compiling information and data and experiences for the books that they write. And as consumers that we can read or listen to this information in just a few hours, which is kind of incredible. If you are an avid reader, I have five books that are about to change your life. And if you’re not an avid reader, that’s okay. I would suggest that you listen to this episode anyway. Because I still have five books that are about to change your life. If you’re not a reader, you can become a reader. I also strongly believe that if you read these books and absorb them, that positive things will come to you from the info that you get from these books, you may have experienced this sometimes information in a book lands at just the perfect time. And you feel like oh, that was so perfect, how I picked up the book. And it just made sense to me at this exact moment. And sometimes it takes more than one time reading through it. So if you read one of these books, and it doesn’t quite land, that’s okay. It might not be the right time for you set it down and come back to it in the future when it does feel right. I believe that the messages conveyed in these books will help to build solid structures for your life. I do quite a bit of reading. So it is saying a lot when I say that these books are life changing. I truly believe that they are and they have been for me. And I really hope that they are for you as well. The five books we’re going to talk about today dive into really specific topics. Those type topics are: 1) thinking yourself to wealth and happiness, 2) habits, 3) living in the present moment, 4) the power of letting things go and surrendering, and 5) the power of gratitude. And again, I believe that when understood and absorbed, that they can definitely change your life.
Megan Porta 03:55
The first book that I want to mention is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. This one is a really old book. It’s a classic. It’s arguably the most famous and powerful self development book ever written. It was published in 1937, which is kind of crazy. When you think about it. The concepts that the author talks about in the book seem so modern and evolved. And although some of the stories that he talks about in the book are obviously not as modern, they still somehow apply today, which is really cool. The author talks through stories about Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and many other millionaires of that generation to illustrate the principles of the book. To be a millionaire back in that time was a really big deal. By the way. You will learn secrets about how to build massive wealth if this is something that you want, but you’ll also learn how to attract the right people into your life the right events.
Megan Porta 05:00
So, business partners and so on, and also just to harmony into your life. He uses the word harmony a lot in the book, which I think is a really powerful word. Napoleon Hill experimented with this concept of the mastermind group, which is what I aim for in my mastermind groups that I run for Eat Blog Talk. It was a really powerful tool for him back then, and for his people that he collaborated with, and it still works today. I will talk through just a few favorite parts from the book, there are so many, but I’m going to condense these, in order to not make this episode super long. There is a part right away in the beginning of the book that I absolutely love. I remember the story that he tells all the time. It’s just one of those stories that has stuck with me. Napoleon Hill talks about one of his own experiences with the law of attraction and bringing good things into his life in a really cool way. So his son was born without hearing, I believe in both ears. He was born completely deaf. And the doctors told him and his wife that he would never hear. Napoleon Hill, it was like, No, I do not believe this for my son, I believe that there is going to be a way that he will someday be able to hear out of his ears. So the book says it much more eloquently than I’m about to but from a very young age, he started speaking into his son’s ear and just telling him, You are going to hear you believe this, I believe this for you. I am your father. And I believe that you are going to hear and he just spoke these words to him over and over, even though his son couldn’t hear what he was saying. He communicated this message to him. And he truly believed it as his father, he just believed that something would evolve in his son’s future where there would be an advancement or something would happen so that his son would eventually have his hearing restored, which is kind of crazy, because I think a lot of us would hear that and just be like, Okay, well, he’s deaf for his life. And that’s our lot. But he did not settle for that. Fast forward many years, there were advancements made, the cochlear implant was made, I think, around that time. And because Napoleon had spoken these words and beliefs into a son his whole life. His son actually believed, too, that he was going to hear one day, the cochlear implant was put on him, and it actually worked. He restored not all of his hearing, but some of it, and then went into a profession where he helped other advancements to be made in this realm. I think he also helped other people to be able to hear so he took this disability and turned it into something really good. And his hearing was restored. The story hits home for me, because we had a very similar story with our son, Elijah, he’s 16 now, but when he was six, we discovered that he had something called a cholesteatoma in his left ear. At the time, it was really scary. We didn’t know what this was. We didn’t know if it was benign or malignant, or what was going to happen. It turns out that it was benign. It was a tumor that had grown inside his left ear, near his eardrum, and it was starting to affect his hearing. The doctors told us to that Elijah would be completely deaf in his left ear for his whole life. This kid at that point had already been through so much. He’d had a handful of open heart surgeries at that point, he’d had a spine surgery.
Megan Porta 08:43
So many other things. So when we heard this news, my husband and I just could not believe it. I will never forget sitting in the waiting room, I remember exactly what the waiting room looked like. I remember where we were sitting. I remember what the doctor was. When he told us this news. I was shocked, stunned, you know, that feeling of just being like, I cannot absorb any of this information. I don’t know what’s going on right now. I looked over at my husband and he had this look on his face. Like he did not accept the information that the doctor had just told him. And I remember being kind of annoyed, like, why isn’t he accepting this? But Dan looked at me. He looked at the doctor and he said, This is not going to be Elijah’s story. He was so firm and what he said and he believed it. And because he believed it, I believed it. I was like, Oh, well, he must know something. I don’t know. So cool. Elijah is not going to be deaf. And the doctor kind of laughed at him like okay, sure that sounds great. We’ll just see how this pans out. Fast forward a year because he’d had a couple of surgeries on this ear and had had a prosthetic device put inside to attempt restoring some hearing. Everything needed to heal for a year to see whether or not anything was restored.
Megan Porta 09:59
So after a year we did a hearing test again. And guess what, not only did he have some hearing restored, but he had hearing in a normal range, or better depending on the decibel. And his doctor literally could not believe it. When we would go into his office, he would say to us things like, you guys freak me out. I can’t believe that this happened. I’ve never seen this happen, I never would have expected this. And I kind of loved that we shocked him with that. And I know that all of this happened as it did, because my husband believed that Elijah was going to have his hearing restored. And to this day, he still has normal hearing. So that story really resonated with me from the book, there is so much truth to this. And especially as parents, we have power over what we say about our children. Another part of the book that I really love is a quote, The quote is, “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.” It’s such a simple quote, it’s a really quick, easy sentence. But there’s so much power there. I have this in a frame in our living room. And I look at it every day, because literally whatever you can think of, and believe in can happen. Another quote from the book that I love is, “the starting point of all achievement is desire. That is another really quick and easy one. To me that illustrates that. You can achieve whatever you want, but you need to desire it first. Get in touch with why you are striving for the things you’re striving for. What is your why be really closely tied to why you’re doing it, and really desire that end result in order to achieve the things you want.
Megan Porta 11:40
Another topic that is talked about a lot in the book that I love is how procrastination can be one of the biggest weaknesses that can hold us back from achieving our dreams. To counter procrastination action must be taken. I have this quote highlighted in the book, I have a lot of quotes highlighted. But here’s one of them. Quote, most ideas are still born and need the breath of life injected into them through definite plans have immediate action. The time to nurture an idea is at the time of its birth, every minute it lives gives it a better chance of surviving, end quote. An idea is just an idea until we act on it. And I love this concept that the faster we act on it, the greater the chances of success are that we actually achieve it. When you think about what holds us back from taking action. During that little window of time, it’s fears its self doubt, it’s maybe other people’s opinions, and could be a slew of other things. But knowing that there is that window, and that that window is really powerful. And if you act inside of it, your chances improve of achieving your goals. I love that concept. Like I said, I could go on and on with my favorites from this book. It’s really powerful. There are some kind of weird parts in it. Just to warn you, if you haven’t read it.
Megan Porta 13:02
I don’t know which chapter it is, but it’s toward the end. I was like, Oh, this is interesting. But it kind of adds to the uniqueness of the book. And I just want to say prepare yourself, when you absorb the principles inside this book, your life will change for the better. You will be able to navigate your life with greater harmony, there’s that word again. And you will have an understanding about how to accumulate wealth if that is something that you want. The next book we’ll talk about is one of my favorites of all time I recommend this book to just about everybody. You’ve probably heard me recommend it many times. in various places it is Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Megan Porta 13:42
Most of us know that habits are very powerful right and that they can literally make or break us. James Clear is a leading expert on habits he does such a good job of simplifying the processes of applying good habits to our everyday lives. In the book you will learn how to easily design your life and your environment to support good habits. You will learn that when you set a few strategies in motion, that things will start to change and shape in your life really rapidly. Since the first time I read the book, I have learned that setting just one small habit in place that sticks can lead to momentum in other areas and snowballs into other good habits and sometimes the snowballs into an entirely new routine. So if you are looking for maybe a morning routine, start with one small habit and just see how that can snowball into an amazingly successful morning routine. I will talk through a few favorite parts from the book. So one of the concepts James Clear talks about is this concept of habit stacking. I use this all the time and I hear other people talk about this concept all the time as well. So it’s really powerful. The idea is that:
Megan Porta 14:59
If you want to form a new habit, you take an existing habit that’s already in place, and you start stacking the new habits on top of it. So if you get out of bed every morning, and you brush your teeth without even thinking, you mindlessly go to the sink and you brush your teeth. Great, that is a habit. If you want to maybe incorporate five minutes of journal writing into your mornings for an example, stack that on top of brushing your teeth. So immediately after you brush your teeth, you have your journal, right outside the bathroom, so you can write for five minutes in your journal. Once you’ve got that habit down, then you can stack on top of that. And you can just keep doing that, until you have a collection of habits that are super successful.
Megan Porta 15:44
Also, in the book, he talks a lot about how you can easily overcome a lack of motivation. I know that is an issue for a lot of people just not being motivated. So he addresses this in a really simple way how to find motivation and to stick with things even when you don’t want to. There’s one story that sticks with me from the book, I love this one, it’s a story about a guy that he knows who wants to go to the gym, he wants to start working out. But the idea of going into the gym and working out is just really big and overwhelming and daunting, and he just doesn’t know how to make it happen. So he starts with one simple little thing he gets in this car in the morning or whenever I think it’s in the morning, and he drives to the gym. And he parks in the parking lot and sits there for five minutes. And then he drives on to work. He repeats this habit for a certain amount of time until it’s ingrained in him. Once he feels like it’s an established habit. Then he not only drives to the gym and parks his car, but he goes inside, and maybe he stands in the entryway for a minute or something. Once that is a habit, then he spends five minutes on the treadmill until that’s a habit. So what I talked about earlier that habit stacking this is what this guy was doing. He was just establishing one little tiny habit until he had that down. And then he would build on it and build on it. And eventually, he was going to the gym and doing full workouts and it was not a big deal for him. It wasn’t super overwhelming.
Megan Porta 17:16
Here are a couple of quotes that I really liked from the book that I pulled out from it, “Making a better choice that is 1% better or 1% worse is insignificant in the moment. But over the span of moments that make up the lifetime, these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be”. I love this quote because it might seem so insignificant to make just the tiniest change in your habits. But if you think about over time, how much of a difference that can make in who you become, it’s exponential and so powerful. Here’s another one, “Success is the product of daily habits not once in a lifetime and transformation”. Again, little things add up to big things, it doesn’t have to be an all at once change. And probably my favorite quote from the entire book is this. “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs. But as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements”. Think just about that first line that I said, every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. I think about this all the time when I am making a bad choice, I think, is this in alignment with someone that I want to be in the future? And if the answer is no, I try to stop myself and make a different choice. This has really impacted my life really powerfully. Because once you get into the habit of it, you can stop yourself in those little moments. And just ask yourself that. Is this a good vote? Or is it not? I love this book. It is super powerful. Also get on James Clear’s newsletter, go to his website, jamesclear.com. And sign up for that. He sends out an email every Thursday, I believe and it is my favorite email that lands in my inbox hands down every week I read every word. They’re all powerful and inspiring. Atomic Habits is a total life changer. It will change the way you think about your successes. It will offer up strategies that will positively impact your habits, both as a human and as an entrepreneur.
Megan Porta 19:47
The next book is called The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Something I feel a lot of us miss is living in the present moment. A few years ago I didn’t even Know what this meant. I have lived most of my life totally caught up in the hamster wheel of nonstop thinking, overthinking, thinking about the future, thinking about the past on and on and on. You know what I’m talking about. I first heard Eckhart in an interview with Oprah. She really supports him and his teachings. And I loved his message. His message is really simple. And it’s all based in just living in the now living in the present moment. Eckhart is such a gifted and powerful spiritual teacher, and he just has a way with his words and with communicating, he has a touch of humor, which is really refreshing. So if you can listen to his podcast as well, I highly suggest that you do that just search Eckhart Tolle. After I first heard him speak with Oprah, I started consuming more of his teachings, listening to his podcast, I listened to or read his books. This book, in particular, The Power of Now changed my life, because it prompted me just to do this simple act of stopping. It made me just stop and recognize this moment, each moment that I’m living in, and how precious it is. How often do we do that? Most of us so often are living in the past, we’re thinking about things that we did, rehashing experiences, conversations on and on failures, things that we did wrong. Or we’re thinking about the future, what are we striving for? What goals are we trying to meet? And this can literally wreck us. What if we work on enjoying now this moment for what it is, even if it’s challenging, just stopping and appreciating this moment, I will be the first to admit that it’s not easy to do this, especially at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’s really powerful. And it’s such a simple concept, right?
Megan Porta 21:57
And this book is what taught me how to get started with it all. I will read through a few of my favorite parts of this book. I have a handful of quotes that I love and I pulled out from it. “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have make the now the primary focus of your life”. So simple. All you have is now you don’t have anything else. Here’s another “All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry, all forms of fear, are caused by too much future and not enough presence, guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past and not enough presence”. Wow, those words I can relate to so many of them, the anxiety and stress and worry of the future and the guilt, regret, and sadness from the past. How much do we get caught up in all of that? Here’s another, “It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living, and quote, another quote, if you get the inside, right, the outside will fall into place. Primary reality is within, secondary reality without”. Who this one is very powerful for me, you may have heard that phrase as within so without, and we often get it backwards. We think that if things are in alignment, externally, that inside will change. But it’s actually the opposite. Here’s another quote, “as soon as you honor the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle, dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease. When you act out the present moment, awareness, whatever you do becomes imbued with a sense of quality care and love. Even the most simple action”. And honoring that present moment is so simple, but so hard. I think we’ll all agree about that. And the last thing I’ll mention from the book is just this concept that Eckhart talks about all the time, how if we want to start living more in the present moment, we can do this through simple acknowledgments that we see in the present moment or experience in the present moment. He talks about just like if you’re walking up the stairs, how you can just acknowledge, okay, my foot is on the step, it feels cold, I don’t have a sock on my foot. And then you touch the wall and the wall feels bumpy. Just that simple act of acknowledging what you’re feeling or sensing, or experiencing right now is teaching yourself how to live in the present moment. So if you don’t know where to start, start there.
Megan Porta 24:41
In one of Eckhart’s podcast episodes, I remember him talking about writing this book, and how he was telling a friend that he was planning on writing The Power of Now and it was going to be about living in the present moment and how this friend said, I don’t think you should write that book because there’s so much content on that. Alright, Do you Why would you write something that’s already been written? And Eckhart response to that was, that’s okay. If it’s already been talked about, I know, inside of me that I need to write this book. If I don’t write this book, I will literally die. When I heard him say that I was walking around my neighborhood, I had my air pods in and I literally stopped on the sidewalk, and my mouth fell open. It was one of those times where you just hear something and it just hit you like holy crap that was so powerful. It just taught me how important it is to get out into the world what you know, you need to get out into the world. He knew that he had the knowledge and the value to share on this topic, and that he had to share it. And if he didn’t, that his body would literally die. That’s how important it was for him to get this message out in his words. So I really hope you read this book, it is such a good one.
Megan Porta 25:58
The next book we’ll talk about is called Letting Go the Pathway of Surrender by David R. Hawkins. This book illustrates effective ways to let go or release life’s challenges in order to be free. Do you know how much crap we hold on to as humans? Maybe you do? Maybe not we hold on to so much. There are so many stories and mental blocks that we unintentionally carry with us or our lives. These stories can come at from childhood or trauma, or just experiences that we’ve had maybe everyday experiences, or people we’ve talked to or conversations we’ve had. We can have resentments from things that happened to us decades ago, from childhood being a really small child even, that literally are chained to our souls. There are resentments toward parents, a lot of parent resentment can happen. Their resentments toward bullies from childhood, or ex-partners and on and on. Have you ever stopped yourself to think about how resentments are serving you? I hadn’t really done this until I read this book, I was forced to just stop and think about all of this in a really meaningful way. I found myself in a place recently where I was just feeling really resentful toward a lot of people and about a lot of different weird things. So I found this book after reading the same authors other book called The Map of Consciousness Explained which by the way, is another really good one. This one, the letting go book completely changed my life because it forced me to stop and think about all those resentments I had and how they were definitely not serving my life.
Megan Porta 27:41
I pulled this quote from the Amazon description of the book just so you can get an idea about what it’s about. “The book is equally useful for all dimensions of human life, physical health, creativity, financial success, emotional healing, vocational fulfillment, relationships, sexuality and spiritual growth. This book will help you release past traumas, negative beliefs and self-imposed limitations. Experience a newfound sense of freedom, joy and authenticity, recover from addiction, enhance your personal relationships, achieve success in your career”. And here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book, “The crucial point is by changing ourselves, we change the world. As we become more loving on the inside, healing occurs on the outside, much like the rising of the sea level lifts all ships. So the radiance of unconditional love within a human heart lifts all of life”. I think it really does start with us and us changing us in order to change the world. Here’s another one quote, “letting go is like the sudden cessation of an inner pressure or the dropping of a weight. It is accompanied by a sudden feeling of relief and lightness with an increased happiness and freedom. It is an actual mechanism of the mind and everyone has experienced it on occasion”. I so agree with this. I think we’ve all experienced that, where we just release something, and it feels so good, and it makes us feel so light. And we can keep doing this with so many things that we carry around with us.
Megan Porta 29:11
Here is another quote, “Everything it can be taken from a man but one thing, the last of the human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”. Amen to this. You have the power to change your attitude at any time. This has been a huge lesson for me. Another quote, “We have the opportunity to choose whether we want to hang on or let go of emotional upsets. We can look at the cost of hanging on to them, do we want to pay the price? Are we willing to accept the feelings? We can look at the benefits of letting go of them? The choice we make will determine our future. What kind of a future do we want? Will we choose to be healed? Or will we become one of the walking wounded”. And I will just say that this book not only has insights like that, but it does help you to walk through how to easily get to the root of what you’re holding on to and how to let those things go. When I finished reading this book, I remember feeling so light, so free, like I had surrendered a lot of those resentments that I was holding toward people that really had no point being in my life at all. I feel like I should probably read this once a year.
Megan Porta 30:23
The last book we’ll talk about is Oh, another favorite, the gap in the game by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy, you’ve probably heard me talk about this book, on the podcast many times. And if you’re in any of my groups, I talk about it all the time, I send this book to every member of my mastermind at some point, it is such a powerful one, this is perhaps my favorite book of all time, I might be able to say that, before I was even done reading it, it changed my life. And the concept of the book is so simple, which is change the way you measure your progress, having gratitude when you’re looking back on past accomplishments. And when you do this, your entire perspective on life shifts in the book that authors refer to measuring your progress from past to present. And they refer to that as the gain. And measuring your progress from present to future is the gap. So when you live in the gap, you’re disappointed all the time, because you’re not there yet. But when you’re living in the gain, you feel satisfied, you feel accomplished, because you can see exactly how far you’ve come. I had this book in my hands for the first time when our oldest son Elijah was about to have his fourth open heart surgery. This was just a couple of years ago, actually, almost exactly two years ago. I was about halfway through the book, and some of the concepts were sinking in about how to live in the gain. And I just made the decision to go into this surgery with that mindset of living in the gain and not the gap. Because in previous surgeries, I definitely went into his surgeries thinking, Oh, he’s not there yet. We need to get out of here. We’re in the hospital. I don’t want to be here, when can we go home. But this time, I looked back and every little thing that he had to go through, I would look back and see how far he had come or how far we had come. And that always made me feel better and accomplished and satisfied. One little example was when he came out of surgery, he was on a ventilator, they gradually turned the ventilator settings down so that he could start breathing on his own. In the past, I was caught up in the thinking of he’s still on the ventilator. This sucks, I can’t believe he’s not off it. And this time, I just decided to look at it in the opposite way. So I would say oh my gosh, they just turned down his setting. That’s so exciting. It’s like one notch turned down. That is progress from one hour ago. And I did that the entire time he was in the hospital. When he got out of bed to walk for the first time, he only took like three steps. But I told myself, that’s three steps he didn’t take yesterday, yesterday, he was in bed all day, and on a ventilator.
Megan Porta 30:49
So I carry this concept with me through his whole surgery. And guess what the surgery felt so easy, from my perspective from the perspective of a mom, which is saying a lot because that’s a big deal. And it’s not an easy thing to go through. So that really carried me through that. And I carry this concept into every area of my life. I try to I tried to measure from my past to where I’m at and see the progress and feel grateful for that. I pulled this quote from the Amazon description. “In this book, you will learn that measuring your current self versus your former self has enormous psychological benefits. And that’s really the key to this deceptively simple yet multi layered concept that will have you feeling good, feeling grateful and feeling like you’re making progress, even when times are tough, which will in turn bolster motivation, competence and future success”.
Megan Porta 33:54
Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the book. “If you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack”. Here’s another quote, “The way to measure your progress is backward against where you started, not against your ideal.” Another is quote, “In psychology inattentional blindness occurs when you are so fixated on one thing that you fail to see everything else going on around you. It’s easy to miss the gains happening throughout our lives or businesses because we may have tunnel vision on the problem in front of us”, and the last one we pulled out was, “When you’re in the gain, you transform your experience, in the gap, you compare your experiences to other people’s and feel worse off as a result. You don’t take ownership of your experiences, but instead you distance yourself emotionally from them, which ends up creating debilitating trauma of varying degrees”. The way the author’s just relay all of this information is really easy to comprehend, and sift through. I’ve found this to be such an effective way to really quickly change my life, and I’ve heard this from many people who I’ve given the book to or recommended it to, they have said the same thing. It’s a life changer. I freaking love this book and I hope you read this. It’s a good one. Okay, I hope you loved this. These are my five life changing books. I’m going to put a list together of all of my other favorite books that fall outside the realm of the top five. So if you go to eatblogtalk.com/books, you can see all of my other reading recommendations. If you have books to add to that please let me know I’m always up for reading new material. Let me know what you think of these books. If you haven’t read them and you start digging into them. I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much for listening today food bloggers You guys are amazing. Let me know if you have any mindset or self-care topics you’d like me to cover in the future: [email protected] Have a great day everyone.
Outro 35:58
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