“Just think positive. It’s all in your head. Look on the bright side. Just write a better story.” Who here has had one of these cliches spoken to them and it just pissed you off or deflated you? It feels so affirming and even offensive to an honest experience and feeling we’ve had. The events we experience in life are…our truth. They happened and we were there and what we experienced is just, true. And yet right there is the problem, and opportunity. What we experience is just how our brain processed the event. As you’ll hear in this episode, two people are in the woods and a bear walks past their camp. One is ecstatic about experiencing a bear in the wild while the other is terrified of the possible danger because they had a friend who was hurt by a bear. What is true? They saw a bear. The rest of the experience is just what they thought based upon their personal perceptions. This is our life. A bit of fact and the rest we make up around it. With that in mind, we have the opportunity to question what we think and feel and work to consider a bigger and more reasonable reality than our negative propensities often manufactures. This isn’t just an idea, this is brain science, and my guest is Michael Hyatt and this is my fourth time having him on the show. Michael was CEO of Thomas Nelson publishing and today is a prolific author of wisdom and leader and mentor to a lot of the celebrity guests I’ve had on this show. Michael has had several New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling books, including Platform, Living Forward, Your Best Year Ever, Free to Focus, The Vision Driven Leader, and Win at Work & Succeed at Life. But this new book written by him and his daughter Megan, is top shelf for me. The book is called Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts with Your Thinking. But I ask you to wait right there. This again is not just another pithy swipe at just trying to put a silver lining on things. You’re going to hear Michael site scientific research on how our brain literally takes any incident, let’s call it an objective reality, then your neurons go to work concocting a story around it so you can make sense of it, but what is really mind blowing to realize is the primary story your brain goes to work creating is a story that will protect you. This makes sense evolutionary when you are literally often in survival mode. But if you truly grasp that life is happening and your imperfect brain, and we’ll get into that, goes to work doing what it can with what it has, which is not everything needed, to create a story that protects you in the moment. This is why you hear a friend or your spouse tell a story of something you both experienced it and you are sitting there wondering what on earth they are talking about. You were there and that is not at all what happened, right? Well. It’s not right. Or wrong. It’s the story your brain wrote. And if this is the case, much of the trauma and limitations and negative beliefs we have about ourselves in reference to what we have experienced, or what we think we have experienced…are in question. And maybe, we are capable of more. This is the episode. Get Michael’s book you also get his MIND YOUR MINDSET COURSE for free, it’s normally $479. mindyourmindsetbook.com/selfhelpful. The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices