The Critical 5 Seconds That Determine Your Entire Future

So, why is it that you can read all the personal development books, listen to all the different audio programs, just really study and work hard on yourself just like everybody teaches you how to do, and you're still struggling out there? You feel like you're just on the hamster wheel, you can't ever get off? Well, I'll tell you, it's not because of lack of intelligence, it's not because of lack of discipline, it's not because of a lack of anything other than your control of a very critical five seconds of your life. And today I want to introduce to you the Gap Thinking Framework. It's the missing link that's going to help you create the life you desire and stop living in a life of default. Let's get started. Welcome to the Rich Mind Podcast. Now I didn't discover this gap, this critical five seconds in a classroom, I didn't discover this in a book or an audio program. This is a lot of trial and error on my own. I've been in the process of my own personal development for well over 15 years now. And I've read a lot of the books, I can't say I've read them all, obviously I've read a lot of the books. Audio programs are my go-to, I'm an audio learner, so I can pound through some content very quickly. Podcasts, I've bought the programs. I've got countless things to listen to, watch, read, bookshelves are full. And the point is, is that why wasn't I achieving the success that I desired? I kept questioning that to myself throughout my entire journey. So back when I first got started, I was in a retail job. That was my whole life, basically in high school and then as I was getting into my adulthood. And I thought that was my path. I was dedicated to the craft of being a retail store manager, basically. I was in a local or regional grocery chain. I'm in Indianapolis, Indiana. And that was my life. I worked very hard, I worked very long hours, 60, 70, 80 hours a week was not uncommon. And I was burnt out, to say the least. This was probably in my early 30s, early to mid 30s of my life. And what happened was, at that critical stage of my life, as I mentioned about 35 years old, a moment happened to me that has really changed the trajectory of my life almost instantly. And what happened was, this was back around 2007, 2008, a very similar situation to what's going on, I would say in our world today, a lot of uncertainty, jobs, not sure if they're going to survive. And mine didn't back then. So what happened was I was working a retail store. I was the store manager, and they came in and made the decision that they were going to close my store. It wasn't performing up to the standards that they had set. And the hard part was, I gave my blood, sweat and tears to that store. I would work all the time. As I mentioned, I was working several hours, but I would work mornings, evenings, nights, third shift, weekends, holidays, you name it. And I was there. And it just had become part of my life. It was who I was in that moment. And to have that rug pulled out from underneath me was a huge blow to my ego, huge blow to who I thought I was, huge blow to what I thought I was doing was the right thing based on basically programming that I had learned my entire life. My father, I can remember, he's the one that helped me get the position that I had. And the whole idea was that if you work hard, stay with the same company for basically your entire life, they would then reward you at the end of that journey, if it was, you know, depending on how long that was, right? So basically through into retirement, that's the journey that I was on because that's what I was modeled as the right way to be. But in that moment, I realized that that wasn't true. I realized that that was very inaccurate thinking. Let's just put it that way. And when I had that realization, I began to question everything up to that point. Why was I doing certain things like this to myself, to my family? I mean, I missed so many holidays. I really missed out on a lot of my children's growing up phases. I would say from anywhere from two, three years old, all the way up until, you know, they're in their teenage years. I really wasn't around because I was so dedicated to operating this store because of what I thought was the best thing for myself and for my family. As I mentioned, that was a hard moment for me to realize that that was not true. So I began to go down the personal development journey, probably very similar to maybe where you are today. You might be trying to seek out different answers as to why certain things are happening, not only to you, but around you. And you're trying to figure out, okay, how do I move around in these moments to better, you know, do things better for myself, do things better for my family, which is exactly where I found myself over the last 15 years. So then fast forward, maybe, well, it's only been the last two years or so, maybe three years ago that I really started to realize and understand that life is nothing more than a series of decisions. And life is nothing more than a series of patterns. And when you can recognize the patterns, you can then begin to recognize the decisions that you're making at those specific moments. Now let me give you a little bit of an example, even for myself. So I've been obviously trying to figure out this success thing, right? I'm trying to become an entrepreneur, trying to be out there sharing my message. I've created the Rich Mind podcast. I've started and tried to start several different businesses. I'm an author, co-author of a great book, Think Big. You know, I've done a lot of great things, but the success, the quote unquote success, has always eluded me at different points in my life. So what has happened or what I decided to do is I was going to begin journaling basically different activities throughout my life. And what I discovered is as I was being triggered by outside circumstances, so a lot of times I would get just instant self-sabotage. That's my pattern, is that I would have great intentions, great ideas, at least I thought they were great ideas. Ideas come to me and I would begin to implement those ideas out into the world. And what would happen then is somebody would trigger me with a thought or an idea. Now, it didn't have to necessarily be anybody in my presence, right? They didn't have to be in my physical environment. They could have been a virtual person, right? Somebody I was listening to on a podcast or something I read on social media or something like that. And it would spark off a thought or a feeling within me that would instantly send me down a rabbit trail and that rabbit trail would lead to self-sabotage and shedding whatever project or whatever idea that I had down. That was my pattern. And it was continuously happening over and over and over. And I will admit it still happens even today. I will say that I am better at this than I've ever been, but I've not mastered it. And I'm not sure if you can master it. I think that you can get better at it, which is why I'm encouraging you here, talking to you here today. I want you to get better at this. So it's a matter of questioning your pattern when it arises. And what I've discovered is that at that moment of the trigger, there's a split second moment where a decision's made. Now, most of our life is on autopilot. So it's like when you're driving, you're being bombarded with your stimulus all the time, right? People are coming, people are going in front of you, around you, right? So you can't think in those split second moments, different decisions at that time. You can't. You need to operate on autopilot when you're driving a car for the most part, right? Unless something drastic is happening around you. Now, but in your everyday activities, in terms of if you're trying to achieve a particular topic or a particular subject or success, whatever success means to you, if you're trying to achieve those things, you have a split second moment to make decisions when a trigger or a stimulus comes into your life. That is what I'm calling the gap. And that's what I'm introducing to you here today is the gap thinking framework, which is where I want to take a lot of the discussions that we have moving forward here on the Rich Mind Podcast. Now, from that gap, you can either have a narrow gap, what I would call a narrow gap, which is an instant response. So it's the difference between being reactive and actually being responsive. And those are the two terms I want you to keep in mind. If you're being reactive, it's because you're continuously just stimulus reactive, stimulus reactive, and it's a very short, short gap. And that's what I want you to number one, become aware of. And I want you to become so aware of it that you can almost see it in real time. That's what's happened for me is as I've gotten more clear and focused on my on my pattern, I can see it happening almost in real time. And when I can catch it, what you'll be able to do and what I'm going to encourage you to do is widen that gap, widen that gap as far as you possibly can. And when that when you do that, you will then begin to respond to that trigger and you'll be able to get to decide what to and how to interact with that trigger, whether it's important, whether it's a lie, whether it's truth, whether it's something you need to be aware of, you'll get to decide instead of reacting to that trigger, you're going to be able to respond to that trigger. That's where that wide gap and that's what I want to help you get to with this gap thinking framework is a wide gap on those moments that aren't required. As I mentioned, the example here with driving, right? You can't really do that when you're driving, but in just your day to day activities, when you're trying to achieve, I don't care if it's a weight loss goal. I don't care if it's a financial goal. I don't care if it's a relationship goal. It doesn't matter. The point is, is that you will get triggered with ideas, with thoughts, with outside influences, and your ability to then respond versus react will be the difference in the result. And when you can affect that result, you can then affect what's going on in your outside exterior 3D world. I talk about winning within. This is the process of winning within based on what I've studied, based on how I'm changing currently my life and my family's life moving forward. We live in a world governed by different laws, and I'm not talking about the laws of the traffic laws and the state laws and the government laws. That's not what I'm talking about. Today, I want to talk about the law of cause and effect. And what I want you to do is, if you can focus in on this gap, on this moment, and try to focus on widening that gap, you can begin affecting the cause. The cause is your decisions. The cause is then taking the action after that decision that's going to impact the effect, which is the results that you're going to begin seeing out there in your exterior 3D world. We're still talking about law of attraction and abundance and all of those types of things. And you keep thinking maybe to yourself, where is this abundance at? I don't see any abundance. All I have is just this negative. Why is this world happening? What's happening to me? All this is happening to me. Why am I not seeing this abundance that everybody keeps talking about? This law of attraction. Why am I not attracting all of these things? Well, I want to break it down as simply as I possibly can, which is where this gap thinking framework is going to fit into your life. And I really hope that this message moving forward and this content that I'll be producing here in the near future will help you think about life differently, become a participant in your thoughts versus just being basically just battered by the wind. One thing that it's been interesting, as I've studied, as I mentioned, the greats, you know, the Earl Nightingales, the Jim Rohns, all the greats, even the current gentlemen, right? Or ladies too, for that matter. The Tony Robbins, you know, all those types of people. Everybody always talks about your thinking and becoming better thinkers, but nobody ever really talks about how to think. And it really dawned on me. It's like, okay, we've been gone to school for 18, 12, whatever the number is, a lot of years, and we're taught to remember, but we're never really ever taught how to think. And so that's where the gap thinking framework hopefully will fit into that process and help you begin to see that you are and can be in control. Another mentor of mine, David Nagel. He's fantastic. David Nagel. He's great. I would recommend you go out and find his content as well. He's really helped me shape the way I think, I believe, I honestly believe he's the one that's helped me see more of my own patterns. But one thing he says a lot within his content is that our greatest gift is our ability to choose. Now, when you think about that, how impactful that really is. When you have the ability to make a different choice, whether you like it or not, it's still your ability to choose. Now being indecisive, not making a decision, that's still a choice. Now when you begin to start taking your choices in-house, start becoming a participant in your life versus just, you know, outside player, right, letting things happen to you versus getting in the driver's seat and taking action within your own life using this gap thinking framework that we're going to be talking about and discussing. That's when you can start seeing some dramatic changes in your life. You'll start to feel more calm. You're going to start feeling more abundant. You're going to start feeling like things are actually working towards you and working for you. This law of attraction, things, your opportunity is going to start showing up. You're going to start getting some great ideas. Your imagination will start to kick in. Your intuition will start to kick in. Your relationships will start to improve. That's been my experience and that's why I'm so excited to share these things here with you today and moving forward. But your ability to choose and making that choice, that's why I'm so glad that you've decided to choose to be with me here today and I look forward to serving you here moving forward. So with this gap thinking framework, we're going to be talking about the BS Buster. Now BS, as I've talked about in an episode before, are your beliefs and your stories and we're going to go into deep, deeper thinking with that, right? We're going to talk about those beliefs and those stories on how, when they are imposed on this trigger, these triggering moments, how this gap thinking framework is going to help you in that process to think better, think differently in that split second moment to widen that gap and to make better decisions moving forward. We're also going to talk about the PACE protocol and how that is going to help you also widen that gap, be able to help you get into the driver's seat of your life and then improve your thoughts and your thinking and your decision-making moving forward as you start to achieve the things that you desire, the things that you want in your life, which is so exciting. So lastly here today, folks, once again, I appreciate your time. I appreciate your attention. If you want to head over to www.richmind.co, I've got a Rich Mind Assessment set up for you and ready to go. Now what this is going to do, this is going to be the very beginning process. You need to become aware. You need to become conscious of your current pattern and how you think. Now if you take this assessment, this is simply just seven questions. It'll take you a couple of minutes to go through these questions. If you take the time to think through each of the questions and answer them honestly, I promise you at the very end of this assessment, it's going to give you a persona of who you are currently in your level of thinking. And with that level of thinking, you're going to be, I'm also going to give you a three-step action plan that's going to help you improve this gap, widen this gap, improve how you're thinking, which then is going to improve the results that you're seeing moving forward. So go out there, have a fantastic day, head over to richmind.co, take that assessment, and I look forward to coming back with the next episode again very soon, folks. Until then, bye now.