2022 June 28 Change is opportunity

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Thanks for joining me tonight for a quick reminder, that above all, change is opportunity. So let's get started. 

First we have the regular reminder that I am not a medical professional. The things I'm talking about are things that I find useful and helpful in my life. If you have a true, real emergency and something where you feel truly helpless or depressed, please seek professional medical help, or just dial 911, or you can dial (800) 273-8255. Starting in just a couple weeks now, onJuly 16th in all areas, available in many areas now, just dial 988 to connect with immediate assistance. Good to know for yourself or for a friend. 

Tonight is going to be a bit of an extemporaneous night. Life doesn't always go as we expect, so these things happen. In this case it was because work ran really late, but the reasons are many, and they're always new and novel. Something always comes up. 

This reminds me of a number of years ago as in an executive MBA program at RPI. I did not finish. Nominally that was because of money, but now looking back, I can see that it was because my mind was keeping me safe. That's a whole different episode, but I did attend a number of classes and then did attend the final graduation day. I was invited, which was really sweet. 

One of the biggest takeaways was from a very busy physician who was in my class, and who was also going for her MBA and raising a family. She said she truly felt that she was living life pretty efficiently, to the point she would bring textbooks with her and read them in the checkout line at the grocery store.

She was really trying to take advantage of every minute. Then she finally realized that you just can't always get everything done on your to-do list. Sometimes they are really important things. You know what she learned - she said, was the skill of really prioritizing what was on her list, doing the most important things, and then actively choosing which tasks she was willing to just set aside, possibly forever.

It's very difficult to do, but sometimes it's necessary. The corollary to that is, sometimes in the face of no apparent opportunity for success, you have to just decide that failure's not an option, and you have no choice but to create your own opportunity for success. That's really the topic for tonight.

As we all know, these are very changing times. There's a world war going on in Europe, and it's in progress now. People believe it isn't happening, but it certainly is. There are near constant attacks, and the most basic values and things like common courtesy and civility now are almost viewed as some form of weakness.

The economy's pretty much unpredictable at this point, which means that investment and savings are questionable. The job market is completely disrupted with the working from home and people moving away. But then in other ways it's returning to core values of the past.

There's change, it seems, everywhere and in every way. That's the secret,  because in change, there is opportunity. Change is only scary if you lose faith in yourself and in the future. If you can believe in yourself and your core values of happiness, then change is just change. It's not intrinsically bad. It's just new. 

When new things arrive, there are new opportunities. At one level, we all know that, but there are many forces around us. Every established, old style business and political viewpoint, those are things that stand to make money, but telling us that change can only bring bad things. That's just not so, even if it takes us a little time to understand and embrace the effects of ongoing change. 

If we remember to be true to our core values, and we examine change in terms of what truly matters to us, we are in a position to take advantage of the good parts of the change and avoid the pitfalls, whether it's changes in social media, travel, or health. Most of us have a pretty good idea of what feels right.

And it's worth keeping versus the same sort of hollow promises we've seen so often before in our lives. So now it just becomes a matter of as always living our life in harmony with our goals and principles, envisioning the future we want to create, and our minds will work to make that vision a reality. Most of what is presented to us as a huge change is, in reality, just minor adjustments to how we live.

If we keep that underlying viewpoint in mind, keep that perspective, and look for the new opportunities that appear all around us every day, every change that we could be worried about turns into a new opportunity to live our lives as we want to.

Think about all the people leaving the cities to work remotely.  The other side of that change is that, although many of the cities are having troubles from that, many of the small towns that were dying out are having a great resurgence and growth. A real return to nature, truly a real green revolution, where your food is truly local, and you can walk to the store because you don't have to drive 30 miles, and a return to strong family relationships. This is only one of the very many examples of what's being touted by the media as a horrible change. It's killing all the cities and it's really bad. That's only one perspective and, in reality, has many benefits. 

You cut down on the commuting You automatically cut down on the pollution and your carbon fuel usage. If you live in a nice small community, now you get to know a lot of people. When you get to know them, then you can share ideas. When you find new ideas that contradict your own, you can learn how to embrace them, learn how to deal with them. You actually have communication again, and that brings peace to yourself. 

Like we've talked about in so many contexts, it is up to us to decide how we want to react to our world and the world around us, and that will determine if we are happy or not. As we said last week, being pulled forward into happiness is the most effective and lasting way to find true happiness.

That's the whole point of envisioning the future that we want: pulling our brain's vision forward first, then will allow our brain to pull us forward naturally. If we envision how we want our interpersonal lives to be, then we will tend to live our lives in a way that our vision becomes a reality naturally, with joy, and that will happen no matter if the world stays the same or continues to change in ways, both big and small. 

So that's it for the evening. Thanks for stopping by. Stay healthy. Care for others. Remember to care for yourself so you can always be at your very best. 

And of course, please remember the war that's going on in Ukraine. Maybe it's not in a lot of the news, but it's going on in many horrible ways. As always, if you're able and interested, the page of donation links is still up at UKR7.com.  There's a lot of humanitarian aid places, a lot of more direct action places. Remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. So if you can, or if somebody's else is asking, please point them to UKR7.com and that will help them find ways that they can get involved in a way that they feel comfortable with.

As always be true to yourself, live your life aligned with your true goals and feelings. Thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting and useful, please pass it along. If not, drop me a comment on what you'd like to hear about. Have a great week. Thanks for visiting, and remember to live the life that you dreamed of, because that is the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone, and see you next week on 7EveryMinute  and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.