To live a fulfilling life requires bravery and a willingness to make choices and embrace the changes that may come with them, such as starting a new job, changing careers, moving to a new location, or making relationships. How can we have the confidence to make these decisions and believe that they are achievable?
In this episode, we are joined by Janet Langmeier, the founder of Phoenix Soaring International. Janet shares her incredible story and the philosophy she lives by that everyone is worthy of the life they desire. With over four decades of experience, Janet has helped countless people overcome their limitations and achieve remarkable success.
Join us as we learn from her wisdom and discover how we too can believe in ourselves and create the life we truly deserve.
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Believing in Yourself and Achieve the Life You Want with Janet Langmeier
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less, and one of the key themes of pretty much every episode of this podcast and how it all comes together, it’s all about the mindset. In order to achieve the life that you truly want, what you really desire, a truly joyous life, to quote my guest today, you need to believe it’s possible. You need to think it’s possible, you need to have the right self-talk, and you need to think about the right things. My guest today, Janet Langmeier, is the founder of Phoenix Soaring Intl and a facilitator of the Mastery Mindset Coaching Services.
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Welcome, Janet, to the program.
Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here.
Oh, yeah, thank you for coming on my podcast and for the workshop in which we met at a few weeks ago at the Mind Body and Spirit Expo. So, Janet, let’s start a little bit about your story because you’re all about what your self-talk is, what you’re thinking about, and what you really believe is possible and making it possible through your thoughts. Is there a background you come from that led you to investigate all these things and want to facilitate it for others?
That’s a loaded question, Stephen.
I know, I know. I was like —
Of course, the answer is yes but it’s not that simple.
Oh, yeah, of course. If it was just yes, this wouldn’t be a podcast.
Well, studying what we what might have been in my day considered esoteric things. I’ve always been interested in what drives us, what’s going on inside. The inside of life has always been very, very interesting to me from the time I was very young. And so reading things that a lot of other people didn’t read back when I was a kid opened my mind to think differently, I guess. I did a lot of the normal eight-to-five and what other people expect for a long period of my life, for enough decades that got that down, got that down really, really —
So you know what that’s about, fully know what the eight-to-five is about.
Yeah, and I had a lot of success but I worked really hard and I made some choices that were not easy because I was raising children at the same time and I was working and I look at the younger people today and the choices that they make and I just applaud how so often they know how to make choices that support their life as opposed to I felt like I had to do that, I had to do this, there was no other choice for me. And yet that didn’t align with the things I studied and the things I believed in. And, one day, you know, we all have our one day, right?
Yep.
Well, the one day that I really, really knew that something had to change, I was driving to a job that I was very good at and I liked and everything, I was on the Boulder turnpike, as a matter of fact, and I had my daughter in my ear, I was listening to her talking to me, and I get to the exit to go to my job and I started having a panic attack.
Oh my.
And my daughter could hear it and she’s like, “Mom, pull off the road, pull off the road,” and I’m like, “I’m a block from the office, I’m gonna park,” and, I mean, I just the whole full blown —
Yeah.
— and I just couldn’t believe what was going on. And a friend of mine texted me and I said to my daughter my friend is texting me, she goes, “Mom, hang up for me, she’s a doctor. Call her back right now.” So I did and she could hear my voice so she goes, “What’s going on?” and I told her and she goes, “Janet, turn the car around.” And I’m like I’m single, I have to pay my own bills, I have to take care of myself, if I don’t go into my job, for my car, nobody’s going to take care of me, turning the car around is not an option so I argued for my limitations. I was doing a really good job of arguing for my limitations because most of us have been taught to argue for our limitation and she just said, “Just take a deep breath and turn the car around,” and I heard her and I picked up the phone and said, “You know, I’m gonna hang up from you because I’m going to text my boss and tell her I can’t come in.” So I texted and said, “I’m here but I can’t work. I need to go home,” and I turned the car around and it was the most empowering decision I ever made in my life. Every mile closer to home, I was feeling better, I was getting stronger. So I made an arrangement to work from home the next day. This was before work from home was a work from home thing.
So this was before the pandemic or before…
Oh, this was quite a long time before the pandemic and so I’m sitting in my kitchen the next morning, all I have to do is walk down six stairs from the kitchen to the office and 10 minutes to the time to go online and go to work. I started having another panic attack. And I went this is tied to what’s going on. I’m not happy. I’m doing a job that I’m good at. I’m respected, I’m making money but I’m not happy and I knew it. I knew that it wasn’t filling me. In fact, I was working all the time. And so the short version of the story is I never went back.
So, what was the prelude? You have that one day and you said that you were in this type of job for a number of years, you were doing what was necessary, and this one day, you had the panic attack and then, all of a sudden, you couldn’t go back, but what about the year or two before that? Did you have signs in your head that you knew that you were unhappy, that something felt wrong? What did that feel like?
Absolutely. That had been going on for a number of years. I had been in a job similar to the one I was doing for a different company and I just was like at the end of my road, I’ve been doing that for a number of years and it was just grueling. And so this other company offered me a lot more money to do the same thing.
Yeah.
And so I wasn’t all that happy but you got to make a living, I said yes to the additional money. And here’s the thing. It didn’t matter.
I had so little life because I was working so much more. Click To TweetI was actually spending more money even though I was making more money. And I had less health. I managed to keep singing during that time, that was the only outlet that I found for myself, but other than that, I was literally getting up, going to work, coming home, going to sleep, getting up, going — well, that wears you out and that had been going on for a good five, six years before the panic attack day. Panic attack day was my body’s saying no more.
Yeah, that was when —
Because the body will eventually tell you, if you don’t listen to the little signs that come up —
Yeah.
— there were plenty of little signs that I ignored. Because what did I say? Even on the day that I’m having the attack, fear messages.
Yeah. I can’t go back.
I have to do this on my own. I don’t have any other choices. I was feeding myself all the things that were keeping me blocked from making a decision. Now, I’ve studied this stuff for years. I know what I’m talking about, but this was an opportunity to say how much do you believe in it? Do you know about it or do you know it?
So you’re talking about the difference between I’ve read something and I intellectually know this to be a fact versus I’m actually going to live by it.
Right. Absolutely true. And the truth of it is is that turning the car around that day was the beginning of that, but the very next day, it was like I can’t ignore this message. I know the truth. I know the truth. So that means trusting it. That means taking action on it. And, fortunately, my friend who is a physician wrote me a prescription that said you need time off, take a week. So she wrote me a prescription for a week off and I called my brother and I flew back to Wisconsin and spent a week with my siblings. My mother was still alive at that time, my father was gone. I went to his grave, had a conversation with him. Talked to my brothers and sisters, just had fun, but a really significant thing happened that trip back home. My sister who’s next to me, I’m the oldest of eight, we were going to meet at the park with one of our other sisters at this park by the river and so we were there waiting for her to come and she didn’t know my story because she didn’t know what had happened, I hadn’t told anybody, I just said I’m coming back, so I’m sitting at the park waiting, she comes in and she just runs up to us. She gives us a big hug. She jumps up on top of the picnic table and she starts spinning around going, “I’m free. I’m free. I’m free. I’m free,” and I said, “What happened?” she said, “I quit my job—”
Oh, wow.
So I jumped on the table next to her and I danced with her and I said, “I’m free, I’m free, I’m free, I’m free ’cuz I’m never going back,” and I didn’t know it until that moment. And we just looked and our other sister looked at us like you’ve both lost your mind and we had, we lost the mind that kept us trapped.
Interesting.
Freedom, we were like a couple of little girls dancing in the rain, jumping up and down in the puddle and having fun. You want to talk about joy, the freedom that we were both feeling was unbelievable. And I didn’t know how because the how gets in the way, that’s why we get stuck, I didn’t know how I was going to survive, take care of myself, or whatever, but I knew that what I was doing was not going to fill my soul and it wasn’t going to make me happy and that earning money isn’t all there is about life. Do we need money? Yes, I’m the first person to say that. My mortgage company likes it when I pay them every month. But it’s more than that and it’s breaking away from the fear. We think we have to know how it’s going to happen instead of knowing that it will. I came back from a week with my brothers and sisters feeling completely renewed, clueless, but still knowing that something has to give inside. Something has to give. And things started to just show up and I had an opportunity to take a class, which was going to be way more money than I could possibly have thought that I could do but it was going to allow me to start moving into this kind of work. Now, I’ve been coaching and mentoring in the corporate world most of my adult life. That’s the kind of work I’ve done. I’ve done training and coaching, teaching, that kind of thing, sales, all that. And the notion of Janet Langmeier could do this without having a corporate umbrella was terrifying to me. And when I looked at, you can’t spend that kind of money, you weren’t even earning any money. And guess what? I did it anyway. I did it anyway. I did it in face of the fear because I knew that somewhere, somehow, things would start to show up because I was starting to listen to the voice inside. And it did. I finished what I needed to do, I learned what I needed to learn, and I realized I’ve been studying this all my life and it all started to come together. It took me a number of years before I wrote Mastery Mindset Coaching. I taught a lot of other programs that were similar in nature as far as the core coming from what you think is who you are, what you think is what you become, but I finally wrote it the way that I think about it, which is really all of us are talking truth, we are talking it from the way that we hear it, the way that we speak it, and that was for me a very big thing to do and then to start like stepping out and doing it that way. But once you surrender the how and recognize what is the what, what is it that you are looking for, what is it that you want to experience, you may not know exactly how it all comes together. Well, great, because that’s the whole point of having a joyful life, living an ordinary life in an extraordinary way. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be Jonas Salk.
And when my father passed away, I was trying to think of what to say, to do a eulogy or whatever, and what I did is I said very little. I got up and I said, “I just wanna thank Dad for a few things. I wanna thank him for rigging the bingo games in every single one of our birthday party so that every kid could go home a winner.” And this was back before — now, my grandkids, when they have parties, all the kids take goodie bags home but when I was a kid, that wasn’t the way it was. When I was a kid, if you won the game, you got the prize. I could see my parents. They had a code. Mother would walk around and see who didn’t win and she’d give him the code and he’d pull a number and he’d magically pull the number that that kid needed to get bingo. And that game wasn’t over ’til every single kid hollered bingo. Now, that’s living an extraordinary life so I had to acknowledge that. I thanked him for loving our mother because, this day and age, so few people have that all the way through their life.
For sure.
That the parents love each other at that in that way. It was an extraordinary thing but it’s an ordinary thing, isn’t it?
Yeah.
And my dad in 1976 came home 10 days before there was going to be a little parade in one of the small towns, I come from a very small area in rural Wisconsin, and he came home 10 days before the Fourth of July parade for the Bicentennial and said to my mother, “I think I want a clown for this parade. Could you make me a costume?”
A clown?
He became a clown, an amateur clown, and the first time he did it was for the parade for the Bicentennial in 1976 and he amateur clowned the rest of his life ’til he became very ill.
Interesting.
And he learned how to do magic tricks, he did all kinds of things and when I stood next to my mother in his wake, and saw kids, there were so many kids at his wake, you can’t believe it, and I heard these stories, right? I thought what an extraordinary thing he did. It was so ordinary, he just became a clown, because he thought it would be fun and he loved children. He would go to the hospitals, he’d go to the nursing homes. I mean, because he said, “Everybody’s a kid. Everybody’s got a kid in ’em.” And I heard these wonderful stories. So I thanked him for making all the kids that we knew, not just his grandkids, but all the kids that he knew happy.
When we live our ordinary life filled with joy, it makes our life extraordinary. Click To Tweet
That’s amazing. I had a similar recent ordinary extraordinary experience this past Saturday. I was at Happy Camper in the Highlands neighborhood in Denver and I was ordering a rum and Coke. I saw a bunch of people at another table with a flamingo straw and I asked the waitress about it and she says, “Oh yeah, that’s the straw we give with our Flamingo drink.” There’s some sort of like crazy cocktail, but then she offered to give me that Flamingo straw that I was so excited about into just a basic well rum and coke. And I got it and I got some amount of joy from it, even though it was something as stupid as just this little straw that probably mostly appeals to seven-year-olds or something like that.
When you allow that kid in you, the part of you that still enjoys wonder, and we do —
Yeah, for sure.
We all do. And when we give ourselves permission to do that, that takes whatever we’re experiencing to a whole another level and that’s what I call living extraordinary. But you have to commit to it. You have to be willing to claim it. You have to be willing to say it’s okay for me to do that and for someone like me who’s basically been kind of a serious person most of her life, I have to give myself permission to let go of those ideas of what does it mean to be the oldest of eight children, what does it mean to be a mom or what does it mean to be a grandma or what does it mean to be a coach or what does it mean to be a teacher, just fill the blank in, it just means live in that space and be as present as possible because it’s fun. I wouldn’t give up any of those roles, I love them all. I don’t have to live them with that crease here, I can live them with this one, with the smile, with the joy.
So what prevents people from getting into that goofier mode? I feel like there’s a societal narrative that comes from somewhere, maybe more prevalent with some groups of people than others, that prevents people from allowing themselves to be really goofy. People who won’t do something like play the air guitar, which is something really basic, really goofy, you’re just enjoying the song, you’re just going to play this little air guitar, but I’m sure there’s plenty of people out there that don’t feel like they have the right to do that, that it would somehow damage their reputation to do anything like that in their lives because they’re supposed to be seen as a serious professional.
The belief systems that we hold, and these beliefs, sometimes we’ve learned them from the people around us, sometimes we’ve learned them from experiences in our own life, sometimes we’ve learned them because we’ve read a story, it doesn’t matter where we picked it up but once we decide that that’s the way it is for us, then that’s how we take on our life, right?
Yeah.
So I think I had a belief system that I had to be a serious person, I had to be seen seriously came up through the time when women were not taken seriously in the workforce and you had to be twice as good as a guy to get a job.
So you need to make up for that with your seriousness and constantly showing it.
That’s right. I mean, I didn’t get playful ’til I was a whole lot older where I didn’t care as much. But it doesn’t matter how old you are. I see young people sometimes holding themselves back, being afraid to make a mistake. I won’t try it until I already know how to do it. So much has stopped us from experimenting. We look at people at the peak of their performance so often and so then we think I can’t be seen learning how to do it because that’s not how it’s done. We don’t get examples of what it takes to get to the peak of our performance, we get examples of the peak of the performance, which is fine but it stops so many people from having to use that eraser on the top of their pencil, right?
Yeah.
There’s a reason that it’s there. So I think that we build these belief systems and then that holds us back and we don’t try.
I went whitewater rafting the first year I lived in Colorado.
Oh nice. I love whitewater rafting.
I’m so happy that you love whitewater rafting. It was a deliverance experience for me, okay? It was the scariest thing that ever happened. There were two rafts, we were coming down the Arkansas and the raft behind us capsized and the guy, one of the guys in the raft had a heart attack and we all had to get off the raft to get to the shore and we had to have him helicoptered out. I was white knuckling it the rest of the way down the Arkansas River. Have never whitewater rafted since then, but at least I can say I’ve had the experience, right?
Yeah. I mean, I have fallen out of a raft on the Arkansas River myself, but it wasn’t helicoptering someone out of a heart attack, it was the guide, I was going guided tours because that’s a lot safer than just trying to do on your own.
Yeah, we did guided, yeah.
They got us back out to the shore and got the boats and everything like that and we were able to continue on our mission, although I did lose my sunglasses.
Oh, I’m so sorry. I did kiss the ground when I got out of the raft. But what if you didn’t try it? What if you just heard the story? You and I have both gone whitewater rafting, you loved it, I’m hesitant.
Yeah.
But what if we didn’t try it? Because you heard my story, you never tried it. You heard your story, well, you know, it sounds like, you know, he lost his sunglasses. I mean, who knows?
I mean, yeah. Some people get deterred by something simple like that. They’re like, “Oh, it’ll be such a hassle. I’ll have to go back to Ragstock and buy another pair.”
What are you thinking about? Are you thinking about what an exciting experience it would be to learn how to have this experience to go whitewater rafting? Or are you thinking you have to know how to be a whitewater rafter? In fact, you’ve got to be a guide before you can take anybody and do it. Well, they don’t think about what it takes to become a guide. That person probably has capsized many times —
Oh, for sure.
— before they were able to do that.
The guides have conversations amongst themselves. There was one group I think I met once that said, like, “Yeah, our group of guides, the first one to capsize for each season has to buy a round of drinks for everyone.”
But see how different of an attitude that is. When we give ourselves permission to make mistakes, when we can start to look at where are we thinking, what is going on, when we think we’re afraid and we think we’ll be laughed at, when we think we have to be serious, whatever we put in, somewhere underneath of that is another message that says, “I’m not worthy,” another message that says, “I’m not good enough.” Those messages are buried deeper so we might have surface messages but underneath of them are these kind of consistently deep messages of, “I’m not worthy of having…,” fill in the blank. One of the deeply held belief systems that we often all have in common and they show up in different ways for different people.
“I’m not athletic,” okay? “I don’t really enjoy sports.” Those are the layers before you get to the, “I’m not good enough.”
That, “I’m not worthy,” I see it often in people who say, “I don’t dance until I have at least three drinks in my system.”
Because what’s going to happen? Some of those layers go away. The alcohol allows them to let go of those belief systems, those preconceived notions, and they stop thinking about how they look and they start just letting themselves enjoy.
And a couple of times in this podcast, you brought up the needing to fill in the how before doing anything. Is this another manifestation of this whole, “I’m not worthy”? Like is it someone saying, “I’m not worthy of having this until I have written out a detailed business plan with 30 pages and I’ve covered every single checkmark of every single possible risk and done an environmental impact study on my laptop usage,” and all this other stuff?
And I can tell you that even if they did all of those things, there would be more.
Yeah, something else will come up. So as soon as you say —
Something else will come up.
— “I’m not gonna launch this business,” or, “I’m not gonna start this initiative,” or, “I’m not gonna reach out to this group of people I’m excited about until this…,” but then once this happened, they’ll say, “Oh, but I didn’t think about this yet. I didn’t think about that yet,” and that’s going to keep coming up as long as there’s this underlying belief that you’re not worthy essentially?
Right, because the underlying belief is way down and buried. In fact, some people would even deny that. Oh, of course, I’m worthy. I mean, look at it. And at the same time, not, so you can do all those things you just talked about and then it would be, “I don’t have the right outfit to wear,” “Well, I’m too heavy,” “I’m too tall,” “I’m too thin,” “I don’t know enough,” “I should probably take another class,” “I really should invest in this before I spend that.” I mean, it doesn’t matter, when we have a consciousness of lack, whatever it is, lack isn’t always about money, although money is one of the ones that comes up, lack is almost always about how we think about ourselves. I lack the feeling of worth. Most of us, “Well, no, I’m a worthy person.” Well, a worthy person is not the same as having a belief system that I’m not enough. We’re not talking about having an ego, talking about underneath, there’s this underlying story that somehow or other has been implanted and we all hear that story in different ways, but, at the end of the day, they come down to a couple of similar messages, “I’m not enough,” “I’m not worthy,” “I’m not lovable.” “I’m not lovable,” is another one that’s really big and if I go out and do this, other people might not like me.
So I’m thinking about like back to middle school where it shows up in its most raw, immature form. They say, “Oh, if they find out I’m friends with that person, they’re not gonna think I’m worth being friends with them,” or, “If they find out I wear this shirt, I like this type of music,” all those like real surface level stuff that people stress out so much about at that point in their lives.
Yeah, middle school is like the ugliest version of it, in some ways. Gay Hendricks in his book, The Big Leap, talks about one that a lot of people don’t mention but I see it all the time, the fear of outshining. So, underneath of it is, “I think I’m really good at this but nobody will love me if I outshine them. If I look bigger than, if I look —” because we’ve been taught in a very subtle way any kind of bragging is wrong, anytime you speak up to really like try to shine, you should, you know, don’t outshine other people because people who do that are braggarts, they’re not real. I have a son, a professional boxing referee —
Oh, wow.
Yeah, I know. Certainly not something I knew that he was going to become but it was a lifelong dream of his to become that, and before he became a professional boxing referee, he boxed. Now, as a mother, watching your son in the ring, not an easy thing to do. I don’t like watching him hit someone and I don’t like watching him get hit, either one. I’m better at watching him ref but even that’s a little bit rough for me sometimes
Things can still happen to the ref. Things get crazy in there, for sure.
Well, and it’s just being in that environment, but he would get up there in the ring and you’ve got your opponents right there in their corners and he would be very cocky and I’d hear people around me saying, “Well, look at that guy. He’s so cocky.”
Yeah.
And he’s just, you know, “He’s so full of himself,” and he’d come out there and he’s a small man, my son’s a small person. I mean, he’s not a featherweight, he’s probably a middleweight, but, anyway, so he’s getting all out there, bumps himself around and whatever, and got clobbered. I mean, the first fight I went to, literally he was bleeding. He got clobbered. He didn’t win and I heard all these people going, “Well, that’s what happens when you’re out there and you’re so full of yourself.” Coming home from that fight, I was just listening to him and I said, “You know, can I ask the question about how you are before the fight in the corner?” because I’ve never seen him fight before, that was the first time, and it was really hard for me. And he said, “Mom, if I go out there thinking I’m gonna get beat, I’m gonna get beat. I’m beat before I put myself in the ring.” He said, “I’ve gotta go out there and believe that I can take anybody. I am like cock of the walk. I am the best fighter in the world. I can take a hit, I can give a hit. I’m going to come out of this victorious.” And he said, “I know people think I lost the fight today.” He said, “But I’m victorious because I was in the ring.” He said, “It isn’t bragging. It isn’t being bigger or better or brighter, it’s being prepared.” And I went to his next fight, his second fight, and there was, this little banty weight guy, he’s just doing the same thing and I heard the same kind of conversation. He won that fight. They were no different. I felt a little better.
Yeah, for sure. I mean…
And he gave me, actually, you can’t see it here but he gave me the trophy from that fight. He said, “Mom, I want you to have my first trophy because I want you to remember it ain’t bragging when it’s true.
You gotta go in there being prepared to be in that arena and do the best you can be. It isn’t about winning or losing, it’s about showing up and doing your best. Click To TweetWhat makes most people have a negative reaction to other people showing off?
It’s the message of this isn’t how we behave. We’ve got norms. We have norms. This isn’t how we behave and when people break norms, it’s uncomfortable. We don’t know what to do with it. And so we’ve taught ourselves being humble is the way to behave. When we see somebody stepping out of doing that, we either applaud it because we’re glad somebody’s got the courage to do it, whether it works or not, or we shun them for it, but we do one or the other. When we find out who we are and it comes down to what are we thinking, where is our mind, if you know your truth, if you know that you are a wonderful human being, if you know that there’s something in you that’s for you to live in this life, because we’re all here with a purpose. Our purpose, as I said, doesn’t have to be Jonas Salk. What if my purpose is to be happy? What if my purpose is to be a good mother? What if my purpose is to enjoy my family? What if my purpose is to have the best whitewater rafting trip ever? Because I can share that joy with other people. One of the questions I get a lot when I’m coaching is, especially clients who say, “My dream is to have a loving relationship, I really want to have a partner in life but it feels so selfish.”
Yeah.
And I’m like what’s wrong with the dream of having a loving relationship? “Well, that feels like my — I feel like my purpose in life should be bigger than that.” So think about this for a minute, Stephen. If you’re walking down the street and you see an older couple holding hands and talking and thoroughly enjoying each other’s company, does it make you smile?
Yeah.
Yeah. Don’t you think they’re fulfilling a purpose right there? Because you’re seeing somebody, when you see a young couple in love and they can’t get enough of each other’s company, they’re just learning about each other, doesn’t it make you smile?
Yeah.
Happy relationships make us happy.
Yeah, I’d say the same thing with like friendship groups too, right? If you see six people all sitting in a table and they’re just laughing it up and just enjoying stories about interesting experiences they’ve had or funny observations amongst each other, like as long as they’re not staring at their phones, joy is brought to me by that.
What you’re talking about is that these experiences are not isolated, they’re not just for our selfish enjoyment. We actually share it out there and other people look at it and it gives us permission to go look at it, “That’s for me. I want a friend group like that. I want a relationship like that. I can do that.” And it gives us permission to let go of this, “I’m not worthy.” “Well, he’s doing it, I can do it.” But that takes a shift in our mindset. That takes us being willing to say, “That’s for me, let me claim that good.”
And how that happens is the very thing. You see six people having dinner together, I want that, then claim it and you will bring it into your life simply by the beginning of being willing. Now then you might have to take some steps. Maybe you have to go places where there are people The brain is electric, the heart is magnetic so we are electromagnetic beings. When I shift my thinking, I open up to draw that in. So even if I didn’t make the phone call and invite somebody to a movie yet, just the fact that I’ve shifted that gives someone else permission in that energy field, if you will, to realize you’re more open, maybe I’ll invite you to a movie.
Someone listening right now is hearing this message and saying, “Yeah, I wanna change my energy. I wanna be open to receiving whatever it is,” whether it be a new relationship, a new job, new adventures, new business opportunities, new clients, all this stuff, what can someone listening do right now today, as soon as they finish this podcast, to start changing that energy, changing that focus and getting out of the whole idea that, “Oh, if I want something, I’m selfish, and if I have something, I’m flexing, and these are all bad things,” and get to the whole, “I’m worthy, I’m gonna just live my life and fulfill my purpose”?
Make a decision.
Everything starts with a decision. Click To TweetYou have to make a decision. That’s what it takes. You decide. Decide means to cut away, right? You decide to cut away what doesn’t serve you, you decide for yourself. Once you make a decision, you’ve changed that whole signal that’s coming out of you. I’ve decided for myself. From the decision, other things happen. Things show up. It’s the strangest way to explain to people who want to be in control that the decision is actually the beginning of letting go. The decision for yourself is the beginning of surrendering to your truth, to your inner self. But you have to make that decision first. And then when you do, you cut away everything in your life that doesn’t serve what you’ve decided for, but once you make that decision, opportunities will show up and you have to support that decision by making that decision again and again. Bob Proctor used to say that the decision is 95 percent because your attitude that you use to make that decision is 95 percent of being wherever it is you want. The other 5 percent is the easy stuff, but making that decision, so if you’re sitting there and you’re listening to this podcast and you don’t know, if you can feel that you want something different, decide for it. Literally, simply decide for it. And then take one step, one small step in service of that decision. That one small step could be, I always say make a date with your decision. Put it on your calendar. Say, “Okay, today is Wednesday. I’m gonna do this Friday. If I’m getting out of my isolation, I’m gonna go see a movie on Friday with a friend. I haven’t been to a movie a long time but I think I’m gonna go see Air.”
Actually, I do like those — I’ve seen the previous for that movie. It does look really interesting.
Well, I loved basketball and I have seen many of the greats play because a company I worked for, we had box seats so I saw many of the greats play, the one great I never saw play in person was Michael Jordan.
Oh, really?
I know. I saw Dr. J, I’ve seen Kareem, I’ve seen a lot of the greats. I saw Bill Walton play. I saw — his name just went out of my head — Bill Russell play. These are old guys but then I’m an older woman. But I also saw — come on, help me out, played with the Celtics for years.
You’re talking about Larry Bird?
Larry Bird, yeah. I couldn’t pull his name up but I can see his face. But I never got to see Jordan. And I lived in Milwaukee. Can you believe it?
Oh my gosh. You were so close. That surprised me quite a bit because in Chicago at the time, that was like what everyone talked about.
Oh, yeah, for sure. So, anyway, but I mean, you make a date with yourself. You make a decision, do something small, it doesn’t have to be big. A lot of times, we think everything has to be a grand gesture. We can’t do it like you were talking earlier, you got to get the whole business plan put together. No. If you’re looking at you want a business, then take one step. What’s that one step? Maybe it’s calling someone who’s doing a business like that. Whatever it is for you but you have to give yourself permission and take one small step in the surface of it and none of that happens until you make a decision. That’s the first thing.
Yes, so you make a decision. It’s actually odd. I went to my first business networking and entrepreneurial meetups about five years ago when I had no idea and nothing really that I had any passion about, no idea to really present, I just knew I want to be around the energy of people that are trying to solve problems as opposed to the energy of people that just complain about problems.
If you’ve got that kind of curiosity, you’re going to be around people who are curious, who will help you to learn more and stretch you more. If you have people around you who aren’t curious, you’ll spend less time with them. Some of those people are people we really love but they’re not necessarily people who are going to be that part of you. My daughter taught me many years ago, she said, “I don’t know how anybody can only have one person in their life,” because everybody brings something different to you and no one person can bring you everything. They can bring you a lot but if you really want to grow, you want to learn from a lot of different people and you choose. The Dalai Lama talks about sacred friends. He says we all should have friends in our life. People who are easy to love. We all have people who are easy to love and we want people who are easy to love. And then we have people who are what he calls sacred friends, maybe not so easy to love but sacred friends are very, very important to us because sacred friends show up to show us a part of ourselves that we’re ready to heal. They show some place in us to grow. So that person who’s driving too slow and you just can’t get past him, maybe that person is teaching you patience. They don’t even know they’re offering you a sacred friendship right there. The uncle that drives you crazy at Thanksgiving or Christmas or whatever, may not be aware of the fact that this is an opportunity for you to learn to be more loving, more accepting. You don’t have to like sacred friends, you don’t have to spend a lot of time with them, but whenever you come into a situation where someone in your life is sort of coming up against what you’re feeling and you’re going, “I don’t want this and if they would only change, I would be fine,” the minute I hear myself thinking that, I know this is all about me. And learn from that, embrace that, thank that energy, thank — you don’t have to say thank you to the person but you can thank the energy of what they’re bringing up for you. This is an opportunity for you to grow at a whole another level. We spend a lot of time pushing away what we don’t want. We don’t have to bring it into our life but when it’s there, it’s being presented to us, there’s an opportunity for us to mirror and look at what is it that is responding to me. You and I both could meet the same person and I could be like, “What a wonderful, lovely person,” you can be, “God, how can you stand being around that person?”
Yeah.
Right? Because something in that person is showing a mirror to you that it wasn’t showing to me and vice versa. And when that happens, you recognize this is my opportunity for growth. This is my opportunity to be grateful that I’m awake enough that I can recognize this. Most of us don’t, we just run around blaming or we run around wishing somebody else was different. If you think about that, if you take that out a little bit further, do I really want the responsibility of everybody living the way that I think they should live? What a, number one, boring life that would be and what a heavy burden that would be.
To try to control everything.
Yeah. Life is too hard to live but many of us live under that control, that kind of internal control, because we’re so afraid of what you said earlier, the impostor syndrome. They’re going to find out how unworthy I am.
Is part of noticing this stopping yourself from being distracted all the time? Nowadays, we’re distracting ourselves with these devices everywhere, people have other forms of escape, whether it be always being drunk, always being high, always being tuned into like five other things. Is there a certain amount of presence that we need to work on in order to realize, make the decision and make our lives more joyous?
Well, the obvious and short answer of that, of course, is yes. And then, well, how do I do that?
Just breathe in, breathe out.
Literally breathe. I mean, literally just take a deep breath, because it shifts state. Now, there’s a lot of different ways that I teach about changing states. Breathing is the easiest and most available to you at all times. There’s several different — listening to music, taking a walk in nature, physically just moving your body, like just literally moving your body, as simple as standing up if you’re sitting down, change state, but the easiest and most accessible and the best possible way to get a result is to just breathe. Take a deep breath, shift by letting that air out, you can let your mind and all the energy around it because you can get really like a lot of, you know, like…
Yeah, your mind is buzzing on like 15 different things, you’re like…
Right, and so many of our devices and things keep us, like you were talking about being high or being drunk or being tied up with devices. It’s really too hard, like we are so afraid of being still, we keep ourselves going. Breathing will stop it. Even if you’re high, breathing will stop it, right?
I’ll have to try that someday.
It will slow it down.
It’s weird, like I’ve been high and trying to speed it up by doing planks. I’ll have to give that a try.
Well, I can’t relate to high because I haven’t gotten high but…
But, yeah, all the mechanisms of the way we distract ourselves, like —
They’re all about distraction, you’re right.
Yeah. I mean, obviously, we’re trying to help people reduce the amount of time they spend in front of computers and phones, it’s become so prevalent these days, but I just —
Well, part of that’s a choice, back to our decision.
Yeah.
One of the things I think we lose, especially in our fast-paced life, is that we have choices. We always have a choice and that may be as simple as take a breath and slow down for one second, I may not be able to make the big choice to leave this job this moment, I may not be in a place where I can leave this marriage or this relationship this moment, I may not be able to change my eating habits in this moment. If I have to lose X number of pounds, that decision to lose those pounds doesn’t drop them all in that moment, but the decision gets you to that place, right? And how do you get to the decision? Take a breath, stop, allow yourself to be present, as you said earlier, be present with that thought that’s trying to get through to you. Your inner self is always telling you the truth.
Before that day you had the panic attack on the Boulder turnpike, there was always those thoughts that were trying to get through to you and so if someone wants to prevent themselves from getting to the point of having that day, whatever form it shows up in, it’s about breathing and saying, “What is my body, what is my mind trying to tell me at this moment?”
That’s right.
Definitely.
Many people already know, our intuition never lies to us. Our intuition always knows, always knows the truth and all of us know this. We have all listened to and then thrilled with the synchronicity of intuition and all of us have pushed it aside and went, “Darn, why didn’t I listen to that? I got that little hit before,” right?
That’s what I’ve been working on for about a year now. It’s been one of my initiatives is to trust that intuition.
Intuition is your inner self talking to you. It’s the part of you that knows your truth. Click To TweetRemember we talked about, you have this inner truth. It’s always there. But we get really good at drumming out with noise, with getting high, with getting drunk, with having devices, with having work, with having busyness, all these things keep us from hearing what never stops talking to us, no matter how loud we get. And that’s why we’re afraid to breathe, that’s why we’re afraid to be present, because we might hear the voice that we already know is there by giving it a little life. You get fire a little air, what does it do?
It expands, it blows up.
Right, there’s a fire in you always, always, always, there’s a fire in your soul always. Give it some air, give it some breath, give it some space, and it will always lead you and then you have to let it unfold. When you make that decision, when you make that what, that’s the what decision, the how shows up. The difference is when the how shows up, are you willing to take a step with it? Because sometimes it shows up not the way you thought it was going to.
We could probably have a whole another discussion on that.
Oh, yes.
For sure. But, yeah, I just want to wrap this up. Janet, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes and telling us all about how we can go about really believing that we’re worthy of the life we want, the purpose that we know within our intuition that we’re meant to serve in this life and bringing it into fruition because everyone out there listening, first of all, thank you for listening, thank you for tuning in again if this is not your first time and I encourage you to tune into Action’s Antidotes for more stories, more interesting discussions, but my final message to everyone out there listening is that you are worthy of what you want, if you have something going on for you, don’t be afraid to flex, don’t worry about all the haters that are saying you shouldn’t be talking up your this, talking up your that, and if you want something and it’s not like something, I don’t know, excessively mean-spirited, if you just want to have a nice life, if you want to share great moments with people, if you want to have a great business, it’s not selfish to want that. It’s not selfish to want to do something like that with your life.
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About Janet Langmeier
Janet Langmeier, founder of Phoenix Soaring Intl and creator of Mastery Mindset Coaching, is a dedicated Spiritual Explorer, studying and teaching transformational principles for decades. As a Master Coach, Janet blends spiritual principles with practical real-world application in her coaching and teaching. Throughout her career, Janet has helped people to successfully transform their lives in the areas of career, education, relationships, spirituality, body image, and health. No stranger to the work of transformation, Janet’s ongoing personal journey to full spectrum abundant living is the driving passion behind her desire to coach and help others. Janet’s coaching programs, workshops and retreats help people break through limitations and achieve greater results than they’ve known before.
A highly sought out speaker, Janet is also a contributing author to four books, 3 of which are Amazon #1 Best Sellers: Short, Sweet & Sacred: Uplifting Stories from Life Coaches Who Overcame and Moved from Stuck to Success, Hold My Crown: Women of Grit Share Stories of Resilience, and The Badass Within: Stories of Strength, Hope, and Courage, and Happiness Matters.