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ReImagine VIP - Commentary

Okay, welcome to the additional audio commentary for this month’s lesson. I’m going to talk about the topic in more detail, in more depth.

One of the things I want you to do as you go through the reimagine process, when you go away somewhere you take your personal retreat and you do all the activities I mentioned, think about all these things, I want you to be radical.

Radical means very, very, very different. I want you to think really big. I want you to try to think of crazy amazing seemingly impossible changes to your life. This process is not about small little constant improvements.

Constant and never ending improvement is important, as we’ve discussed already, but the reimagine process is about vision. It’s about; what do you want to constantly and never endingly improve? What direction do you want to go in your life? How do you want to totally change it?

You know what? There are always areas in our life where we have settled, where we have become complacent, where we think well this is not great, but it’s okay. We settle for mediocre.

We don’t’ want our lives to be mediocre. Sometimes when our lives are mediocre in some area it just seems like a lot of work to try to change it, or it’s just really easy not to think about it very much. People do this a lot with their work.

If you have a job you hate, you are motivated to change usually. Some people do stay with jobs they hate for years and years, and that’s a tragedy. Probably more common is the situation where people stay with a job that’s mediocre or a career that’s mediocre.

It’s not horrible, it’s not super painful to them, but it’s also not inspiring to them. It’s not wonderful, it’s not great. It’s just kind of okay, so-so.

People usually start those kinds of jobs or careers thinking they are temporary. Well I need some money so I’ll just get this job and eventually I’ll get something much better that I really love. That’s okay; sometimes you do need some money right now and if that’s the case fine, but the danger is you get stuck in mediocrity.

The danger is that you just continue in that mediocre so-so, okay situation month after month, year after year. It’s just kind of easy, it’s not too difficult. You’re comfortable doing it.

It’s also been boring, it doesn’t challenge you, and it doesn’t make you feel great and inspired either. Those are the most dangerous situations. When you’re in pain, for most people you eventually will take some action just to get out of the pain.

When something is just mediocre it’s easy to become numb. Numb means to have no feeling. You just don’t have any feeling at all. There’s no pain involved but there’s no pleasure involved either – it’s just so-so.

This happens in relationships. You get stuck in a relationship. It’s not a terrible relationship, you don’t fight all the time, you don’t hate each other and nothing terrible is happening, it’s just not a wonderful relationship.

There’s no passion, no excitement, no surprise, no romance. There’s no spark, no fire.

You continue along just kind of mediocre.

It can happen in any area of your life and in fact for most people we have some area in our life where we’ve gotten a little lazy or we haven’t focused on it very much in awhile and we’ve settled for mediocrity.

It happens to me too. It happens to everyone. That’s why having a reimagine retreat every year is so important, because you need some time when you get away from all your little mediocre routines.

You need to change everything, break all your patterns, escape everything that’s normal in your life, and then look at it. Examine that life bit by bit, in detail, looking at every little part of it.

That’s where you can really be honest with yourself. You can say health is important to me. I’m okay, I’m not in bad health, I’m not in pain, but I’ve let myself gain a little bit of weight and my energy level has dropped a little bit. It’s just not great, it’s not fantastic, and I want fantastic.

You have those realizations when you get away from everything that’s normal, all your normal routines. When you’re stuck in your day-to-day routines – getting up, going to work and seeing the same people – you often just don’t see these things.

It’s easy to get stuck in a lot of mediocre situations and not even realize it. That’s why this is so important, at least once a year. It’s very, very powerful.

There are many different ways you can do this. Let me tell you about my own personal experience, how I do this. I’ll tell you because I’ve done many, many of these reimagine retreats or sessions in my life. I do them every year.

Recently, I’ve been doing them more frequently than that and guess what? My life has been changing, growing and improving much faster lately. Over the last five years I have learned more, done more, grown more, experienced more than I did the previous 20.

This process is a big reason because I’m doing this now twice a year, three times a year, every three months sometimes, quarterly. I keep myself always pushing and growing and pushing and growing and it’s fantastic. It feels wonderful.

You’re not doing this for another person, to show off or to get somebody else’s idea of success. You’re doing this to keep reminding yourself of that wonderful, fulfilled, happy, ideal life and purpose that you want to live.

It’s easy to forget it it’s easy to get distracted by all the other things in life so doing this reimagination process just brings you back and reminds you again. Let me tell you some of the things that I’ve done.

One of the first times I ever did this was at a time in my life that was very tough. I’d just broken up with a serious girlfriend that I really loved. I had moved to a totally new city where I didn’t know anybody, and in fact I really even didn’t like the city. It was kind of miserable.

I had just quit a job that I hated and was getting ready to go to a new job. Lots of big changes were happening in my life and I felt the need before starting that new job of getting away from all of that craziness and all of that chaos and all of that difficulty.

I wanted to get away from it all and just calm down and think about my life, and think about okay, what do I want in my life? What direction do I want to go? What kind of person do I want to be?

I was feeling that the events, the external events in my life, were controlling me at that point. I was just reacting to stuff I wasn’t really planning and deciding myself.

I did something very simple. I have very little money at that time, no money. I decided to drive my car down to Florida. It’s about a 10 hour drive I think. I just drove my car down to Florida and I went to a town I’d never been to before. It was this old Spanish town.

I stayed in a youth hostel, in a little bunk bed like a dorm. All I did was just walk around.

I took a little boat trip where they took you out and you could see dolphins, that was my little activity I did that was different, and I started doing something very important, something I still continue to do today

This was probably 14 years ago, but I continue to do this great habit, and that is I started writing a journal. I’ve mentioned that in other VIP lessons, the power of doing that.

What I did is I started writing a journal. I was writing a journal and just all the things I mentioned to you in the video I started doing. I started thinking; what do I have in my life that I don’t want anymore? What should I get rid of? I made a list.

I thought about what in my life in general, situations, people, my own behaviors do I want to get rid of? I made a list. I started imagining, what kind of life do I really want?” This probably was the very small seed of my current life. It started and planted then, all those years ago.

I didn’t say I want to start an English teaching company and help people all over the world and I’ll do it on the internet. Of course I didn’t think about all of those things at that time that happened later.

What I did realize was I want to have a life of freedom and fun and adventure. I want to be free, fun and adventurous guy. That’s the kind of guy I’ve always imagined myself being. At that time, I was really unhappy and super serious.

I started writing about all these things and what it did is I got a picture of the life I really wanted. I got a picture of the kind of person that I really wanted to be. It wasn’t a perfectly clear picture, I didn’t know all the details, but I had a general feeling this is the kind of life I want; this is the kind of person I want to be.

You know what? Within a year’s time after doing that I started on a completely amazing different life. I quit that second job after just a year, I lived in my car for a summer as an adventure, and then I moved to Japan to teach English in a small town in Japan. All that happened within one year after doing this process.

From that point my life has been so, so different. It has been adventurous. I have travelled; I have become a more interesting adventurous person. It just grew, and grew, and grew from there.

You can see from this example when you’re having a tough time in your life it’s a good time to do this process also. Sometimes when you have a lot of bad stuff happening in your life you get overwhelmed you’re like oh my God, you’re just reacting to everything.

It’s really helpful to get away from all of that for awhile. For me that first one was just a weekend, it was just three or four days I think. It doesn’t have to be long, but you must get away from everything, that’s very important. And you must do that whole exercise of writing and thinking about those things.

Of course, travel itself can be this way. I did a big trip to India and Nepal, about a year later after what I told you about going to Florida. A year later I did a trip to India, Nepal, and Thailand. It was very long, it was like three months.

That trip – wow, it totally broke all my normal patterns right? I’m in totally different countries; I’m moving around, nothing was the same as it usually was. I continued writing my journal and I thought about those same questions again.

That led me to do other things. It led me to take some other very, very big risks and to make some big changes in my life. I took a lot of big risk and I made a lot of big changes, again going through the reimagination process yet again.

That second time helped me to realize I wanted to be a writer and a communicator. For a short time I became a travel writer, I wrote freelance travel articles. That’s when I started writing a blog, and the blog eventually became a website, two websites, because I wrote about my personal travels and then I had another blog about my English teaching experiences and ideas.

That English teaching blog eventually became a website, and that eventually became Effortless English. It started there, it started again with another reimagination retreat, getting away from everything and in this case a totally strange and different place for me, and again thinking about those same questions.

What am I grateful for? What do I want to get rid of for my life? What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of life do I want to have?

Another way you can do this, and I’ve done this recently, is you can go to some kind of powerful, intensive, self help seminar, a personal growth seminar. It needs to be intensive. I’ve been doing that lately and that has caused me to make huge changes.

For example, I’ve gone to several Tony Robbins seminars. (Inaudible) and I went together to all of these. During these intensive seminars four or five days, you’re totally focused on your own life and your own beliefs and your own habits, and what do you want from your life? What don’t you want from your life anymore? How can you change those things?

The great things about these kinds of seminars are they give you actual tools. They teach you psychological methods and techniques for changing your limiting beliefs, and for creating new powerful beliefs. You learn strategies and ideas.

You also are around a lot of totally new people that have the same focus you do. It can be very powerful. That’s another thing you can do is find some kind of personal growth, personal development or leadership type seminar, go to that and think about these same questions.

There’s not a right or wrong answer. Try all of these different things, I have. It just depends on my mood, depends on the opportunities. If I don’t have much time I’ll just do a weekend somewhere, if I have more time maybe I’ll do a seminar, maybe when I have a lot more time I’ll do some big trip to a strange place.

I mix them all up. This is the way for you it’s like the compass for your life. We get off track, we get off of our path for whatever reason, and when we do a reimagination retreat for ourselves, it’s like we look at our compass and say oops oh no, I’m off my path again, I’m not moving towards my purpose, I’m not becoming the person I really want to be.

When you do this process it helps you steer back, to come back to your path again. It puts you back in the right direction. It’s very important.

You know you get homework every month. Time for your homework. Do this. That’s it.

Do it. You just listen to this and you think oh AJ, that’s a great idea, that’s really interesting. It’s really interesting what you have done AJ.

I’ll do this someday, maybe I’ll do it. If you just do that – no power, nothing happens.

This is not an idea to think about, it’s an action to take. You will only get the amazing benefits when you do it.

Don’t make excuses – I don’t want to hear your excuses. Oh I’m busy, I can’t do it, I don’t have money. You don’t need money all you need is a weekend. No excuses do it.

This is your life, your life. You owe it to yourself to do this.

Chose the life you want. Oh my God, I shouldn’t have to convince you of this, right?

Some people get stuck in patterns, stuck in their routine and this sounds like some big thin got do. It’s not a big thing, it’s an easy thing.

My first one I just jumped in a car, I drove, and went to a new place. I did it in a weekend, and I drove back. It doesn’t require much time or money. You can camp, which is free. You just gotta do it.

Do it, do it, do it this month. Schedule it and then do it. Do it alone, don’t bring your buddy don’t bring your wife and kids, just you. Do it.

If you’re really brave, if you’re strong, if you really want the benefits, after you do it, get on the VIP site and share what happened. On our VIP site we get lots of nice little comments and I put links to nice inspiring videos and so do other members, that’s great, but I’m not seeing very many VIP members sharing their experiences doing these activities.

I’m guessing it’s because a lot of the members aren’t actually doing them. They’re listening to them, they’re thinking oh that’s really interesting, oh that’s a great idea – great ideas only change your life when you take action upon them, when you actually do something. No action, no results.

I know I’m saying this again and again, I wish I could say this 10,000 times. Do it. Don’t think about it, don’t appreciate what a great idea this is, don’t appreciate what I AJ have done, how fun it is to listen to this – that’s not important.

What’s important is that you take these ideas and you do it, you take action. Action, action, action is the key. Go and do your personal retreat and then share it on the VIP site because when you share it you’re helping other people. Other people will read it and say wow, I really should do that myself too.

They will take action in their lives and their lives will get better too. That’s leadership, showing you care. By sharing your experience you’re helping so many other people, that’s why it’s so important to please do it.

I will see on the VIP site, have a great day. I love you, thank you. Thank you for listening to me, thank you for letting me teach you. The best way you can think me is to just do it and live an incredible life. See you again. Bye-bye.