Change Your Mindset, Change Your Life at Any Age

Summary
In this episode, Ted Kopecko shares insights from his book 'Finding Joy, Journey of You,' exploring how to live intentionally, find lasting joy, and transform your mindset for a more fulfilling life.




Takeaways
Joy is a journey, not a fleeting moment. 
Your mindset and beliefs shape your reality. 
Invest in your personal growth and self-awareness. 
Align your life with your purpose for lasting happiness. 
Surround yourself with positive influences. 
Your future is shaped by the choices you make today. 
Read 15 pages a day to transform your life. 
Your time is valuable—manage it wisely.



Chapters 
00:00 Introduction to Joy and Ted Kopecko 
02:41 The Moment or Season That Changed Ted’s Perspective 
04:11 Joy as a Journey, Not a Moment 
08:32 The Four Pillars of Joy: Mindset, Identity, Time, Direction 
12:28 Changing Your Programming and Mindset 
15:52 The Power of Aiming for the Stars 
17:43 Managing Your Time and Future Planning 
20:26 Practical Steps to Transform Your Life and Joy 
21:24 Resources and How to Connect with Ted Kopecko


🔗 Connect with Ted Kopecko | Finding JOY
📧 Email: Ted@FindingJOY.us
🌐 Website: www.FindingJOY.us
🔗 LinkedIn: Ted Kopecko
📸 Instagram: @ultimate.life
📘 Facebook: TDKopecko

📝 If you're ready to intentionally write the next chapter of your life, visit www.FindingJOY.us for resources, inspiration, and tools — plus a FREE workbook to help you discover your purpose and live with greater joy.




🔗 Connect with Holly Porter | Retreat RNR 
📧 Email: holly@hollyporter.com 
🔗 LinkedIn: Holly Porter | Retreat RNR 
🎵 TikTok: @retreatrnr 
▶️ YouTube: @intlretreatassociation
📸 Instagram: @retreatrnr | @hollyporterinternational 
📘 Facebook: HollyAnnPorter

FREE GIFT: 2026 Retreat Industry Report
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to All Things Retreat Podcast. I'm Holly Porter, your host and CEO of Retreat R and R. With over 25 years of experience in designing transformative retreats. I'm here to share insights and inspiration to help you create an extraordinary experience. Whether you're a pro or just starting out, you'll find valuable ideas here. Enjoy the ride. Let's dive in. Hello, welcome back to the show. And if it's your first time, welcome to the show. Today's conversation is about something that we're all searching for in one form or another: joy. Not temporary happiness based on circumstances, but the deeper kind of joy that comes from knowing who you are, recognizing your value, and intentionally choosing how you want to live. My guest today is Ted Copekle. Did I say that right? You got that perfect. He is a commercial real estate broker. And my Alexa's going off here behind us, trying to correct me. Like she knows. He's an entrepreneur, a speaker, an author of Finding Joy, Journey of You. His book became a number one international bestseller in the categories of motivational self-help, personal transformation, and self-esteem. Driving for more than 30 years of business experience, along with the personal challenges and turning points that have shaped his own life, Ted helps people move away from reactive, life-led living and towards intentional, joy-led living. And his message invites us to pause, reflect, connect with our purpose, and recognize that we still have opportunity to write the next chapter of our lives with greater freedom, faith, intention, and joy. Welcome to the show. That was awesome, Holly. I just love that.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

So thank you, thank you, thank you. It's an honor to be here. I just, I gotta be, I'm thrilled about being here. You provide such a great value to your audience and your program. Um I've listened to it and I gotta just tell you, yeah, I hope, audience, please, please, please give a big handout to Holly because it takes a lot of effort to put these um podcasts on and timing and so forth. So thank you for doing what you do. I it's an honor to be here. So thanks for the invite.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

Well, we're happy to have you and come and bring us some joy today. I I was sharing with Ted before the show that that was my mom's names, who's passed on. So that was probably one of the biggest reasons why I picked him because he was all about joy. And I'm all about joy too. Well, okay, let's talk about a couple things here around joy. When was there in your life a particular moment or a challenge or a season in that that you realized that you were living reactively instead of intentionally?

SPEAKER_01 2:45

Oh gosh, you know, looking back on life, you it's it's a cumulative approach to a lot of this. But there are there was a couple instances in my life that kind of slapped me up the side of the face and say, wake up, right? That that voice in back of your your brain. Just a little bit about me. Uh I did write Finding Joy, Journey of You. It's a real book, everybody. It's 400 pages, it's not AI produced. So this really comes from human experience, not AI experience. So first understand that. Um Finding Joy, Joy, the acronym for joy, everyone, is Journey of You. So as Holly was saying, in the Webster's context, it may be a momentary happiness, maybe a Sunday afternoon barbecue, or going into the gates of Disneyland. But in our context, joy really stands for our journey. And if you really think about it, that makes a whole lot of sense, doesn't it?

SPEAKER_00 3:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:44

Because our journey in life produces lasting joy versus momentary joy that we may have from time to time. Um, the sub-subtitle is finding your purpose, value, and freedom. So the book is not about me, it's about all of us as the human race. You know, I look at us like we're all we're all different flavors of ice cream, but we're all ice cream. You know? You may like pistachio, you may not. At the end of the day, we're all ice cream. One of the things that I've I've found out through my journey, and I'm sure Holly with you, you know, I've I spoke I have spoken to thousands of people, and what makes it abundantly clear is we all want the same thing. The common denominator, I don't care where you're from, whether you're from the Middle East, whether you're from Europe, whether you're from the US, Canada, China, wherever, we all have the same dreams. They may be tamped down for outside stimuluses, but we all have the same dreams of aspiration, of wanting a better life, having fulfillment in our life. But what tends to happen to us is that we after some level of school, whether it's high school, college, or trade school, we become busy. We were told a we were told a certain thing, most of us the same thing when we were young that was downloaded to our cerebral hard drives that we kept in our adulthood that came out to be limiting beliefs and latent defects on how we think about ourselves. Right? So Finding Joy, Journey of You is really a book that lets the reader stop for a second in your life. Just give yourself a breather, give yourself some grace and some mercy. And what it does is it allows you to stop for a second and realize is this the life I want? Is this where I want to go to? Um, what's my destination? Where am I leading to? Most of us are so busy in life that we don't even think about that. We're just happy that we that we survived one day of life to get on to the next.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

Yeah. And I've said so many times. I've I'm doing I'm saving that for a rainy day, and I'm thinking, it's been pouring. Why am I waiting?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Well, most of us, and I'm when I say most of us, I think at least 95 to 98 percent of us are in daily struggle. Yeah, of some sort, right? I would agree. And the meaning of struggle is the loss of freedom in human terms. Right.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

Which which is why retreats are so important for people, because it gives you going for transformation of whatever struggle you're in, you want out of it, or you wouldn't be showing up.

SPEAKER_01 6:32

Right? Exactly, exactly, exactly. You're exactly right. And so finding joy in its own way tries to give us the tools and the tricks and maybe the hacks that we can do to move our life forward. Yeah. Um finding so finding joy, every chapter in joy and finding joy is a journey chapter of some aspect of our life. And the very, very first chapter is where it all starts, and that's the journey of mindset.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Oh boy, hallelujah.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Right?

SPEAKER_00 7:06

Yeah, it's so true. Because that that is everything. Everything comes around that.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

When I started this, I started this about five years ago, and I was doing a bunch of blogging on Facebook and everything, and I was doing business blogs and entrepreneurial blogs and all this, and I came across the word joy in one of my writings. I went, well, what does joy actually mean? And I started looking at I'm a big one on acronyms. Yeah. And and I came upon Journey of You. I went, wow, that is really that's really deep when you think about it. And that um that that that I'm sorry, I I was thinking something else came across my brain. Yeah, we all know. Oh, absolutely. So when I so when I came across, you know, this finding joy, it went, wow, this is how most of us get stuck because what we were taught early on in life. So let me give you an example of this. And in finding joy, there's four pillars of joy. So everybody just understand that you have, and it's almost like the the the four pillars of alignment with joy. So one is mindset, the next one is identity, the next one is time, and the last one is direction. Now, when all those four are lined up together, you're working with life and not against life. So let me kind of decipher a couple of those for us. In mindset, I uh when I first started, I started looking at mindset and looking at some of the work that Carol DeWick, she's a professor over at Stanford University, she did a tremendous amount of work on mindset. So I started looking at it and was reading some of her research, and what she basically said is we have a fixed mindset or we have a growth mindset. And I was thinking, well, you know, maybe there's something else there too. Maybe what we really have is a bandwidth mindset. None of us are really have a fixed mindset, and none of us really have a growth mindset. We're somewhere in between. And so I kind of look at it from a standpoint of most of us, and again, around 95% of us are left side of center towards a fixed mindset. So, what is a fixed mindset, right? A fixed mindset really is well, let me give you another little example. A fixed mindset is where you love your comfort cave. Yeah. You you you like, if you made it through today, then you'll you'll bear through it tomorrow because you're too afraid to venture out and meet up with a saber-toothed tiger. See, this was drilled into us in our in our DNA, right? And then it was refortified after when we were born. What did the doctor do? He held us up by our legs and and slapped us on the butt. Right? Well, that was a nice way to come into life with a negative.

SPEAKER_00 9:58

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 10:00

And then after that, yeah, then after that, what happened was we our parents told us what to do. Sit down, get up, eat that, don't do that, stop picking your nose, right? And then we were told things all the time, what and what not to do. Then what happened? We went to grade school, right? Then it became more conformative. We said, okay, let's sit down in chairs. Now, from chairs, that teacher up in front is our is our future boss. And there's some actual videos out there that are just, I mean, so great on this subject. Whereas they actually compare the school, uh, the school classroom to the modern day cubicle offices that we sit in today. Just the strike. I mean, and so what happens to our brains for at least 16 to 18 years of our life from grade school, high school, and college? We're basically doing the fundamental thing over and over and over and over again. Yeah. We are fundamentally going into a classroom, a work environment, sitting down, doing what we were told, get up, do it the next day. Hopefully, we get an A. Because if we get an F, a big F, that's failure and that's bad. Right. And so we indoctrinate ourselves, or the system indoctrinates ourselves, to think in a way that doesn't let our spirit grow, but contain us. So then after college, what happens? Well, you know, we're we sit at a we we take all that learning that we had and we may apply it to that some career or so, but at the end of the day, we've created a life of work. Yeah, we're working our lives away. Now, I want to put a quick disclaimer in here is that I'm not against jobs. Jobs are jobs are important for each one of us because they help pay our bills. But as I say, don't let a job define who you are, right? Because what tends to happen is we get stuck after from our 20s up to our 50s and 60s, we get stuck in that job. And then we wake up one morning going, how did that time go by so fast? What happened? And what happened was we were busy in life. We didn't, we stopped thinking about ourselves and started thinking about everything around us when we should be the biggest cheerleader in our own life. We're the author of our own book, right? We're the director of our own play. Well, how are you writing your play? So in finding joy, journey of you, especially with mindset, we say, okay, how can we change that direction? And later on in life, can you take that? Can you take our mindset and make those fundamental changes? And we give some great little clues and hacks on how you do that, uh, so that you can start changing the programming that was downloaded your brain when you were when you were young. This is almost like taking an app and putting an app on your phone, right? You want your phone to work a certain way, so you download it. We were downloading an app because society wanted us to work in a certain way. They created an industrial workforce, which was fine. Now, if you love your job and you know that AI is not knocking on your door to take it, then congratulations. You can say that. But at the end of this time, right, as you get older, don't be bitter with your choices. You know, don't be sitting on a couch at age 70, 75, 80, thinking to yourself, wow, if only I would have done something different. No, you had the choices, you just passed them up. So, what finding joy does, it actually tries to really highlight to the listeners or to the readers, look, there is a better way. You can move forward in a better way. Find a greater purpose in your life. Everybody, if you got a pen or pencil in your hands, write this down. If you're driving a car, please don't do that. Um, but I will tell you, this is a sex success success sauce. Um the secret sauce of success, I'm sorry. Uh is yeah, is find greater purpose, increase your value, become valuable in a process, to have abundant freedom in life and give value to others. That that truly is the secret sauce of success. So um the next uh pillar is identity, right? Who are you? What is your branding? How are you presenting yourself to the world? How is the world treating you in life? We go into a lot of depth about identity. Can you change who you are? Can you create a better version of your branding? You know, gosh, Proctor Gamble, many companies spend billions of dollars on marketing and branding their product lines, but yet we don't spend any money on an investment to ourselves. You know, we don't go to retreats, most of us don't. We don't invest money into better coaching or getting a mentor in our life. What we do is we just kind of wing it. So if we survive today, then okay, hopefully we'll survive tomorrow. Les Brown, one of my mentors, I don't know if you know who he is, of course, but Les Brown is just awesome. I love him to death. And he said something like, you know, you you only work hard enough so they don't fire you, and they only pay you enough so you don't quit. Yeah. And that's the really the essence of how where we're at in our life today, most of us. See, most of us didn't get the memo of entrepreneurship, we didn't get the memo of the one that Elon Musk got. Yeah. Because Elon Musk would be a good example of a growth mindset. You know, he didn't look at failure as a setback, but a setup for success. How many rockets did he put up in SpaceX? You know how long SpaceX has been around? Uh how many? Yeah, about 25, 25 years. Wow. Most of us, you know, it's like, oh, well, they're probably just around in the last few years, right? No. What you don't see is the dedicated effort to get there. So when you talk about finding joy, journey of you, there's no shortcut. It does take work and it does take effort and it does take investment of who you are, but you you are worth it. As Les Brown would tell you, you have greatness in you. You just have to pull it out and find it. You know, you'll also say something like most of us aim too low. We're aiming for the moon when we should be aiming for the stars. And those are the type, those are the type of things that we need to to really think about to change our mindsets into a better future forward. So identity is a big deal. Time, this is uh really the next big one. Are you selling your time on the cheap? Most of us don't think about that, right? We're trying to manage our month so that we don't get behind in our bills. Yeah, most of us are in struggle, and struggle chases money. Success chases value. So time is really important. How do we how do we increase the value of our time? And there's a few simple things we can do. Number one, as um Jim Rome would say, you are the sum of the five people you hang out with. So who are you hanging with? If they're not promoting you, then stop giving them your time. If you're in toxic relationships, think more of yourself and respect to get out of those relationships. If your friends are holding you back or they're not moving forward in their life, then it's time for a new friendship circle. And we go a lot into that too. So in time, show me your friends and I'll show you your future, right? Yeah. Time also has another aspect. You know, we all have a time bank, and that time bank, we go to that time bank every day, we withdraw so much money, and one day we're gonna go to that time bank and there's gonna be little time left. And the reason for that example is really highlight the fact that our time is valuable when we spend it. So, are you spending it at a job that's you know you're you're selling it on the cheap? So, I always like to say to people, what type of time store do you have? Do you have a Dollar Tree store selling your time in bulk amounts, or do you have a Neiman Marcus where the value of your time is consummate with who you are? And the last one is direction. Where are we going? What is that direction? So, what I actually like to always tell people is this do a fun little game here, and that is project yourself 20 years down in the future. Right right now, everybody virtually think about where you want to be in 20 years from now. What does that look like? What does the scenery look like? What when you open up your front door, what does that neighborhood look like? Who are your friends? What are you doing? So think about that dream life that you want. Now, for one second, you're there. Think back to today, 20 years earlier. What would you do different today to get that life for 20 years down the road? And you'll start making the changes. Let me give your audience one really great, easy way to do this, and most of us do not do this, is read. Right? The most simplest thing in the world. Most of us think, oh my gosh, I gotta change, so I gotta go back to school, I gotta go do this. No, you don't. The very first thing what you have to do, it's the cheapest approach. Is there are a lot of great books out there from John Maxwell, uh, Les Brown, Bob Proctor, Jim Rome, Tony Robbins, Grant, and the list is just huge. You have a lot of mentors out there that are trying to give you value from what they what they've learned in their lives. Right. Yeah. That's true. So what I say to everybody is this you have 15 minutes of time in your in your day. Take 15 minutes, read 15 pages.

SPEAKER_00 18:55

Well, and how many times are we scrolling on social media, wasting minutes when we could be adding, you know, it's it's a negative we can add a positive.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

So well, yeah, we come home at night, we're tired, right? Maybe you spent 10 hours, including drive time, right? And and you're tired. Now you gotta maybe fix some dinner and you turn on some mindless TV program to escape that first part of that day.

unknown 19:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:21

So what so what I try to do is put this down to bite-sized pieces, just 15 minutes a day is all I'm asking, right? Pick up a book from John Maxwell, get do some research and start downloading a better program to your brain.

SPEAKER_00 19:34

Love it, right?

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Don't do mindless scrolling, limit your your understanding of news. Right news can become really toxic. And what we're doing is we're downloading that to our brain. Every every time we're seeing it, the eyes are your USB ports, right? Stop watching dark media. You know, that's the most destructive thing you can put in your brain.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Yeah, there's so much. I'm like, we could go on and on, and I'm like, we're out of time. Um, I'm so sorry.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

No, but anyway, so we're watching everything. Yeah, so take 15 minutes of time of your day, read 15 pages. At the end of the year, you would have read probably close to over 5,000 pages. Wow. Well, yeah. Right? That's about 10 to 15 books. How would your life change if you did just that one thing? So Finding Joy Journey of You sets sets the you on your path. This is gonna be a cheap plug. Please get Finding Joy Journey of You first because it's it's a great primer book for all the others you need to read. Yeah, there's lots to read. Is your book on Audible yet? Um it it is. It's um we do have an audio version on it. Um so you can get it there. You can also pick it up at Amazon, Barnes Noble, or you can go to our website, www.findingjoy.us, findingjoy.us. Um and when you do that, you can get a free workbook. And it's a serious workbook, it's about 80 pages long. And um you finish the workbook, give me a reel, showing the pages, flipped, and so forth, and we will send you a finding joy journey of you diploma because you have graduated out of your past life into developing your future life, and it's actually kind of a serious thing. When we put that up on the wall, that becomes your flag to know that you're changing your life for the better. So, you know, Holly, with your program and uh your your information, it's it's so valuable for people to take their life and elevate it because we're they're worth it. We are worth it. The greatness is in you. I always say God gave us all the dots. We just need to be smart enough to connect them. So go to findingjoy.us, you can message me there and um join our community.

SPEAKER_00 21:51

Well, thank you. And uh we'll put all that in the show notes too for everyone so they can go grab it there if you didn't get a chance to write it down or maybe you're driving. But well, thanks so much, Ted, for being on the show. And I'm sure everyone's got lots of wisdom from you, so I really appreciate it. And we'll see everyone next time on the show. All right, bye for now. Take care, thank you. Thanks for joining us on this episode of All Things Retreat. We hope you're leaving with new ideas, fresh inspiration, and the motivation to take your retreats to the next level. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review. It helps us grow and reach more retreat leaders with you. And if you have any questions, topics you'd like us to cover, or just want to say hello, send us an email at infoletreet.com. Follow us on social media to stay connected and all the latest updates until next time. Remember, wait retreat, great. Let's make them extraordinary, one step at a time. 25 minutes. Let's make some really well.