Reinventing Yourself Book Review

Hello and welcome to episode number 10 of the Strategy Corner, where our goal is to get you to take action. I’m your host, Michelle Zink, the owner of Intentional Solutions Corp. Today we are going to do something totally different, no single strategy today, but a book review. Each 10th episode I’ll be sharing my favorite books and what I love about them. My first book is Reinventing Yourself: How To Become The Person You’ve Always Wanted To Be by Steve Chandler. First let me tell you about Steve. Steve is the author of 30 books, a master of success coach, founder of the Coaching Prosperity School and public speaker. Steve Chandler is known as America’s notoriously unorthodox personal growth guru that has helped thousands of people transform their lives and businesses. I read Steve’s book reinventing yourself three times, and each time I learned something new, I actually learned about Steve from my coach Theresa.

She always says, “Once for information. Twice for transformation.” So for me, since I’ve read it three times, I don’t know what that means, but I do know that Steve’s books are amazing. They’re short to the point. That’s why I love them so much. The chapters are just really easy to read before you go to sleep or when you wake up. He writes very simple and direct and he gets right to the point. So the big thing for me is when I read a book, I love to get something from it. Even if I’m only reading for 15 minutes. And from Steve, especially in this book, you could just read it for maybe two minutes, like a few lines and you’re actually going to walk away with something that you’ve learned, that you can try. So his books are always to me providing feedback and all while also providing you with things that you can actually implement in your life.

And so I love to read his books because they’re just full of information to take with you and to utilize in your life that particular day. I love this book so much that I’ve actually recommended it to several clients and they have found it extremely valuable book in their learning. So this book is all about being an owner or a victim. Steve starts in the introduction to say, “Owners give all of themselves to what they’re doing. They pour all their energy into the current moment. A victim is someone who sees power as something beyond his or her control. Victims have a habitually, lonely and pessimistic way of viewing and describing world and its people. And although this victimization can often last a lifetime, it’s only a habit. When it’s understood, it can be quickly replaced.” So what I love about that is when he says that being a victim is only a habit, and when it’s understood, it can be quickly replaced.

That to me is monumental, right? Because it’s not something that you have to live with your whole life. And personally I notice I fall in and out of victim. It could be daily, it could be hourly. And so now that I’ve read the book and I really have become in a practice where I notice if I’m being a victim, I’m able to snap out of it quicker. But the thing is is that it’s only a habit. So we have a habit of becoming negative or pessimistic, but we can change that. So today what I’m going to do is I’m going to share my favorite excerpts from the book, and by doing this you’re going to see how valuable this book is for you to buy and really study, right? Because again, I’ve read it at least three times, not because I didn’t get the information, but because every time I read it, I find something else more valuable to focus on.

Okay, so now we’re going to begin again, I’m just going to share excerpts. So here is the first excerpt I’m going to share. “[inaudible 00:03:41] beautiful losers. They risk all. They are losers because they have lost all fear of embarrassment. They have lost all inhibition, they have lost all concern for what other people might think.” To me, what stands out in this excerpt is they have lost concern for what other people might think. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time not thinking about what other people are going to think about things that I’m going to do. So in this situation they’re saying owners are people who don’t think about what other people might think about. What they’re saying, what they’re doing, they’re authentic to themselves. It says here that they have lost the fear of embarrassment. So it really means putting yourself out there and not being afraid of what people think of you.

Okay? The second one. “You can set yourself free by changing how you talk to yourself about your capabilities. The greatness you see in others is also in you. I promise you that you can find it inside you. No matter who you are, no matter who you’re inventing yourself to be.” So again, this is talking about nothing is permanent. It’s talking about that you’re free to choose who you want to be. You’re free to live the greatness that you want to live, but it is a choice.

Number three. “Keep in mind that you are many people. You can be whoever you want to be with patience. You have inside you still more astounding human creations waiting to be made up.2 So the owner is someone who is reinventing themselves all the time, is looking to see who they need to be in this next situation, who they need to be, what owner they need to be in a new business venture. They’re always looking to find out inside themselves who they need to be and they’re always looking to recreate themselves.

Okay. The next one. “An owner will change his personality on the spot in order to keep a commitment. A victim will break any commitment in order to keep his personality.” Okay. What does this mean to you guys? To me it means, I don’t know about you, but there’s days when I don’t want to do things. I have on my calendar to let’s say go meet a friend or go meet a business colleague for coffee and maybe the thought is I have too much to do and I don’t want to go, but in this situation, the owner goes ahead and goes and meets the colleague, goes ahead and continues to move throughout their day and do the things on their calendar, even if they don’t feel like doing it. A victim on the other hand will break that commitment in order to keep their personality.

So it could be, well I’m just the person who doesn’t like to have too many things planned throughout the day and so you’re going to go ahead and utilize that as a example or a reason for you not to keep and adhere to your schedule and not meet the person. Because maybe you had two or three things earlier that day and you just, you’re not someone who does four things in a day. So realizing when we say things or we believe things, how they can be a victim thought and how if we open that up and became more of an owner and realized, well, I’ve used to think that I only do four things in a day, but now I’m seeing my capacity is larger and I have the capability of doing five things in a day. So I’m going to go ahead and continue to meet with that individual that I have scheduled on my calendar. So it’s about, again, choosing to be an owner, not just allowing past thoughts or past ideas of who yourself is to hold yourself back from moving forward.

Another passage. “Happiness is growth. We are happy when we are growing. You can notice this for yourself. You’re happy when you’re growing, are you not? And no growth you’ve ever made has ever been effortless.” Okay. Two things here. We think we always want to be comfortable, but in reality when we’re growing, we’re always feeling better, more whole, more adventurous, more living in the moment. And then no growth you’ve ever made has ever been effortless. So I know that the people who listen to this podcast are owners and their executives. So I know you’ve made growth happen in your lifetime and I know that you also have experienced that it’s not effortless, right?

When you decide to grow, it takes a lot of effort. That’s why a lot of people tell you to focus on like one big goal for a year or one big thing in a certain amount of time because the energy it takes to create that growth is overwhelming. So by really focusing in, you’re able to create the momentum and get that growth you’re looking for, but it’s not effortless. So if anyone ever tells you that to grow is comfortable, they’re lying to you because growth is not comfortable. It’s uncomfortable, but it also creates happiness. It creates exuberance, it creates excitement when you’re growing.

Okay. The next one. “If you will first say yes to the things that are important to you then saying no to what’s not important will get easier and easier.” Let me say that one more time. “If you will first say yes to the things that are important to you then saying no to what’s not important will get easier and easier.” This goes back to in the first couple of weeks when we talk about scheduling your calendar, it’s very easy to just say yes to everything and then that’s where we create this overwhelm where we’ve got so many things on our calendar that we don’t have enough time to actually complete any of them. So what he’s saying is if you say yes to the things that are important and you have those things on your calendar, then it’s really easy to say no, right? Because if you already have something scheduled there that’s important and someone asks you to go to coffee or lunch and it’s not really important to you right now, you could easily say no because you already have something else planned.

So by being an owner and saying first yes to the things that are important to you, it does allow saying no to become easier. So I think we should all try this one because I know for business executives and owners, people are always wanting your time. And so by being really great about first saying yes and then allowing yourself to say no to the things that just aren’t as important, will really help you to get control over your life and your calendar.

Okay, the next one. “The insanity starts when no goals, plans or commitments are ever made and people you don’t even care about are taking all your time.” So this again is just about saying yes to the most important things. The most important people. So this way you have space to actually connect with those that you really love to be around. And then you have space to say no to those that you don’t want to be around. So just make sure that you’re putting your time and effort and your energy into things that actually do matter to you.

Here’s another one. “Owners let everything and everyone become their teacher.” So for me, this means that no matter what happens in your day, you’re able to learn from it. It could be a positive, it can be a negative, but there’s always a learning involved with anything that happens in our life. And an owner sees those as teachings. An owner doesn’t say, oh my battery won’t start and my day is going to be ruined and I can’t do anything and my life sucks. They’re going to say, okay, let me slow down here. My battery isn’t working. They go ahead and take care of it. And in that time they realize how they can make this a teaching.

Maybe they notice something was wrong with their car the week before, but never took care of it so they can learn to be ahead of the things. So if they see something that doesn’t seem right to take care of it, they can also throw this into a teaching of utilizing that time while they’re waiting for someone to come and fix their car, to take care of some things on their calendar or their to do list. So utilize the moment to actually get ahead instead of just wallowing in the issue of their problem at hand.

Okay. “Practice is the most important discovery in the history of human achievement, but in our culture, we ridicule it. We minimize its power. We try to avoid it, even though it’s only practice that will give us life we want.” This is so important, this whole idea of practice. For me, it’s been a life shift. I’m someone who used to be a perfectionist. I’m a recovering perfectionist. I always wanted to get everything just perfect. And in reality, if you’re growing and developing yourself, you’re not going to get everything perfect and you don’t want to, right, because you want to get things wrong. That’s how we grow and learn. So for me, practice has become such a powerful tool for my brain to just say, let’s just play with this.

Like if I have an idea or I have a thought or I want to create something, I just say, let’s just play with it. And what’s like the one thing I can do? And through practice it really helps you to create what you want to achieve. I know there’s probably a lot of golfers out there and you know that you can’t just go out and play golf and be really good at it. You’ve got to practice and when we see people in our community or people who are very successful, we tend to look at where they are now, but we don’t look at what they’ve done over the last maybe year or five years to actually get there. The practice they’ve had to do in order to become a great speaker, in order to become a millionaire, in order to become a great baseball player.

Practice is the key to getting you whatever you want in life. So let’s not minimize it. Let’s go ahead as an owner and realize the value in that. And when we’re feeling stuck, just remind herself. We have to practice, we have to play play in order to move forward.

Another one. “True giving does not focus on the return. It focuses on the giving. The giver gives without condition and then moves mental energy right away to the next person to give to and never looks back.” So have you guys ever tried this where you gone to Starbucks or maybe Dunkin Donuts and you’ve paid for someone’s coffee behind you? If you haven’t, I would recommend you try it today. It is very exhilarating and it’s amazing how fun it is to pay for someone else’s coffee. So when in this quote it says, true giving does not focus on the return and that’s exactly what you’re doing when you’re driving through a coffee shop drive through and you don’t even know the person behind you, right? You’re not going to see their reaction when the person who takes their money says, no, you don’t owe me anything. The person in front of you took care of it.

It’s just doing it to do it. Okay? There’s no specific return that you get from that individual, but the return you get is a positive and abundance mindset for yourself, which helps you move throughout your day as a more abundant person. So please try this. Go and do something really great for a person and then don’t look back. It could be a friend. Maybe send them a book and don’t even think asking them how they liked the book. Let them come to you and tell you about the book. It doesn’t matter if they like it or they don’t. You did the act of kindness and sent them a book or send a card to a friend just saying hello or send a business executive that you work with some flowers or a bottle of wine or some chocolates just because, and don’t even look back. Just keep on going. If they respond back to you, wonderful. If they don’t, they don’t. But again, it’s all about focusing on giving, not focusing on what you get back from it.

Here’s another one. “So how do you change a victim? See the owner in them, stop making them wrong.” For me, this is a big one because now that I have been studying this owner victim mentality and the owner victim mindset, I can spot a victim from far away. And what it helps me to see is that by approaching a victim and then telling them where they’ve made things wrong isn’t helpful. So I have a couple victims in my life, and instead of going ahead and telling them where they did wrong, I try to focus on what they’ve done right.

For example, when we talk about the practice, this doesn’t come easily to me by not telling them what they did wrong. My personality, it seems like would rather focus on what they did wrong and to share that with them. But I have learned through practice that that isn’t helpful and it just makes them more defensive. So by me focusing on what they’re doing right. I have seen a change in the victims that I deal with on a daily basis and I see them becoming more owners only because I’m focusing actually on the items and activities they’re doing that show them as an owner. So this is a mind shift change and it’s not easy. It does take practice, for you to really just bite your tongue when you see a victim acting like a victim. Just bite your tongue and to see the opportunity to showcase where they’re being an owner and see how that relationship could change for the better by focusing on the good, not the bad.

Okay. “The more I feel that I’ve been done wrong in the past, the less there is of me to do right in the future.” I’m going to say it one more time. “The more I feel that I’ve been done wrong in the past, the less there is of me to do right in the future.” So this is saying that an owner doesn’t have the space to do right in the future if they’re acting like a victim and they’re feeling that they’ve been done wrong in the past. This is where you have to let go of those negative thoughts of the things that have happened to you in the past and rewrite them more into an owner mindset. So for example, if you had an issue, let’s just say with an employee, where the conversation, you felt, didn’t go right and that you felt was a hindrance to the relationship of the two of you working together moving forward. You have the ability as an owner to rewrite that conversation, to make it as one that was practice.

It was just something that you had practiced and you learned how to better approach the individual. You’ve learned what to say, what not to say to them. And so the next time you’re going to do even better in the conversation with your employee and you’re going to create more of a results driven conversation based off of the conversation that you learned from. So that’s where you can flip being a victim saying, oh well that employee just doesn’t understand. That employee isn’t dedicated to the organization, yada, yada, yada. You can change that into an owner and say, I again, it’s you. You can only change yourself. I took away from that conversation, great learning opportunities that I’m going to utilize and put into our next conversation to make that one even better. Right there, you’re already thinking about how when you talk to them next, the changes you can make and about creating them into an owner and yourself into an owner.

Okay. “You can replace any pattern or behavior or thought with another. All it takes is relentless practice. You are not stuck. I’m not stuck. We are not lost in the fabrication of who we are.” So this again plays into the last quote. You can replace any pattern or behavior or thought with another, right? And it takes practice. So it just makes you realize, again, you’re in control. And so if you have a negative thought towards an employee or towards your boss or towards your spouse, you have the choice to change that from a victim into an owner. So why not?

Okay, we only have about three more to go. Here’s the next one. “Should actually reduces your motivation every time you use it. Should is the most self defeating word in the English language. It’s like a tranquilizer to the spirit.” I know you’ve all have experienced this when you think, oh, I should have done this, I should have done that. I’ve heard people say, you’re shoulding all over yourself. You know it really just brings you back because it shows you that, oh, I should have done this. Something you didn’t do. And so it already makes you behind, or it makes you feel less than who you are because you should’ve done it.

So when you utilize the word should, you can practice changing that word like I decided not to because maybe the thing that you allegedly shouldn’t have done or should have done, you really didn’t need to do. So you can choose not to do it or you can choose to do it, but do it like this weekend or do it on Friday instead of Tuesday. Just changing that small shift from should to I am going to or I decided not to makes you an owner, not a victim.

Okay. “Understanding and mastering how you speak to yourself as the most important project you could ever take on.” Again, this goes back to you have the opportunity to practice how you talk to yourself. You have the opportunity to become an owner, but it takes practice. So understanding and mastering how you speak to yourself is the most important project because you’re the most important person in your life and the more that you talk to yourself in an owner way, the more you’re going to show others how to be an owner. It’s something where it’s a trickle down effect. So if you’re an owner, then the people underneath you will start mimicking that. They’ll start living in the owner mindset, not because you specifically told them to be an owner, but you’ve showed them when an owner really does, you have utilized and spoken the language that is made up of an owner mentality.

So they just naturally see and utilize how you’ve spoken to them, to other people. And so that whole ownership mentality gets brought down to your employees, to your children, to their children. So it’s a great thing to master because when you master it yourself, you’re actually helping others to master it as well. Okay?

“The fire can only start on the inside, not the outside.” So this is saying you can’t buy something to make you feel good. Again, you can’t buy something to make you feel good. It starts on the inside. You can only make yourself happy from the inside and then that comes out to the outside. But if you go and you decide, I’m going to buy an iPad, that iPad isn’t going to make you feel ambitious. That iPad isn’t going to make you feel powerful. That starts on the inside and you have to create the energy within yourself.

Okay. Here’s my last quote. “Make a decision today to take possession of the most powerful weapon there is in the battle against a sad life. That weapon is called practice.” So if there’s anything that we’ve learned here through reading all of these excerpts from the book, you notice that again, it’s practice. It’s not about beating yourself up that you became a victim. It’s not about looking to your past and saying, oh, that shouldn’t happen that way. It’s not about shoulding all over yourself. It’s about noticing when you make these victim word choices, when you make these victim actions and then deciding from a place of ownership that you’re going to change that. And the more that you slow down and you notice when you’re falling into that victim role, because we all do, no matter how well I practice this, I always can fall into a victim role.

And so again, I don’t beat myself up. I just notice where I have and then I go ahead and change the story. I change the wording so that I can become a owner and choose my destination in life. I use this book for reference when I’m looking for inspiration or need to get back on the owner train. The thing is we all, no matter how positive and owner like we are, we are always going to have times when we need to hit the reset button. Where we have turned off course and this book is just the prescription to get you back on track. Okay, so now it’s your turn. The call to action this week is for you to buy this book and I’ve got a link to the Amazon website so you can go ahead and purchase it. Now you don’t have to buy it, but if you felt like this book was speaking with you, I recommend you buying it and putting it in your library.

It’s one that you can again read five minutes before you go to bed, five minutes before you wake up. Or excuse me, five minutes when you wake up. It’s a great resource book and something that you can utilize and read every day and actually learn something every day. Please go to iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play and subscribe to the Strategy Corner. You can also go to my website, intentionalsolutionscorp.com and sign up to get my weekly blog post, which also has a link to the latest podcast. And again, I’ll have a link at the bottom here for Amazon, so you can purchase the book directly from there and start reading it tomorrow if you want. Until next time, remember through action and growth, progression happens.

Let’s take action together.

Thank you and create an amazing day.