DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
DEBBIE WILLIAMS's Podcast
Focus on the Positive
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This week Marcus Thomlinson is on a mission to create a worldwide community where people feel less stressed, think more effectively and enjoy personal and professional success. Most importantly, a community where people feel truly fulfilled. An example of this is teaching the 7 Key Mindsets which enable people to become more positive, proactive, and productive. He helps people realise they have true influence over how they think, feel, and act. The result is living a more fulfilled and balanced life where you are motivated to take positive action, feel great, and smile more often. In this episode, we focus on the positive.
Links
mindsetrevolution.org
debbiewilliamspodcast.com
This week's guest is an emission to create a worldwide community where people feel less stressed, think more effectively, and enjoy personal and professional success. Most importantly, a community where people feel truly fulfilled. An example of this is teaching the seven key mindsets, which enable people to become positive, proactive, and productive. Yes, people realize they have true influence over how they think, feel, and act. The result is living a more fulfilled and balanced life where you are motivated to take positive action, feel great, and smile more often. In this episode, we focus on a positive. Please welcome Marcus Tomlinson. Hello, Marcus, and welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00Hello, Debbie. Good morning, and thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER_01Marcus, why is positive thinking so important for us?
SPEAKER_00Well, for me, it saved my life. I was diagnosed with chronic stress some years ago and some other stuff, given 18 months to live. And if I hadn't discovered positive thinking, I would not be here. So it's a no-brainer for me, and I was so motivated and moved by the whole concept, which I didn't really know much about or believe in before, but now I embrace it and chose to change my life and now teach it. It's super important for me.
SPEAKER_01What is positive thinking and how do you teach positive thinking to others?
SPEAKER_00I think there's a bit of a misconception about positive thinking, whereas I'll give you a quick example. Let me show you what it's not, and that might help. So if I was looking out of the garden right now and it was overgrown with weeds, and I thought, right, I'm gonna think there are no weeds, there are no weeds, there are no weeds. Well, all the positive about there being no weeds is nonsense. It ain't gonna change the fact there's weeds in your garden. So that's not positive thinking. What positive thinking is, is first of all, working out what is it you really want to achieve, something in your personal or professional life, and what's the proper outcome. So, in that example, the outcome isn't you don't want no weeds, you probably want a really nice garden. And if you want a nice garden, what does it look like? You might have flowers and plants and fountains and who knows what. So the thinking, the positive thinking to kind of wish into being, the manifest, if you like, uh a nice garden is hey, I have a beautiful garden with flowers and a fountain and red roses if that's your thing. And then if you sort of put that into being, think about it as hard as often and even say it out loud every day, then you're motivated to take real-world actions to get excited about maybe going out and do the weeding. So, does does that make sense to sort of contextualize it?
SPEAKER_01It helps to contextualize it. But how does one put that into practice?
SPEAKER_00There's a few great techniques. So I try and suggest to certainly my clients and anyone who wants to talk about this stuff that we are what we think about the most. And there's a thing in life that we tend to attract more of what we think about the most. So if we're positive and happy, we tend to attract positive, happy people and things. If we're negative, sad and angry, we tend to attract negative, sad, and angry people. If you just think yourself, you probably know somebody who just always sadly seems to attract really bad stuff into their life. It's as if they just have nothing but bad luck. Somebody once said about somebody I know, if they didn't have bad luck, they'd have no luck at all, which is just no way to be. Conversely, you can probably think of people in your life and people listening to this will think, oh, so and so, they're so lucky. Just everything they do and touch seems to go really well for them. And funny enough, they're probably really positive, happy people who just exist in that life. So the first thing is if you declare to yourself, right, I want to be a positive person who looks for the solutions, not the problems, all the time, and then start to fill your brain and your thoughts every day with what you want, not what you don't want. Quick example: most of us wake up in the morning and you just kind of come round, you're like, Oh yeah, I feel what sort of day is it? And then you either start thinking about all the things you didn't do yesterday, the things you should have done, maybe the things you did that you weren't happy with, and by the time you've got up and onto the toilet, you're exhausted by all the negative thinking. If, however, you wake up and go, Good morning, it's gonna be a fantastic day today. I'm gonna get some really good stuff done, I'm gonna be on time and tackle the most difficult task first, your brain's listening. And for some people, you might say that's way over the top. But all you're doing is declaring an intention to your mind, this is what you want from it, and then it will go out and try its level best to make the thing you want the most happen. And there's something magical that happens alongside of it. It's almost like the universe gets on your side and starts bringing more positive opportunities. So the key to positive thinking is make it a real outcome that you really want, yours, not someone else's, and then just be clear what it is and state to yourself in we call them mini mantras, mindset mantras, I can absolutely do XYZ. I'm attracting more of ABC. And you know what? That's what starts to happen. It's almost like magic.
SPEAKER_01You said that positive thinking saved your life earlier.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Can you expand the next story a bit more just to provide context for us?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. So I was in financial services for 20 years, made loads of money, had all the stuff that I was told work hard, get stuff, houses, cars, and life will be joyous. And yeah, I had a lot of money, but it was something missing inside. Also, because of the lifestyle that I was sort of in financial services, rugby playing, and a musician, drank phenomenal amounts of alcohol because that was part of the culture. The culture I was in was kind of hard living, hardworking, fast living, and I thought that's the way to do it. So my alcohol consumption was through the roof, as was everyone else's. And then, secondly, the way I was huffing and puffing and thinking of negative stuff, I didn't realize actually causes the chemicals that are supposed to help us when we're stressed turn into toxins. So, really quick lesson in how stress works is that whenever you get butterflies in your stomach, if you run and invoke fight or flight, i.e., physically run away or fight something, those chemicals are dispersed. If you don't, which most of us don't do in normal day life, we just kind of sit there and go, Oh God, I feel a bit terrible, those chemicals turn into toxins which start poisoning your bloodstream. So I was accidentally poisoning my bloodstream by having nervous and negative thoughts far too often, plus drinking too much, and my doctor said, Look, you carry on like that, your system is gonna pack up, and I give you about 18 months to live. I kind of listened, thankfully, and as a byproduct, I went on kind of a coaching positivity course for the first time. I didn't believe in it, if I'm honest, but I thought, you know what, I need to get better, I'll try it. And it was a game changer, and it was helping me understand the truth about what positive thinking does. And we know now there's been a 30-year study done by Harvard that people who purposefully try and invoke more positive thoughts more often are live better lives, they're healthier, they live longer, they live better, and they have much better relationships with other people, whether it be romantic relationships or interpersonal relationships. So by choosing to think and focus on what's good in your life, that was so powerful, it changed my health. I changed jobs in the end, left financial services, and now I'm a mindset coach. I couldn't be in a better space because I get to talk about this stuff every day. So it literally saved my life, and I continue to think the best thoughts I possibly can every day.
SPEAKER_01What would you say has been the most beneficial part of having this positive mindset? What would you say to someone else to say, oh, it's okay for you, but for me, I have to deal with X, Y, Z?
SPEAKER_00I do talks on this sort of stuff now. Um one of the talks is my childhood and my upbringing. And part of the reason I was in stress was I used to carry the story of my childhood and my upbringing and how it was a very abusive childhood. We don't have time on this podcast today, but I used to love it. If somebody started telling me about how bad their childhood was, I'd be like, yay, come on, let me get to me, because I've never lost this story yet. So, number one, my upbringing, my childhood is one of the most challenging you'll ever hear about. Secondly, being in that really dark place, financially bereft, where I got to with all this was I woke up three days after New Year with no car, no partner, nowhere to live, and £10 in my pocket. So if you say it's all right for you, what about me? Well, the I started from an interesting place. I got into such a bad place because I was just drinking too much. So I started from, in some ways, as most challenging place you possibly could. I was alive, that's what pretty much what I had going for me at the time. And I was aware of this, so I just simply said, look, I've got a choice. I can now go further down into the worst space of my life ever, or I can say, no, I've got a choice. The only person who can decide how I feel about me and whether I want to like myself, because that was the problem. I didn't really like myself at the time. And I thought, you know what? I've done some good things, I think I'm basically a really nice person. I'm gonna start liking myself and loving myself. So that was step one, and saying, looking at the scraps of stuff that I had that was positive, it wasn't much at the time, and very quickly I was couch surfing. I had some good friends who let me so I was homeless, but couch surfing, so that was a step in the right direction. And then I stood up one day and said, Right, I haven't got a job, I haven't got a car. And I was in my ex-wife's kitchen at the time, and I kind of looked up to the universe and said, Right, I'm ready to come back. I'm not accepting this situation anymore. I said, I need a car and I need a job and I need it within two weeks. I want to grab hold of myself and create a better future. And I felt really silly doing that because I had nothing and it was hard to think positively, as you said, in that space. Anyway, I then had to ring somebody, a friend of mine, who lent me some stage lighting, because I'd just finished this drunken year being a Toy Town rock star in a band, and I had to give him the lights back, but because I have no car, I had to ring him and say, I'm really sorry, I can't bring your lights back because I haven't got a car. They're here when you want them. And he said, Oh, what are you up to now? I know you've not had the best luck recently. And I said, Yeah, well, I'm coming back into the world as a consultant because I had business experience. Slight challenge, don't have a car, don't have a job, but I'm ready for both. And he said, Oh, really? What what sort of things are you going to be doing? I said, Well, I'm going to try and help people improve their businesses, which was so hard to do. Because remember, I had no money, I had nowhere to sleep, really, I had no car, no job, and my self-esteem was pretty much at rock bottom, but I had to just say, No, no, this is where I'm going. He said, Oh, that's amazing. You couldn't help me, could you? So, yeah, of course. But I haven't got a car and I haven't got a salary. He said, Oh, I'll tell you what, if I pay you so much a month, I've got a car sat on my driveway, it's doing nothing. Would you like that? I said, Yeah. And all of a sudden, within I think it was seven minutes of me making that request of the universe, I had a job and a car and I came off the call, I burst into tears, absolute floods of tears, because it just was all so crazy. And that was the change. If I can do it from absolutely nothing, and I built and built and built, and now I'm delighted to say that that was 13, 14 years ago, and I love myself more in a positive, kind of holistic way every day because I get to help other people overcome the challenges I overcame then.
SPEAKER_01What would you say is the main factor that someone should consider to start this positive journey?
SPEAKER_00Things that are useful are respond rather than react, because whenever we have negativity around us, it's very good to be going and think about what's not right. So the difference is you know, if we react to something that can be maybe a bit over the top, responding with the thought of hang on, what is it I really want? Be really honest with yourself about what is the change. So for me, having if it's nowhere to live or you're in a bad relationship, your job's awful, look at all the things that are are the best of what you've got. Because I don't care how bad things are, if you're breathing and you have some level of health, you have possibility, you can build anything from there. And so just quickly make a list mentally, preferably write it down of all the things that you have in your life which are good, and also anything you've ever done in your life which you're proud of. Whether it was winning a race at school or something you did at work or somebody complimented you for something, or someone you helped, just start to make a list of anything and everything that has a glimmer of positivity that you did well or makes you feel good, and start to focus on that and trying to bring some of that positive memories and those positive feelings into your life. And from that, even if you've only got one thing, we can build absolutely everything, and then focus on what you want. If you haven't got a job or you're finding it awkward in a relationship, start thinking about the better version of what you want. Don't start thinking, I haven't got a job and there's no jobs out there, and I can't get a job. Well, that's what your brain and the universe will give you. If you say, Oh, I have an awful relationship, how can I either spin this round? What can I do to be the change so that this relationship gets better? And it might be that you have to change the relationship, but what if you could just change everything about the relationship by looking at it from a completely different perspective? Same with the job. If you haven't got your ideal job now, start visualizing the next job that you really want. See it in your mind's eye, feel it as a positive emotion, and believe that somehow, if you're focused enough and concentrate on this with as much positivity as you can, often enough, and you really, really want it, you'll believe it's possible. So see it, feel it, believe it means you can achieve it. If you can see the future you really want or the outcomes you really desire, if you can attach a positive emotion to it, maybe by looking at that little list of all your top life moments, and then absolutely believe that if you really want this, you can manifest it in your life, you'll be amazed at the change and start with little things as well.
SPEAKER_01So I absolutely love that motto. See it, feel it, believe it, achieve it. And that's something that we can focus on every day.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely saturate your mind with what you want, not what you don't want. Because that's what wins. What some people do. You could start off the day, hey, I'm really positive about we'll use the garden analogy just because we started with that, yeah. I'm gonna create a great garden, I'm gonna create a garden, I'm gonna create a great garden, and they maybe say that for two minutes or whatever, and then the rest of the day they go, Yeah, but I can't though, can I? Well, I haven't got any money to do that, and I don't know how to do it, and it's never gonna happen, is it? Yeah, and and you know, I'm good at thinking of these things, but it's not gonna happen though, is it? And if you then spend the rest of your day with those thoughts, which ones are gonna win? It's that simple, the negative ones. So you have to proactively get hold of your brain, your mindset, your inner you, and say, no, I am focusing on the fact that I have a fantastic garden and this is what it looks like. You don't say it once, you don't say it twice, you say it as many times as humanly possible throughout the day for several you know for a week or two or three weeks until it starts to become a reality because then you're saying it more often, and there's no room for the negative thoughts. Push them out! Get rid of that negativity.
SPEAKER_01Marcus, you have been absolutely amazing. Thank you very much for being so positive on this podcast, and thank you for your time.
SPEAKER_00My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me on. I really appreciate it. I hope someone gets some use out of it.
SPEAKER_01If you would like further details about Marcus, then please follow the link in the show notes.