Wake Up

Finding Your Path Back to Balance

• Douglas James Cottrell PhD • Season 2 • Episode 1

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There's a growing hunger for balance in our polarized world. As extremes pull us in opposing directions, how do we find our center and regain peace? Douglas Cottrell tackles this universal struggle with refreshing clarity and practical wisdom.

The journey begins with recognizing you're already halfway there—awakening to the right questions is the crucial first step. Life unfolds in stages, with each decade bringing unique soul lessons. Understanding this progression releases the pressure to have everything figured out at once.

Cottrell offers what may be initially perceived as counterintuitive insight: resistance signals you're on the right path. "The more resistance you get, the harder it is to do, the more beneficial it is to you." What comes easily often leads nowhere, while meaningful growth requires pushing through difficulty. This perspective transforms our relationship with challenges.

Finding your way requires becoming your own person rather than seeking external validation. Too many lose their path by following others' directions or trying to please everyone. True balance emerges when you trust your inner compass and commit to your unique journey.

The practical roadmap Cottrell provides is refreshingly straightforward: decide where you want to be, work backward to create actionable steps, and focus on one goal at a time. Like building a wall brick by brick, success comes through consistent effort toward a clearly defined destination. The key is avoiding the scattered attention that pulls us off balance.

Procrastination emerges as the silent saboteur of balance. When we delay action, doubt and worry expand, often causing us to abandon goals before starting. The antidote lies in decisive action, breaking larger visions into manageable achievements, and committing to finish what you start—staying on the roller coaster ride until the end.

Ready to reclaim your balance? Join us for an episode that will help you chart your course through life's extremes and discover the peace that comes from aligned purpose and action.

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Douglas James Cottrell:

Welcome to the Wake Up, the broadcast where curiosity leads to deeper understanding. I'm your host, Douglas James Cottrell, and my good friend and co-host, Les Hubert, is here with me, along with editor Jack Bialik, as we delve into the fascinating realms of life, metaphysics, spirituality and the pressing questions that shape our world. As always, everyone my good friend Les has intriguing questions we're going to explore today, and so let's get right to it. What is the first question or topic today, my friend?

Les Hubert:

Good morning, Doug. Well, the first topic today seems to be one of great concern by a lot of the people that I have contact with, and their concern is about getting to the middle, like getting to where the balance is. They're tired of the polarization, they're tired of the extremes, they want peace, they want harmony, and they're trying to find out how to get to it.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Well, that's no easy chore. The first thing is congratulations. You have awakened. You're asking the right questions, my friends. L ife is such a way that it leads us in many directions as we try to find our way, from when we're young people and we go through adulthood and we become a little wiser as we go through age. But you know, that question is always there, Les. It's like how to find my way? What's going on with the world? What's happening? How do I find the truth? Where is the middle of the road? How can I sleep at night? How can I stop grinding my teeth at night worrying about the next day? Well, the answer is simply to know that you're 50% of the way. You're asking the right question.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Now, remember, life is like going to university. These different aspects of life that you go through every decade, there's a major soul lesson, a major experience, from 1 to 10, from 10 to 20, 20 to 30, etc. S o realize this is not the end. You don't just live once and how well you do or how not well you do, that's it. That is not the case. The understanding that everything of value is hard. It's hard to get, it's hard to figure out, it's hard to do. Arnold once said getting up out of bed is a struggle. Learn to enjoy the struggle. And when I heard him say that, I said thank you, Arnold, you big, powerful weightlifting guy. Must be really hard for a guy that weighs 300 pounds of muscle to get out of bed. Never mind me. But anyway, the point being is yeah, it's a struggle, everything's a struggle, and this is a secret you should know, my friends: the more resistance you get, the harder it is to do, the more beneficial it is to you, the bigger the reward, the bigger the payoff.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So when you're feeling that pushback, you're on the right path. If it was easy, it's usually taking you down some trail to a dead end. Don't listen to anyone else. This is the point. Be your own person. Listen to yourself. Don't allow yourself to be dissuaded. Don't listen to somebody giving you, "This is easy, this is simple. All you have to do is..." and you take yourself away from your path and you start listening to somebody else telling you what to do, what the right thing is, even though you know inside it's not. You may have mental reservations, but you still do it. And what happens, bam, you fall right on your face. Well, after a while, when you keep getting these emotional contusions and abrasions, you get a little bruise, don't you? And so you become leery, afraid, scared. And then what happens? You give up being your own self, your own person, making your own mistakes, making your own directions and getting your own rewards. So here's the story.

Douglas James Cottrell:

You look at all the motivational people and Les and I and Jack we've, on our other programs, we have interviewed many, many, many top-rated motivational people, and the one thing that it comes down to is wake up, do it. Do it, because procrastination is well, it's the big sin, if I can call it that. But the longer you procrastinate at doing it, it gives somebody else the opportunity to jump in and steal your idea, more exactly put it forward when you didn't get it done. When you procrastinate, you start to doubt and you worry, and that's like a toothache, an abscessed tooth. The more you procrastinate, the more you worry what happens, the more the poison gets into your mind and therefore you give up before you even start. So the motivational people are all about yeah, yeah, rah, rah, get going.

Douglas James Cottrell:

We have a very famous man that told us the difference between affirmation and afformation. Affirmation is over and over words that you don't believe. Afformation is you go and you do it. You form a plan and you get it done Wisdom. So the answer to the question is when people are lost, get a map out. What do you mean? Get a map? Is there a map? Is there a blueprint? Well, of course there is. What do you want to do? What do you like to do? What is your end plan for your life? Where do you see yourself in 20 years? That starts the plan.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Now. Understand this, my friends. I'm not a master of the mind, but I am somewhat knowledgeable from the 50 years I've looked at metaphysics, intuition, telepathy, the spiritual gifts, understanding brainwaves, and on and on and on. Dream interpretation and dreams, etc. The one thing is to understand that when you have your mind working intellectually, you are working chaotically. The mind is supposed to work in chaos all over the place. The most successful people in the world pick one course, one direction, and they stick to it. They don't stop in mid-course, they don't get distracted and do three or four things at the same time. They have laser focus on where they want to go, and that is one of the major points in how to get out of this confusion, this where you're lost.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Now, what do you want to do? Well, you probably want to do all kinds of things, and it takes a little while to discern what is it you want to do. This is where dreams and visions come in. You pray for a dream, you have a dream, you see yourself in the future and then, oh my gosh, now the map is starting to form. I have a destination. It's like you want to take a trip to some exotic place. First you pick the place, then you work backwards, don't you? What's the hotel I'm going to stay? What's the airline I'm going to take? How am I going to get to the airport? What taxi do I need? What's in my bag? What do I put in my bag? And then I buy my ticket to start. So that's how life is to get out of the situation. You work backwards, pick where you want to be two years from now, and then work backwards. How are you going to get there? And don't say I'm going to win the lottery or somebody's going to hand me something. That is not going to happen.

Douglas James Cottrell:

You have two things in your life responsibility and duty. Responsibilities you can hand off to people like your accountant to do your books or somebody to cook your meals, but your duty is only for you. Your success is only for you. Remember power is never given, it's taken. The same with success: it's never given, it's taken.

Douglas James Cottrell:

When you pray, you're asking and you have to take the prayer, w hen it arrives. Take advantage of it. You can pray for all kinds of money and somebody comes by and says, well, here's $10. No, no, no, it's okay, I don't need it. Well, what have you just done? You've shut yourself down, you've negated your prayer.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So, laser focus, decide where you're going to be two years from now and remember the greatest failure everybody-- I was going to say, everybody fails at, but okay, let's say-- the greatest failure everybody acquires is that they don't start off something and finish it. They quit. It's like a roller coaster ride. Right, that's how life is. As long as you stay on the ride, you're going to get to the end. Too many people jump off at the high or the low part.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So having faith in yourself is the point. If you have faith in yourself and you have willpower and you don't care to people- please, you don't ask people what to do and you don't embarrass it if they don't appreciate or approve of what you're doing. So you don't try to please people. You're gonna get back on the path. You're gonna be like, yeah, I can do that.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Remember when you were a kid, say I wanna ride that bicycle. People said, oh, you might get hurt. Let me ride it, I want to go for it. How does it work? Right, how do I stop it? Yeah, let's find that out. Being well, you're already on the bike and you don't know how to stop it. Okay, so there's learning lessons along the way, and you might fall down and skin your knee, just like a kid riding the bicycle. But have you ever seen a kid stop? No, they get back up and they try it again, knees bleeding, mommy's all in a panic and the little boy says it's okay. The little girl says, hey, I can do this, mommy, it's okay. And so they do it. So there are half a dozen different things to get out of the quagmire you find yourself in, my friends. Wake up, you can do this. You can do this, you're alive.

Douglas James Cottrell:

You know the old story about how many sperm were released to and to, uh, get into an egg and make a person? One, and that was you. You're a winner already. You're a winner. So what was the thing that that got you from being a sperm to, you know, fertilize an egg and becoming a person? Y our willpower, your desire, your nature. And so you're already a winner. Okay, don't pick something that's too hard. Pick something that's easy to do. Les, I found in my life that people want to go the hard way. They don't want to go the easy way. You know, let me walk up that rickety staircase up to the fourth floor, but there's an elevator just over here. No, no, no. I want to take the rickety old stairs that I might fall off or break my neck. Why is that? Why do people do that? One of those mysteries of the universe, my friends. So swallow your ego, get on the elevator and enjoy the ride. It's simple as that.

Les Hubert:

It does. Yeah, I used to be like that when I was a younger man and my friends were like why do you always want to do things the hard way? I thought I don't know, but that's how I'm wired. But I learned through time and wisdom that was not the way to go.

Douglas James Cottrell:

No, that's called youthful exuberance.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And as an old man looks back and says you know, the only thing wasted on the young is their youth. Me too, you know. That's the thing about getting older, my friends. You get wiser. But remember, do it now, don't wait, don't put it off. You know, when I get older I'll take the trip. Never going to happen. You want to learn how to go skydiving? Don't wait till you're my age. Do it now. When you get to my age, you're going to go. No, thank you. Jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is not logical, let me tell you. S o do it now. Okay, to take risks. The younger you are, take risks. As you get to middle age, well, you've got to reduce the risk and you've got to be more, let's say, wiser. And you contemplate what you're going to do. So aim low, have small goals that you can acquire along the way to get to the big goal. But you have to have the big goal and then set little goals or steps of achievement.

Douglas James Cottrell:

And then here is the point, here's the secret: just work on the next step, the next goal, order of events. Don't go beyond it, because you'll get . W hen when you step to the next goal. And you get it, ta-da. Now you look at the next one, the, the next goal, and you don't go beyond that, because as you get to these next goals, you might modify the future, but you might know something more when you get there than when you started out, and then you can make better choices. So that's the point. There's five or six steps to take. But here, start now. Decide where you want to be. Remember when you look at... this this is something when this occurred to me, it was just astoundingly ... when When you look at a house and you see a bricklayer putting the bricks down in the house, right, one brick at a time you walk past the house in the morning, you walk back in the afternoon and half the wall is . One one brick at a time. And that's how you have to take those successes. That's how you have to get to where you want to be.

Douglas James Cottrell:

So what was the question? Again, remind our audience, Les.

Les Hubert:

Well, how to basically get back to balance and that's interesting because nobody ever thinks of balance as a destination and to see it through to get there. But you've just given us some great guidelines, Doug.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Yeah, remember, you can't go in that many directions.Five Five, I'm holding my hand up. You can only go in one direction and the key is go to the end. Go to the end. When you go to say, go to school, take a course in something or other, most people will quit the course before they get to the end. That's why, when you go to those classes in the beginning there's people standing around their room. There's standing room only. All the desks are filled up. They're like holy moly, look at all the people like this place. Well, because the people running the course, once they get the money from everybody, they know there's only going to be two or four people at the end of the 10-week course. That is a fact. So when I found that out, I found the amazing thing is that take your time in making a decision, but when you decide to do something, you go the distance. You go for the 10-week course. You go 10 weeks, even if it gets boring, or you don't understand it or it's not what you thought it was. Never quit the roller coaster. Stay to the end.

Les Hubert:

Thank

Douglas James Cottrell:

How do you get back in balance? There are several ways, but it starts up here, my friends, make a choice. Find the ultimate goal. Step back. Planning and then follow those steps without fail and believe in yourself. Read biographies of most successful people. You'll find many of them failed at least well many times, and they finally got it right. But what were they learning every time they failed? Not to make the same mistakes twice. So believe in yourself, love yourself and wake up.

Douglas James Cottrell:

Until next time, keep questioning, keep seeking and stay awake. I'm your host, Douglas Cottrell. Until next time. God bless you, my friends.