Now Garrain Jones has an inspiring story. He’s experienced really high highs and really low lows in his life, all of which have been exactly what he needed on his path to self-discovery.  At one point, when he was at rock bottom, he had a perspective shift.

Change your mindset, change your life.

And he did exactly that to create a new mindset that created abundance in his life. 

What do you have when everything is taken from you?

Well, the only thing that absolutely no one can ever touch, possess, or gain full authority over is your mind. As Garrain often says, "You can take my things but as long as I can control my mind I will always be free.” You see we’re in a world where we focus so much on the materialistic goods and statuses that we earn and inherit, but that’s all meaningless unless we discover what our soul hungers for. And sometimes that requires having things taken away from us to open up space for those things we need.

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Well first I wouldn’t say that there’s a secret to life, there is so much variety within everyone’s own experience that it’s impossible to attribute something that broadly. But there are a few concepts that are generally true, including the core thesis of this quote: “Keep looking up, that's the secret of life.”

First - Keep looking up! The metaphorical understanding of this it that things are going to be okay. You can be hopeful for the future and the opportunities it will bring. You can be intentional about looking up and seeing the “light at the end of the tunnel”, and the hidden blessings in the situation. It’s a great way to live because you raise the level of what you expect, and what you’re willing to tolerate, which then facilitates the delivery of those qualities in your life.

There’s also a physical understanding of this. The opposite of “looking up” is looking down. This is a very common response when something doesn’t go according to plan, or you’ve been hurt in some way and seek to protect yourself. And that’s exactly what your posture is meant to do. Your closed body language creates perceived signals of protection and comfort that you seek. But the unfortunate byproduct of this is that it communicates to others that you don’t want to be approached, you aren’t friendly, and that they should keep their emotional and physical space.

Looking up opens that posture and invites people into your life. This means they can be a part of the solution and support you in necessary ways. It also means you’re looking ahead at what’s to come, representative of your intention to overcome the situation in the best way possible!

While it’s not the end all secret to life, do look up, because that’s the best way to keep going forward.

Full disclosure: This article is a product promotion for SKARA CBD Products. There are a few of reasons why I am choosing to support this brand. First, their leadership staff is made up of people of color, and I want to be more intentional about representing individuals with a different background than my own. And second, out of the goodness of their heart, SKARA leadership contributed $1000 dollars to the fundraising campaign I led to support racial integration and opportunity for under-served youth through Peace Players.

Over the past few weeks I have been a consumer of their product and can attest to its quality. I honestly have never used a single CBD product in my life, never a lotion, never an oil, and I’ve never smoked. And I chose to put the negative associations I have about CBD to try this out and I’m glad I did. 

The reason I believe this product is relevant for personal development is because it promotes internal harmony. It very subtly puts me in a heightened brain state that helps me to overcome procrastination, it narrows my focus, quiets distractions, and it seems to help me to approach challenges with more logic and clarity around how I want to move forward. 

Maybe I had a few good days and it’s a random correlation, or maybe not and there’s something to it. In any case I never felt high, I never felt uncomfortable, and I believe the product offers some real benefits.

I think many of us have the wrong expectations about purpose. We think it’s something that hits us in a moment, all at once in a life-changing way through some form of divine intervention or stroke of destiny. I believe that those things do seem to happen to some people, but the truth is, that divine moment is just the tip of the iceberg and there is much more to the story.

Purpose is not something that you receive, it’s something that you discover. The process of discovery is long, uncertain, wrought with challenges, and unconscious. Oftentimes all of the steps you’ve taken to pursue your purpose are not clearly evident while you’re experiencing them, but they make sense in hindsight when looking back on the path that led you there. Yes it’s a difficult, enduring, faith-based process, but it produces an unparalleled beauty that lights up the truest senses of your being and soul. It’s your unique journey, but there are many fundamental concepts that can accelerate your process once they’re understood.

Here is something you probably didn't know about me, I don’t love exercising. Even though it has been a fundamental part of my life, exercising isn’t something I particularly enjoy. There have been times when I’ve had fitness goals like running a sub 5 minute mile or bench pressing 275 pounds, but the joy I pulled out of the was the achievement after each session and not the act of doing it.

Despite not really enjoying exercise, I’m still very consistent about it, at least 3x a week and every evening with my pushups. But I don’t want to rely on my will power and discipline to get it done. I’d prefer to have authentic motivation and be pulled to exercise rather than forcefully push to exercise.

So, this is what I started recently. Anytime the idea of exercise comes up, I choose to smile and think, “Oh yay, I get to exercise today!”. It’s hard to do because it feels inauthentic, but my subconscious doesn’t know the difference. And with enough repetition it will eventually generate an excited, positive relationship with exercise. Or at least that’s my theory.

So, when I look at my calendar and it says “exercise”, I smile. When I start taking my first few steps on my run, I say to myself “Finally I get to run!”. In my goal sheet, if I write down ‘exercise’ as an action item, I put a smiley face next to it. It’s simply an adjustment of perspective that reinforces the identity I aspire to have. I think it’s starting to work!

I asked myself a timeless question, “When is it okay to quit?”.

Never! Come on, did you expect me to say anything else? You hear it all the time to never quit, never surrender, never give up! I think persistence is an extremely important quality to have, just like the little engine that could. And persistence, in the face of a challenge, will generate unbelievable fulfillment in your life. But, that’s not the end of it.

While it’s never okay to quit, it is always okay to move on. It’s a very subtle difference and it’s all about how you identify with the act. If you quit then you internalize how you didn’t have what it takes to meet the task. It has a very strong association of guilt and shame built into it. It’s not okay to treat yourself like that, so it’s unacceptable to quit. 

But, if you move on from something, you retain your power. You think through the current situation, evaluate the trade-off, and decide to do what you believe is in your best interest. Of course, you can be disappointed and upset by the fact that you’re moving on from something you care about, you should feel that way, but you don’t need to feel guilty or shameful for it because you cannot change the past. You can only do what you think is the right right thing to do moving forward, which very well could be to move on to something else.

Each one of us has our own tolerance and relationship with that trade-off between persistence and moving on. I firmly believe that it’s important to persist through difficult challenges because the discomfort in it will force you to grow. But, if something feels out of alignment, and you have confident awareness of that, it most definitely is okay to move on to something better suited.

We are energetic beings. We go through life securing resources so that we can add more energy to our spiritual, emotional, physical, and metaphysical being. But, it’s not like energy is simply acquired and stored in our bodies for the rest of our lives, it is constantly in motion and transferred from being to being to sustain everything around us. This is consistent with the first law of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it simply is changed from one form to another.

With that flow and transferring of energy there’s a really important opportunity here. And it’s that energy goes where energy flows.

We choose where we put our energy both consciously and unconsciously, but the mechanism works the same regardless of the level of consciousness you have toward it. You can be intentional and do some gratitude journaling, or you can be passive aggressive to a family member about an old issue. In both cases, you are allocating your energy and it will continue to flow in that direction in other ways of your life.

And this is the opportunity. You can decide where your energy goes. You can be selective about what you’re willing to tolerate within your life and assign energy to. And when you allow your energy to go in the positive, beneficial, fulfilling areas of your life, you will find that more of your energy naturally flows there and presents you with more life circumstances in alignment with that energy.

I am in Darren Hardy’s Jump-start program and man is he giving us the honest truth. When you think of personal development you usually think of discipline and hard work and grit, but in Jump-start Darren teaches us how to re-frame our focus and put our energy in the right places. The most important factor in taking positive action is consistency.

In fact, Darren calls humanity’s fatal flaw “inconsistency”, and the reason why so many people fail to be consistent is because we are all hardwired to seek immediate gratification and cannot rationalize the value of delayed gratification. This causes us to start and stop and start again, demanding so much effort every time we get moving because we have to break inertia, putting in an amount of work that isn’t congruent with the results we're getting out. 

However, there’s a secret to consistency that I think we all can appreciate. You don’t need to work as hard to sustain the same level of performance! Once you have things in motion, it requires much less energy to keep pace on the same trajectory.

The example Darren uses is a locomotive. That thing is heavy, and in order to get it going you need to generate a ton of force. Once it gets going, it just needs to be maintained and requires only a fraction of the fuel! Our results work the same way. As a byproduct of the actions we take to keep moving forward. The currency of these actions isn’t intensity, it’s consistency.

Do you want to know where 99% of all human productivity, motivation, and achievement is stored?

It’s in this mystical land called tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll wake up at 6am. Tomorrow I’ll start exercising every day. Tomorrow I’ll begin working on that project that I know lights me up.

It’s so easy for us to make plans for tomorrow because it doesn’t require anything from us right now. We can just stay in the comfort of non-action and in the ideas of what we want to do, because we'll get to it tomorrow. 

Well at least in my own experience, I know that’s not how it works. Tomorrow will be exactly the same. We'll schedule for the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and what we truly want to do keeps getting pushed off.

What can we do to shake out of this cycle? This is something I try to keep in mind when I recognize this slippery slope is starting to take place. I think of the quote, “Yesterday you said tomorrow.”

For me this is a powerful thought because we attach so much to our past. We reflect with disappointment when we look back at the things we could have done. We regret the time we wasted and the dreams that we neglected. It’s an emotional thought, and we can use it to trigger ourselves into taking responsive action, making today day one.