Who Do You Want to Become? by Jerald Simon

I'd like to welcome you to my podcast, "Music, Motivation, and More - The Positivity Podcast."

My name is Jerald Simon, and I am the host of "Music, Motivation, and More - The Positivity Podcast.

I am the founder of Music Motivation® (http://www.musicmotivation.com) and the creator of the Cool Songs Club (https://www.coolsongsclub.com).

In this episode, 015 - "'Who Do You Want to Become?", I talk about the following:

1. Intro/Opening: Who are you? Who have you been? Who would you like to be and become?

2. Positive Perceptions: "Who do you want to become..." pg. 27 from Perceptions, Parables, and Pointers by Jerald Simon

3. Motivation in a Minute (a motivational/inspirational topic): "Treat a man as he appears to be..." pg. 188 from Perceptions, Parables, and Pointers by Jerald Simon

4. The Music Within: Contemplation by Jerald Simon (from the Album: "Sweet Serenity" by Jerald Simon

5. Poetry that Motivates - "Beaten by Bitterness" pg. 78 from my first poetry book, "The 'As If' Principle" (motivational poetry) featuring 222 motivational. inspirational poems I have written.

As a music educator, I have written 25 music books featuring original music I have composed and teaching piano students worldwide about music theory, improvisation, and composition. I refer to them as Theory Therapy, Innovative Improvisation, and Creative Composition. You can learn more about the various music books I have written on my website, http://www.musicmotivation.com. -

I began composing what have become known as Cool Songs to help motivate teens to want to play the piano - the FUN way. You can learn more about the fun, COOL SONGS I composed each month that have accompaniment minus tracks so students can play along with drums, guitars, keyboard synths, and other instruments and sound effects on my COOL SONGS website at https://www.coolsongsclub.com -

Here is a link where you can download a FREE PDF book on motivating teen piano students ("20 Ways to Motivate Teen Piano Students to Want to Play the Piano - the FUN way): http://www.coolsongsclub.com/freebook. After entering your email where you'd like the FREE PDF sent, the page will then refresh and you can learn more about the COOL SONGS Club.

You can join the COOL SONGS Club FaceBook group on my COOL SONGS FaceBook group page at this link: http://facebook.com/groups/coolsongsclub/ - If you know anyone who would be interested in joining this new group, please invite them. I'm excited to share ideas, suggestions, and hear your thoughts, ideas, and tips on motivating and inspiring piano students - the FUN way!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Who do you want to become the person you were yesterday? The person you are today and the person you can become tomorrow are all very different. You may look at the person you were yesterday and feel guilt, remorse, anger, frustration, and pity. This may even apply to the person you are today. If your past and present circumstances seem unbearable, intolerable or undesirable in any way, you can change for the better decide right now to create a better you for tomorrow in vest in yourself, learn as much as you can about the person you want to become. Welcome to music, motivation and more the positivity podcast. I am your host, Gerald Simon. I am the founder of music motivation and the creator of the cool songs club Today's podcast is titled who do you want to become? So I'd like to ask you these questions and think about these. As I ask them one, who are you? Two, who have you been three? Who would you like to be? And eventually become those three questions, have three very different answer. And the responses we receive from others and from ourselves, when those questions are asked, can be very intriguing, very insightful, very eye opening. Because the question of who we are, has so many different answers, the question of who we were or who we have been in the past. And also the question of who we will be or become in the future can actually conjure up within us. So many different emotions, those feelings that we have either good or bad about our past are present. And our sure, because we are the summation of all of our past thoughts, past experiences, past feelings, everything we have done in the past, it has made us who we are today in the present. But everything we do presently will prepare us for who we will become in the future and what we will accomplish, what we will do, where we will go, the kind of life we will live and lead. See these questions are paramount because these questions contain the answers. I'd like to read a paragraph from my book, perceptions, parables, and pointers. And this is on page 27. It says this, who do you want to become? The person you were yesterday, the person you are today and the person you can become tomorrow are all very different. You may look at the person you were yesterday and feel guilt, remorse, anger, frustration, and pity. This may even apply to the person you are today. If your past and present circumstances seem unbearable in intolerable or undesirable in any way, you can change for the better decide right now to create a better you for tomorrow. Invest in yourself, learn as much as you can about the person you want to become. How does he or she speak? What do they do where know that you don't? How do they live? What are their dreams? Ambitions plans, goals, values, et cetera. Are you working on becoming who you want to become? What qualities and attributes do you need to possess? How will you obtain them? What changes could you make in your life? That would be life changing. Decide to be a better person, make the decisions you need to make today to become the person you will become tomorrow. If you think about it, we all have this image of ourselves who we think we are. And of course there is the image of who other people think we are based on what they know, their interactions with us, what they have seen us do, what they have heard us say, people only know, or yes, what they have been led to believe based on the experiences they have had with us. Again, these can be good experiences. These can be bad experiences, but our true selves, the people we know we are when no one else is watching. When no one else is listening to us, that individual is someone we need to get to know better, because we need to be honest with ourselves before we can be honest with others. You cannot be trustworthy with another individual. If you are not trustworthy with yourself, we cannot help others set goals. If we do not set goals ourselves, we cannot teach someone else. If we are unteachable, you see, we need to work on ourselves. And the person we are today is someone we have been working on every single day of our lives year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, every day we are changing. We are improving. We are progressing. We have the opportunity to figure out who we were yesterday and who we want to be today. Every day is a clean slate. It's an opportunity for us to start over. It's a brand new day. It's full of possibilities and we can hope we can have faith. We can do our very best today, but that means we need to learn from past mistakes. We need to learn from past experiences we have had. Now we all have good days and we all have bad days and we accumulate these good and bad days and they turn into weeks. And then those good and bad weeks that we have turn into months and years. And then a lifetime goes by now, what we experience over a lifetime can help us discover ourselves, but we can rediscover ourselves every day. We can help those around us who may be lost, who need a little bit of our hope of our faith. If their faith or their hope is depleted. So we need to think about who we are and who we want to become. And part of that is of course having a vision. What do we want to do with our lives? What do we hope to accomplish? What do we believe we can learn? What talents do we believe we can develop? What habits good or bad do we believe we can adopt? We can drop. We can overcome. We can improve upon what weaknesses do we have? Where are we falling short or not measuring up either in our own minds or possibly in the minds of employers, neighbors, friends, spouse, what can we personally do to be better? Part of this is how we treat ourselves and how we treat others. I'd like to read a quote. This is one of the pointers from my book, perceptions, pars, and pointers. And it says this, this is by Johan Wolfgang van. And he says, treat Aman as he appears to be. And you make him worse, but treat Aman as if he were what he potentially could be. And you make him what he should be. You see how we treat people will ultimately turn into how others treat themselves. If we treat someone as intelligent and we know that they can solve any problem that is placed before them, they will view themselves as intelligent. And then they will act intelligently. But if we think someone is not capable, not very smart. If we think they're not very talented, or if we think they not very good at much of anything. And we treat them as if they are less than what they could or should be, then they will fall short of becoming who they can become. And it's because of the way we treat them. If we are unkind to someone that unkindness that we are enacting upon, someone else will in many ways, cause them to first be unkind to themselves. And if they're unkind to themselves or about themselves, because of what we have done to them or what we have said to them, then they begin to spread that unkindness to others. It starts with their family. If someone has a bad day, others are rude or mean to them. It's like they have a chip on their shoulder. And then they start behaving either in a rude or unbecoming way. And what happens is they were happy. At one point they were positive. They were upbeat. And then that pessimism or poison slowly crept in and it overtook them. And what happens is they begin to be negative. They begin to say things. They really don't mean they're saying them because someone else was unkind to them. And what happens is, is this negative ripple effect. But if we can change that, if we can be positive, if we can be kind about everyone to everyone, then we start to change who we are. And that enables others around us to be who they should be for the music within portion of this podcast. I would like to have us listen to contemplation. Contemplation is from the album, sweet serenity. Now that is a piano solo album of very gentle, soothing flowing, sounding piano piece. This where the left hand has a lot of movement up and down the piano. And, and it's very common, very gentle. So contemplation. I want you to think about what the word means. Contemplation contemplating to think about ponder, but also think about how the music can help you think about how do a better job at discovering who you are, who you would like to be

Speaker 2: 12:07

The, the, the, the,

Speaker 1: 13:38

For the poetry that motivates section of this podcast. I would like to read beaten by bitterness. This is a poem I wrote from my book, the, as if principle motivational poetry, and this is what it says. I was badly beaten by bitterness, bruised by bereavement and chance, discarded by dignity, rejected in remorse, frightened by failure and extremely off course, life had taken its toll on me, an extremely amazing ride. The rollercoaster of all roller coasters. And yet I felt empty inside. I felt sadly sweetened by leans amused by the ment of its dance dismayed by despair infected from its force, outcast and alone and overcome by remorse. But I will not let bitterness best me. I know I am better than that. I will improve each for now. I know the way I will stand tall. Every time I fall and bitterness will leave me once. And for all, who are we do? We allow ourselves to be bested by bitterness. Do we allow ourselves to be saddened by sorrow? Do we allow ourselves to be overcome by guilt to the point that we can't concentrate or do we instead prove that we will not allow bitterness to best us, that we can be positive and happy and upbeat? We will not allow sadness to destroy us. We all have sad times. We all need to be sad at varying stages in our lives. There's nothing wrong with sadness, but if you allow sadness to continue to creep in to your life, you become overcome by sadness and you succumb to the sadness. And then what happens is you don't feel good enough. Everything is depressing. Initially sorrow is a wonder healing process. It's good to be sad to help us be prepared for the times when we can be glad, but too much of anything will at first overwhelm you. Then it will consume you. And eventually if not protect it against, it can destroy you. If we want to who we are and who we would like to be, we need to figure out what we would like to learn in life. But we also need to figure out what we would like to avoid in life. Now you cannot avoid difficulties. Everyone has difficult times. You cannot avoid sadness. Everyone experiences sorrow. There, there are things that we cannot avoid, no matter how hard we try, but we have so much we can do to counteract whatever difficult and dark despair may come upon us. We can improve our positivity. We can say kind things about ourselves. We can say kind things about others, to them and to others. We can improve. We can progress. And how we do that is writing down a list of what qualities or characteristics will we would like to work on. You can think of them as virtues, Benjamin Franklin would often write down what virtues he wanted to work on. And he came up with a list of 13, all encompassing virtues that he felt he was either lacking in these areas or he needed to do more, to improve and get better. So think about what you can do today. Come up with a list, write down. It doesn't need to be 13 virtues, but write down virtues qualities, characteristics that you would like to have. Honesty, dependability, integrity. You can write down different things that you would like to work on. Patience, frugality. Now, many of these, it feels as if I'm quoting Benjamin Franklin's 13 virtues, but a lot of these, you can come up with a list of what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are. And then you can breach that gap because you can make those strengths stronger and you can turn those weaknesses into strengths. But first you need to discover what they are. That is part of discovering who we are finding out what we do, that we enjoy finding out what we do that we don't enjoy. And having an honest and open conversation with ourselves. When you look in the mirror, look yourself in the eyes, see into your soul, ask yourself if you are content where you are in life, what you are doing. If there are any areas in your life where you could improve or be better, maybe we need more patience. Maybe we need to demonstrate more kindness. Maybe we need to be more understanding, have more empathy, have more sympathy. Maybe we need to not be so quick to be angry or upset. We need to be more forgiving. We need to apologize and ask for forgiveness. There are so many ways we can improve and everything. We do qualities and characteristics about ourselves that we are attempting to improve upon and work on each day. What we do every day will help us see a bigger picture of who we can become. So come up with a list today and start improving and working on who you are right now. You can't change who you were in the past. So, so don't worry about the mistakes you've made in the past. We all have made mistakes. We all need help. Some of us are still paying for those mistakes because they have carried over to our present situation, but focus on who you are right now and who you would like to be. And as you do that, you will greater understanding of how you can change your own life. And in the process, you can change the lives of those around you. It's about having a positive perspective. It's about being honest with yourself. It's about caring about those around you. And it's also about how you treat others and how you treat self. Thank you so much for listening. I hope these ideas and thoughts have helped you think a little bit about what you could be doing or what you would like to do. No one is perfect. I am far from perfect and I have so many shortcomings. I have so many failures, but I'm trying to learn from them. I'm trying to, I'm trying to improve. I'm trying to do the very best I can and be better today than I was yesterday. And I think that is one of the main themes that I try to focus on in this podcast is how we can try to do our best and be our best and help those around us. Be their best as well. I'd love to hear your comments. I'd love to have you. If you have any questions, please feel free to send me a message. You can contact me at Gerald Simon, J E R a D S I M O N. Music, motivation.com. You can visit my website, music, motivat.com or my side. Cool songs, club.com. But I'd love to hear from you. You can connect with me on any of the social media sites out there at Gerald Simon, but I'd love to connect with you. And if you have any questions or if you have any commentary about any of the podcast, please feel free to reach out to me, send me a message. If there's something you would like to have us discuss or talk about on the podcast, I would love to hear it. I would love to hear your suggestions, your comments, your questions. I I'm sure. I probably won't have all the answers or maybe not any answers at all, but we can discover together. We can learn. We can grow. We can do everything we can, that we can be better today than we were yesterday. Thanks again for listening. Hope you guys have a great week. See you, bye. Subscribe to music, motivation and more the positivity podcast with Gerald Simon to receive updates about each new weekly podcast. Every Monday, a new podcast is released to help motivate and inspire individuals to learn, to grow, to do, to be and become the very best they can become. These are all motivational messages that inspire men and women of all ages to do, and be their best to set goals, to work on improving who they are and who they would like to become. Thank you again for listening, connect with us on social media to become part of the, as we all work together to motivate each other, to do and be our best. Thanks for listening to music, motivation and more the positivity podcast. I am your host, Gerald Simon, and I'm grateful to have you listen to this podcast. Every Monday, we come out with a brand new podcast and you can listen to it on any of the podcast, streaming science available, just search for music, motivation and more the positivity podcast with Gerald Simon. Any of the music that I've shared in these podcasts, you can listen to. All of my music is available on Spotify, Pandora, iTunes, Amazon, and any streaming site available. You can also check out my music books at music, motivation.com, and you can find my poetry self-help and motivational books available from amazon.com from Barnes and noble and from all different online shops and stores. If you have any questions about the music that I create through my company, music motivation, you can learn more at music, motivation.com and you can visit my website. Cool songs, club.com to learn more about how I create fun, cool piano music that helps motivate piano students to want to play the piano the fun way, especially during their teenage years. I'd love to, to have you check that out, but thank you again for listening. Please feel free to connect with me on any of the social media sites out there. You can watch my YouTube videos on youtube.com/ Gerald Simon. You can connect with me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and all social media sites at Gerald Simon. Thanks again for listening until next time. Keep up the great work and have fun. See you guys. Bye.