Perseverance, Preparation, and Prosperity Thinking in Unbelievable Circumstances – Episode 659

This transcript was auto-generated and may contain errors.

[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Prosperity thinkers, welcome to the podcast. This is an interesting one because sometimes unbelievable circumstances and storms come in life and you get through it and outsiders never know about it. But there’s a lot of things that you have to do to prepare and persevere. There we go. Excellent. Let’s use that word. Kim, set the stage and then we’re going to go through that because there’s a lot of internal lessons for this. Well, so as the world knows, the United States had a storm and some places were hit way worse than others. And as many people may not know, the Texas power grid is not connected to the rest of the United States power grid. And the state of Texas decided to do that so that they could maintain their sovereignty

[00:59] because the state of Texas is the only state that is actually allowed to leave the union if they want. When the storm comes, you know, it’s not really something that we get overly worried about. We’re in the southern, kind of eastern southern part of Texas. We have our solar, we have our batteries, we have a big generator, we have a small generator. We have to do a bunch of water work at the barn, make sure the alpacas water doesn’t freeze. We have a whole set up like special hose at the barn, faucets that go way deep into the ground. So the storm’s going to come. It’s all right. We don’t even bother putting water in the tub, right? Because we have a well and we typically have power and we have backup power and

[01:44] we have backup to the backup. I mean, we are actually still hooked up to the grid when the grid’s working. So that’s like a triple backup, right? We literally have a four phase backup. And so obviously the area went down, so that’s the grid. We live at the end of the Russ County electric rural co-op. So our power is definitely kind of at the end of the world anyway. And then we have our solar and we have a very large solar structure. We have a very large battery system because what people do not realize about solar is you have to have batteries that go with and typically our solar gets charged up during the day. The batteries then also get charged up. The batteries last for the night and then the solar rebuilds itself during the day.

[02:39] And there’s a little extra because if we have a couple of cloudy days or whatever, the situation works just fine. We’ve had some issues here and there. The ice that we got, it looked like snow, but in our area it’s all ice. Absolutely covered up, froze over the solar panels, so they weren’t working. The cold is not great on the batteries. I mean, they’re in a protected area, but I don’t know, they may have had problems. Our large generator, again, so we have no grid, so that backup’s gone. Our large generator was having problems and I can’t really explain them, except I just know that it wasn’t working. This is a big issue. Now, there’s a couple of family members in our area that have no backups, so they

[03:23] all come to our house. And so Saturday, thankfully, it’s Saturday, we realize like we’ve got some problems here and Todd’s out trying to fix the generator at ungodly hours of the morning and realizes this is not going to go well. And so we get our backup generator, which is a tiny little guy that runs with gas, liquid fuel that you put in, and it runs a little bit of internet and a refrigerator and freezer so that that doesn’t get ruined. So we lived in our home with a whole bunch of family members with very little internet. We had to cancel a trip to Salt Lake City because we couldn’t get out. We had trees across the driveway. We have two hills that we have to deal with. They were horribly, totally iced over.

[04:10] It was a mess. It was Armageddon. Yes. What’s unbelievable, and there’s so many lessons in here as we talked about this that we’re going to unpack. Bring us into your mindset because talking with someone else in the same city in the same circumstance, they could say this was the worst experience in my life and I’ll never forget this. And they’ll be so upset. And you are laughing. Now, of course, it was difficult. It was challenging. Take us to mindset and then we’re going to get to the other pieces. Well, I want to state what my biggest challenge was during the week, which I found very interesting. And it was an utter lack of desire to do anything else. Here I am. My calendar is clear because I was supposed to be doing this three day

[05:05] event, et cetera, et cetera. And I’m in my home, right? We had heat. I could have gotten lots of things done, but it was all consuming just to live that I was making no progress on anything. And every single day, literally it took till about noon just to sort out the various aspects of our lives, our parents’ lives that were living with us. There were some kids mixed in, niece, nephews, et cetera, younger kids, the alpacas, the dog. It was absolutely critical to do every single thing that I could every moment of every day to keep my mindset at a level of equilibrium. I wouldn’t even go into positive space. I’m just talking where I don’t cry because it was so weird and so frustrating and so just really world rocking.

[06:12] It was a good experience to go through because now afterwards… Oh, wait, one more thing. I was hungry. I was physically hungry. It was evidence. My sister pointed this out to me. Evidence of how much my mind was working. Because oftentimes I would like go deal with the outside that I had to and then come back and sit in front of the fireplace because that was the warmest spot. I mean, the rest of the room was fine, too. But so you would think, well, I really wasn’t that physically active. I was mentally active. And it was, like I said, it was just keeping my mindset just right at one notch above negative. And so if you look at the spectrum and if you remember, we have a single page document and it is called Unbelievable Thinking.

[07:03] Knowing that we’ve got a few moments before this podcast will get posted, maybe we’ll create a special page for that if people want access to that. I titled it Unbelievable Thinking. I mean, this document is from like 20 years ago and I’ve tweaked it over the years because the word unbelievable can absolutely be implied to be positive or negative, right? And that’s why it is unbelievable thinking. And I have a whole list of negative thinking and a whole list of positive thinking on this single page document. And it’s a spectrum, right? So if you have let’s call negative 100 all the way into the unbelievable negative thinking and you call positive 100, so we have a 200 point swing, if you will, positive 100 all the way on the right on the positive

[07:57] thinking side, prosperity thinking is what I call it on the paper. I was at one, not 10, not 90, one. And all I could do was just not slip into zero. Don’t go there. No, don’t go negative. And Todd is equally amazing at this ability. And he doesn’t overtly show the 50, 60, 70, 80 that I know he gets mentally sometimes that doesn’t ever show. But he’s always on the positive side. It was really, really almost. Yeah, it was unbelievable. That’s really the only word. It’s exhausting. If it hasn’t happened yet, which I don’t know, and no need to share this one, your nervous system will go, oh, because I remember after Hurricane Helene hit us and same thing. And it was just like, finally. And it was like my bones, the internal everything.

[09:02] You said something in here which is so critically important. So it’s this. You have the regular power. You have a solar system. You have a generator. And then you have a backup generator. And you are still able to limp along, operate, not prosper. That’s OK. Limp along. Save the food. Keep the internet. Have some light and heat. Barely. That’s fine. Now, we’ve talked on the podcast about the emergency fund. Plan for the one emergency, meaning the solar emergency. They don’t think about the backup generator. They don’t think about the backup generator. How much of importance was it for you to be at a one with the attitude because you had prepared? Well, as we know, your attitude, your perspective, your thoughts

[10:01] are everything. And they are also the only thing that you can control. But there is a slight or quick second. In other words, if that’s the only thing you can control, there is a close second. That’s a better way to say it. And that’s your body and your state of being. And thankfully, the bulk of our family are decent, prosperous thinkers. Because we all had to deal with this. Everybody had their own thing that they were contributing. And some people really can’t contribute. They’re physically not capable. And yet, you can contribute your state of being. The look on your face, how your body’s sitting at the table, which, thank goodness, we got to use chili that was in our freezer probably for five years that hadn’t been used.

[10:57] And it was a wonderful lunch. And it was hot. Just stuff like that that we can just be so grateful for and happy about. And everybody brought to the table, the literal table as well as sometimes a figurative table, the ability to have a decently prosperous positive mindset with a decently prosperous state of being. Tony Robbins talks about the peak state of being. We were far from peak. But we were not slumped in our chairs complaining and operating in a negative physical space, like with our shoulders down and our head down and et cetera. And on the occasional times when I really did feel like crying, maybe I would have a quick cry. But then, chin up, right? What did the British say? Keep going.

[11:54] You know, I’ve seen it many times. And if you need a cry or you need a frustration moment, that’s OK. There has to be an end. It’s almost like as if you’re walking to the alpacas to feed them and you’re OK. For the next 50 feet, I’m going to be mad. I’m going to kick the snow. I’m going to do this. But when I open that door, it’s good. And that’s OK. There’s a few things that you’ve said in here. There’s such gold, the hard things, like washing dishes. Doing laundry. Taking care of animals, like having a water hose that works, that’s not frozen. We gain a new appreciation for that. And so for all of you listeners, if you didn’t get hit by this storm, here is the wisdom transferred over. If you did get hit by the storm, in the South

[12:47] we say bless your heart, which means I feel bad for you and you’ll be OK. Send an email to hello at prosperitythinkers.com for the unbelievable thinking. That way it will be something that arms you and your family. Because if you weren’t positive, Kim, there’s no way that your household would have been that way. Other people would have picked up on it and it would have been miserable. And you wouldn’t be laughing as we are right now. So thank you for sharing this, even though you had to persevere through a lot of things. Well, so grateful for lots of things. And of course, now we realize there’s parts of our property that are broken and need to be fixed. And OK, fine. And I’m using the word property

[13:37] with a very expansive definition. And how wonderful it is that we can get those things fixed. And one of the things that Todd talks about all the time, he was a Boy Scout, so he prepares and prepares and is backed up and backed up again. His natural mode of operation, plus I think it was taught to him as a Boy Scout, so it contributed as well. It is so valuable and something to be so extremely grateful for. And so there are other people that don’t have that skill, right? Either you’re just not a natural prepper, if you will, or you don’t have the Colby profile that indicates you have ability with your hands. And this is the time to get your community involved. And find people in your community

[14:26] that do have those skills and hire them, which goes back to the emergency fund, which is how utterly important it is that we have cash. In this certain circumstances, the cash wasn’t the thing that helped. But as a general rule of thumb for others, if you’re looking for a lesson that you can apply, like, oh, I live in Florida and we don’t have those kinds of storms. Yes, I realize you have different kinds of storms. The lesson of the importance of cash and how it can solve problems because it can get in there and take an emergency and make it really doable. And this is the preparation part is to have that cash. So yeah, we are back on track, grateful, still a lot of messes to clean up, but the most important thing in the world to me,

[15:13] because I think this is how I am clear that there is good going on, is that there’s progress. And for a week, I felt like there was no progress. And now we have it back. Even if it’s take a shower, right? Like have hot, whatever you’re gonna have in the morning without having to boil water on the gas stove. I mean, it’s just crazy what we dealt with and now we’re done. Well, Kim, thank you for sharing wonderful information there. And again, everyone send in an email to hello at prosperitythinkers.com. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit prosperitythinkers.com.