Formula for Life Recovery

The speaker discusses the importance of self-reflection and self-discovery in breaking free from cycles and finding one's purpose. He emphasizes the need to examine one's thoughts, beliefs, and emotions and step outside of one's comfort zone. He shares a personal dream about overcoming darkness and encourages listeners to see challenging times as opportunities for growth and transformation. “Sometimes, when you are in a dark place, you think that you are buried, but you are actually being planted.” This is Mindset with your host, inspirational speaker and author, Jerome Bowser. Hello and welcome to our podcast. I am very excited to be with you and I'm looking forward to change in your life. I want to talk to you about the formula for life recovery, the formula for life recovery. You know, I want to tell you something. You are here for a reason. You might not understand it. You might not feel that way. It doesn't always look that way, but I guarantee you, each and every life that comes on the face of the earth is here for a reason. You are here for a reason. You are here for a purpose. And until you discover those things, you'll find yourself alone, going in circles, looking for an exit. It's like a never-ending cycle to nowhere. And to break free from this cycle, you have to put on the brakes and begin a mission of self-reflection. Now, self-reflection is not something everybody wants to do. Self-reflection is not something everybody seeks after. You don't wake up in the morning and just decide, oh, you know what? I think I'm going to reflect on my own self. But I want to tell you something. Self-reflection is something that is absolutely necessary. If you find yourself in a cycle that just goes round and round, and it seems like you can never get off of it. Do I have any witnesses out there tonight? There are times when you feel like you're just going in circles. There was a song like that a few years ago. You got me going in circles. Up and down like a silly circus clown. I mean, I know! I felt like that many times myself. But here we are. And I want to help you get off of that cycle. But self-reflection is one of the keys for sure. Let me say this. Self-reflection can be intimidating. Some may be afraid of what they might find out about themselves. And that's a very big possibility. But the Bible tells us that God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind. So fear not. For within each of us lies the potential to uncover our true calling and make an impact on the world. You must make the effort to discover yourself. It's not going to happen by osmosis. It's not going to happen just because I'm speaking to you. It needs to happen because you need to see that you're at the dead end. You may feel like you're at a dead end. There is no left or right or no straight ahead. It is like either I get it together or I'm going to sink further in or I may not make it at all. But you have to make it from the perspective of a self-discovery. Self-discovery is a journey which can be filled with uncertainty. It has requirements attached. It's going to require three things for sure. It's going to require you to have introspection. Introspection is the study of your own mental and emotional processes. You got to check out your own mind, all right? The next thing is that it's going to have exploration. Exploration is the practice of examining your thoughts, your beliefs, and your emotions. A lot of times we have beliefs that are limiting us. We call that in psychology, “limiting beliefs”. These are beliefs that you have that keep you contained in a box. Beliefs that won't allow you to step outside of that box and see what's on the other side. You've got to understand what I'm saying. There are some beliefs that you may have that I can't do this. Or maybe you've heard people tell you you can't accomplish this. Maybe you have a dream that you shared with somebody and somebody was trying to tell you, Boy, you know you can't do this. Girl, stop thinking like that. Those things can't happen to you. Where are you going to get the money from? How are you going to get the resources that you need? People will tell you all kinds of things to stop you and hinder your dreams. Those are called limiting beliefs. So you have to have an exploration. Practice the examination of your thoughts, your beliefs, and your emotions. Keep yourself in check at all times. I know that's hard to do. That's even hard for me. I'm not going to lie. I don't always have all my emotions in check. I am getting better at it every day. I am conscious of my thoughts. I am conscious of what I believe. I believe more positively today than I did last year or the year before that. And I plan, God willing, to have a better and stronger positive mindset next year. You know what I'm saying? You have to progress. Believe that you can progress. The last thing here is a willingness to step outside of your comfort zone. Sometimes we just get so comfortable living right where we are that we won't move. We're comfortable at that. I just can't get over the fact that I spend so much time staying in a box, staying contained, staying chained to one way of thinking that my life should be. When I down realized that I could have had years of ecstasy, years of greatness, years of whatever, it just released from being so self-contained simply because I wouldn't come out of my comfort zone for a fear. For a fear. You understand what I'm saying? Oh, when you're in a dark place, you know what? It's easy to feel overwhelmed. Feeling overwhelmed by the weight of your circumstances can be an incredibly challenging experience. It's as if life has thrown a heavy burden on your shoulders, making it difficult to move forward or find any sense of relief. Hmm, I've been there. The weight may come from various sources, and I've had it come from multiple sources. First, it starts within you. It's a personal struggle. Sometimes it's professional challenges. Sometimes it's relationship issues or even external factors that go beyond your control. It can even be difficult to see beyond the darkness. It can be difficult to see any purpose or growth in such challenging times. But just like a seed buried deep within the soil, there is potential for something beautiful to emerge. I've been blessed throughout the years of having spiritual dreams. I remember my first one like it was yesterday, and I was about 10 or 11 years old. But my second one is the one I want to talk to you about because it falls right in line with what I just said. My second dream, it didn't last that long, but it was very impactful. It was very significant to me. When I came to a consciousness in this dream, I was in an extremely dark place. I was on one knee, crouching down. Everywhere I looked, it was dark. I turned to the left. I turned to the right. I looked behind me up and looked down. It was so dark, I could not see where I literally was. I could not see what was going on in front of me. I could not even see the next step. What I did see, way in the distance, was what looked like a tiny pinhead of light. I focused on that tiny, tiny pinhead of light. Somewhere inside of me, I got a resilience. I got a strength. I got a courage to go and take one step at a time. Believe me, I took baby steps because I did not know if there was no other place to step in front of me. That's how dense the darkness was. I inched my way. I don't know why I didn't get on all fours. Something just told me to stand up and walk. Walk through the darkness. I wish I had somebody to understand what I'm saying because you may be walking in darkness right now. I'm trying to encourage you the best way I know how through my own personal experience. This experience had me inching step by step towards that white light. The most remarkable part about this dream is that with every step I took, the little pinhead light got wider and wider and wider and brighter and brighter. The brighter it became, the more conscious I was of its presence and the more courage I had to take bolder steps towards that brightness. That went on until I got to a place where I literally ran into that light and I was completely bathed in the light and I never saw that darkness anymore. That is a spiritual dream that was telling me about where I was personally, where we were all, spiritually speaking, corporately or in a space where there's just a lot of darkness and not enough light. It was something that would eventually propel me into a relationship with Jesus Christ but it was something that I had to go through and realize. I had to understand the depth of that darkness. When you find yourself buried in darkness, it forces you to confront your deepest fears and vulnerabilities. There's absolutely no question about that. It pushes you to question your beliefs and reassess your priorities and seek out new perspectives. You have to have that kind of drive in you. You can't stay in the darkness and have that drive. The darkness suppresses the drive. You have no inside gumption to move any forward. You could have been in my position and just stayed in that darkness. Fear would just wrap you up and you would never take another step. So in this process of self-reflection and introspection, you begin to uncover hidden strengths within yourself that you never knew existed. Stepping outside of the boat, walking on the water, just doing something extraordinary, something that you never ever thought you would do. Stepping beyond those limitations, those places where you believed you were limited, not realizing on the other side of that wall was a completely different life that was waiting for you. In moments of despair, it's important to remember that life has a way of transforming even the most difficult situations into opportunities for growth and for renewal. The darkness may feel suffocating, ladies and gentlemen, but often it is during these times that we are being planted, sowing the seeds of resilience, strength, and wisdom. You know, just like feelings breaking through the soil, we will emerge stronger and wiser, ready to face whatever comes our way. So embrace the darkness as an opportunity for personal growth and transformation. I know it's scary, but embrace it. You know, the thing about embracing it is that you can squeeze it, squeeze it, squeeze it. It's trying to attack you. So put your arms around it and squeeze it till it's all gone and you'll only end up squeezing yourself. And that thing will have to go away because why? You have no more fear of it. It's not something that's going to occupy you. It's not something that's going to steal you away. Embrace the darkness because in that darkness is an opportunity for personal growth and transformation. And you need to know that within you lies the potential to bloom into something extraordinary. Ah, this is good. This is good for my soul. Let me say this to you. When I look at you, I see my past because I've been where a lot of you are right now. Just take a minute and listen to my background. I was born to a teenage mother because I had to be, not because I wanted to be or needed to be. I grew up in the ghettos of New York City's Harlem. I was raised by God-fearing grandparents who loved me. I had my first sexual encounter with a babysitter. I began smoking weed at the age of 11 and eventually became both sexually and chemically addicted for 27 years. I was a high school dropout in 10th grade and eventually got my GED. I was a college dropout when I started a family that I couldn't support. I couldn't maintain a healthy or sustainable relationship. I continued on a trajectory of consistent, unearned achieving. I became homeless three different times, been to jail two times, and life had no purpose, no point, and no direction for me. I know what it sounds like. This sounds like a person who didn't love himself. It sounds like a person who stopped trying to figure it out because he didn't know how to and it hurt too much to try. It sounds like a person who was a total waste of human life, a completely unsuccessful failure of a life, doesn't it? But I want to tell you something, it wasn't. It wasn't. All those years, I was trying to escape a failure mentality that still existed when I attempted a recovery. See, I had accepted the fact that I was a failure, that this was my life, and there was nothing I could do about it. But what I finally learned is what I want to share with you today. Now I want you to write this down. What I'm about to share with you, I want to help you and bless you with it right now. So write this down. Number one, it doesn't matter how you start in life, it only matters how you finish. I want you to think about that. I'm not going to even comment on it. I want you to think about that, internalize that, reflect on that. When you look in the mirror, I want you to look at that and say these words to yourself. Number two, failure is not something to be feared or avoided, but rather embraced and learned from. I talk about this a lot to my students. I teach these kids different things from time to time. I try to implant something that's not written in their books, okay? And one of the things I let them know is that Thomas Edison, the man who invented the light bulb, he failed a thousand times before he actually developed and had success making the light bulb. Michael Jordan, who a lot of the kids love, one of the greatest basketball players that ever lived, talks about how many shots he missed. Although he scored almost 30,000 points, he missed three times as many shots, all right? But because he learned from that experience of missing, he knew what not to do the next time. Number three point I want you to write down, and I want you to say this to yourself when you look at yourself in the mirror. Why do I say that again? Because that's a positive reinforcement. That's a personal affirmation. When you're saying positive things to yourself and looking at yourself, there's power in that. You're building a resilience. You're building a strength within you. Here's the third thing. It is through failure you gain valuable insights, develop resilience, and ultimately pave the way for success. Let me explain it to you this way. When you understand failure, you unlock a powerful tool that propels you forward on your journey towards achieving your goal. Write this down. Failure provides you with invaluable lessons. You may not see it right this minute. Like for me, it took some time for me to see the failure lessons that I had to learn to be successful because I still had my mind wrapped around the failure mentality. Number one is failure provides you with invaluable lessons. Number two, it teaches you what doesn't work and allows you to refine your approach and make necessary adjustments. Number three, each setback presents an opportunity for growth and self-improvement. Nobody likes setbacks. Setbacks are hard to deal with because you're thinking that you're not accomplishing something, but in reality, you really are. There's no real way you're going to fail if you're determined to succeed. That's the mindset you have to have. So setbacks are only a temporary thing for aggressive forwardness. Number four, setbacks allow you to identify the specific areas where you fell short and develop strategies to overcome those obstacles in the future. And not only for you, but just like I'm doing for you right now. It is not just the fact that I've had these things happen to me, but now I can be able to relate these things to you because the main thing is what I'm telling you about right now no longer affects me, no longer bothers me. It's not a hindrance to me. It's past. It's done. There's nothing I can do about the past. Tomorrow is not promised. It doesn't even come. It doesn't even exist. All you have is today. Make today count. Make what you are doing right now count for you. And that leads me to my fifth point. It tests your determination and forces you to confront adversity head on. Adversity wants to win. Adversity wants to tell you that you can't do it. Adversity wants to tell you that you are not capable, that you are not willing, you are not strong enough, you're not smart enough, you're not intelligent enough. There are other people who can do it better. You know what? That's what adversity wants. It pushes up against you. There's a reason why it does that. But guess what? You stand strong after having done everything that you know to do. Stand. Stand, stand, stand. And adversity can't do anything to a person who's standing their ground. I had to discover these things late in life. I had to discover that I had the power to change reality, to be what I wanted to be, to become who I'm supposed to become, to take hold of my purpose and move forward into destiny. I had to learn to love, trust, and believe in myself. So when you look at me, I want you to see your future possibilities. My job, my passion, my drive, the very reason why I'm doing what I'm doing right now is to inspire you to get up, get moving, to see your dreams become a reality, to let you know that no matter what your circumstances or situations may be in life, there is a God who loves you, who stated in his word that, I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, plans to give you a hope and a future. I want you to realize that with all you have been through in life, one thing is extremely evident, is that you are still here. So listen, learn to trust God and yourself. If you can't trust yourself, nobody else will either. Not your family, not your friends, not your neighbors, not even your girlfriend. In fact, don't nobody want somebody that don't want themselves. What happened? You lost your dream, you lost your vision, you lost your passion, you lost your goals, and now you're here trying to recapture what you lost. Let me tell you something, it all begins when you reset your mind. It all begins when you master your mind. It all begins when you start having a winning attitude in your mind. So I'm going to close here by giving you a strategy that will help get you back on track. This strategy is a five-point strategy. And it just begins, it's really quick. And I love these strategies because it's something that I had to go through and understand myself. The strategy number one is self-diagnosis. Self-diagnosis is the act of identifying past negative impacting behaviors. It's a courageous and enlightening journey towards self-awareness. Know thyself. Knowing thyself requires a bold individual who dares to confront their own flaws and mistakes head-on and seeks to understand the root causes behind their negative behaviors. Now this is a process that goes beyond the surface level of reflection. It's going to demand something from you. It's going to demand an unwavering commitment to exploring deep-seated emotions, experiences, and patterns of thinking. When you undertake this formidable task with the guidance of a professional, one may risk misinterpretation or superficial analysis. However, for those bold enough to drive into their own psyche with honesty and diligence, self-diagnosis offers invaluable insight into personal growth and development. You will make change because you are the one who is psychoanalyzing you. You know you better than anybody else. You can't pay anybody to know you better than you know yourself. And it takes a boldness, though. It takes a strength. It takes a fortitude. You're going to have to want this. You're going to have to want to be this free. Freedom starts from within. It's going to start with this in. And boldness is required for there's such an introspection which embodies strength and courage in facing uncomfortable truth. You've got to be truthful to your own self. And that's the only way to forge a path towards healing and redemption. So number one, number one is a self-diagnosis. Number two, you have to be honest about your own self. Be honest about who you are. It's the most important thing. Self-exploration is imperative that you exhibit an unwavering commitment to honesty. You've got to be honest with yourself about the true essence of who you are. You have to embrace a bold approach as a catalyst for delving deep into the core of your being, unearthing truths that lie dormant within. Sometimes some pain or an event happened in your life that is so deep that you buried it, covered it up, didn't put a marker or a tombstone or a flower or anything on it because you simply don't want to know or remember that it happened. The first time I ever saw a situation like that ever happen was with my little brother. And something happened within the framework of our family, and we got split up. My brother went with my mom, I stayed with my dad, and that happened for a period of time. And then when everything got back together again, we were fine. But in the annals of what happened, my brother has no recollection of this whatsoever. Whenever I talked to him about it, his brain was wiped of it. He had no idea that happened. He could not recall it whatsoever. It was traumatic to him. It impacted him in a way that just wiped him out. So these are things that go on. These are things that actually happen. But you have to go deep within your core being. You have to unearth it. Well, if you don't remember, you don't remember. But you've got to get deep into it, who you really are. Embracing this bold attempt is something that's so cold and has delusions. But I tell you what, delusions are something that can be overcome. But only by facing unfiltered reality can you embark on a genuine journey of self-discovery. Self-discovery is the whole issue. Because this action demands stepping out of the shadows of denial, shedding layers of pretense, and dismantling the walls we construct to hide our vulnerabilities. You know a snake comes out of its skin every now and then. It'll leave it behind and it'll have a whole new persona, a new look. Be a new type of snake, okay? I mean, he just comes right out. You can see where the snake's body used to be, the shell of it, but now he's someplace else, doing something else. That's what you have to do. You have to shed some of this stuff right away, all right? Number three, identify each impacting negative you encountered. Now, this is really important. You need to identify and document the impacting negative experience that has influenced your life. I am so, I mean, this thing, when I was writing this out, when I was thinking about this, this is something that really, really challenged me. You see, in a world filled with constant pressure to present an idealized version of oneself, it's critical to recognize and acknowledge the adversities that shape us as individuals. Negative experiences can range from, I don't know, heart-wrenching emotional turmoil to excruciating feelings of physical pain. By documenting these things, we not only validate our struggles, but we also gain a profound understanding of how they have altered the course of our lives. It takes strength and courage to confront your past traumas head-on. Dissect their impact on our thoughts, actions, and overall well-being. It also is a bold act for self-reflection that allows for personal growth and allows resilience to come. So gather those painful memories, examine them intimately, for it is through understanding the darkness that we truly appreciate the light that radiates from within ourselves. Does that make sense to you? I hope it does. I hope it does. It makes sense to me, and I'm just trying to share these things with you to help you. Number four, make your past negatives fuel your future positives. Flip the script on your life by reverse-engineering past negatives to direct future positive life. It's time to take control and reshape your destiny through introspection, resilience, and bold decision-making. And we can do that by doing a few things. Instead of being bound by the shackles of regret, use those experiences as stepping stones towards greatness. Analyze your failures with a critical eye to extract valuable lessons that will serve as a roadmap to success. Try by transforming setbacks into opportunities, finding hidden treasures within the challenges. Reroute negative emotions into motivation and determination by fueling your drive towards a brighter future. Embrace innovation and creativity and adaptability as you reconstruct your life's narrative from disappointment to triumph. And lastly, reframe past negativity into empowering stories of growth and resilience. What I'm doing right now, inspiring not only yourself but those who are around you. So by flipping the script on your life, engineering past negatives to dictate your future positives, you will emerge stronger than ever before, ready to tackle any obstacle with unwavering confidence and audacity. So as I come to a close, let's review the formulas to restore yourself. Number one, self-diagnosis. Do not be afraid to diagnose yourself. Number two, be honest about who you are. Embrace the beast mode level of boldness designed for your breakthrough. Beast mode. I like that. Number three, identify each impacting negative you have encountered. By identifying and documenting the impacting negative experience that you have influenced in your life. Number four, make your past negatives fuel your future positives. Reverse engineering past negatives to a direct future positive life is the way to go. And number five, lastly, embrace failure. It shows what you what doesn't work on your way to what does. Remember, you were designed for greatness. There is an enemy who doesn't want you to know who you are, whose you are, and what you have. Use these successful strategies and discover the real you. Well, that's what I have for you today. This is Jerome Bowser, the Mind Designer. Until next time, God bless one and all. Thank you.