Would you discover how taking suggestions is an everyday superpower because I think this gives each of us the ability to craft ourselves into a superhero meaning a super man or a super woman with real life combined with everyday superpowers?
Unlock this superpower by reading this post or watching the original video of day 164 of Happier People Podcast on YouTube!
Enter the edited transcript from the video ... I'm on vacation in Detroit and you can see that I'm in the Embassy Suites conference room here. I just sat down and nobody told me I could come in here or anything. I just found a door that was open to one of the conference rooms and I rolled in here. I’ve got some snacks, these are some of my favorite snacks. I just sat down in here and I'm making a couple of videos. 😅
What was I talking about?
Suggestions.
Taking suggestions is a superpower and I’m actually doing this because of several suggestions. I’ve seen consistent comments saying, “Jerry, you're so hyped up. Why do you shout at us in your videos all the time? You should try doing some videos that are more calm and relaxed.”
I took that suggestion. I’m sitting down. I'm at a different place.
I also got lots of suggestions that I saw in the YouTube comments and on Steemit:
“Jerry, please film some video somewhere else, do something a little more exciting, do something a little different.”
I’ve taken that suggestion. I’m sitting down, I'm in a new place.
“And the best place you chose was the Embassy Suites conference room?"
"Boring!”
I just sat down in the Embassy Suites conference room and I’m taking a suggestion.
I’ll show you what the opposite of taking a suggestion looks like in case you don't know what I’m talking about.
The opposite of taking a suggestion is to continue having the same problem. For example, for years in my life, I struggled with all kinds of problems. I was 70 pounds heavier than now, I was fat, overweight, close to morbidly obese. I struggled with moods. I often would get way over anxious, stressed out and depressed. I struggled with alcoholism where I would drink and so many people would say, “Stop drinking. Go to AA, go to the gym more.”
For years of my adult life, I kept having the same problems over and over again, and the people around me who love me kept suggesting ways that I could have a better life, as I complained to them about my life.
Guess what?
I kept doing the same things and getting the same result.
I remember when I was a police officer, my dad telling me as I’d call him with another hangover at work, complaining about my life and how I felt, “Boy, why don’t you go and be a bartender?”
As I'm sitting there complaining about this thing with that girl, or whatever, and my money, he said, “Why don't you be a bartender? You’ll make better money than you're making as a police officer, cash money. You can go out and spend at the bar, you don't even have to pay tax on it.”
He told me, “Why don’t you be a bartender? You’ll meet girls all the time there, you can stay up late, you can go out, you can have fun, you can party. Why do you want to be a police officer? The things you're doing in your life being a police officer is not helping you get what you want, why don't you go be a bartender?”
I thought that was the dumbest suggestion.
I said, “That’s stupid, why would I be a bartender? I want to be a police officer.”
Soon enough they got tired of my crap and encouraged me to quit as a police officer. That was the opposite of taking suggestions. I had problem after problem all the time with my drinking, with my moods, with my eating, with my diets, with girls and all the people around me who loved me kept giving me suggestions, which I continuously ignored.
You might say, “Well, Jerry, sometimes the people in your life give you stupid suggestions,” and that's true. One guy at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting told me, “Why don't you try smoking pot Instead? That way you won't need to drink.”
Now fortunately, I've smoked pot enough times, I got sick the last time, and I don't want to do it anymore. I'm not saying that you need to take every single suggestion in your life that every single person says all the time. At the same time, I realize that for some people, smoking pot might be a good way to not drink alcohol anymore.
I don't know in everyone's business exactly how life should be managed. I know that for me, people suggested that I never drink alcohol, to start with, and then for most of the time I drank for about 10 years, they kept suggesting I stop drinking. I kept not taking their suggestions.
What has given me a really happy life today is that when the people around me make suggestions, whether it’s comments on my videos or on Steemit, where I'm mostly reading comments, or whether it's my wife, my mother, my family or my friends, I try to take suggestions seriously today because often, the people that love me are able to see what I need to fix my problems better than I can see it myself.
I bet you’ve had the same experience with someone else too. I hardly have any problems today in my life, which I'm very grateful for, but you can look at most people's lives and if they complain about something, I bet you could give them an immediate fix.
Now, whether your fix would work or not is a different story. I have a family member who has a lot of health problems, who continuously goes to the doctor, continuously takes medications, basically continuously does the same things over and over, just like I did most of my adult life. They continuously complain about the results.
My suggestion is, “Well, you go to the doctor so much, you don't seem like you're getting better. Why don't you try to stop going to the doctor? Stop going to the doctor. Stop taking all these medications. Ask your doctor about how to do it safely. Stop going to the doctor. Stop taking medications.”
By going often, I mean several appointments every week.
“Just stop going. Quit going. Quit taking all of your medications with the help of your doctor. They may tell you that you can't get off it, ask for a different opinion. Just try stopping all of it. Try eating healthy: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, and some herbs and spices. Try eating like that, try sleeping, getting enough sleep, maybe finding somewhere to get help with this, some natural relief centre. Why don't you try that? Just test it to see how it works.”
Now, from my point of view, that is likely based on my own personal results to probably have a very positive impact on 80% of that family member’s health problems, because from what I've seen, going to the doctor over and over, and taking medication over and over, often, the more you do makes it worse and worse. The irony is that you get sicker and sicker the more you keep going to the doctor. I will talk more about that later, but that seems to be like this, at least, from outside looking in.
Yet the family member continues the exact same thing and won't try that, they are going to continue to have faith that, “If I just keep going to the doctor, just keep doing what they tell me, it’ll get better.”
What happens?
It's always a new sickness, it's always a new problem, and it's always the assumption that going to the doctor is going to fix it. There’s never, for years now, any recovery, there is never any time getting better. It's always more sickness.
You see, if you keep doing the same thing over and over, you're going to get the same results. You've got at least to try something new. If you don't like how things are now, you've got to try something new. You've got to do it a new way if you want to get new results.
I've tried eating a whole new way and I've gotten a lot better results out of it, and yet I only was inspired to start that by taking suggestions. My uncle suggested I start eating different if I wanted to lose weight and keep it off the rest of my life, and reduce the odds of me getting in that doctor cycle and having all of these cancers and problems throughout my life.
I tried that suggestion even though it meant eating vegan, no meat, no animal products like cheese and dairy. Do you think that was something I just thought would be a good time?
No.
I tried it just to test it out and guess what?
I feel really good today.
My body absolutely loves eating like this. The snacks I have with me have nuts, dates, chocolate chips, almonds and walnuts, and beans. Is this the best snack of the world? Sure there are always ways for improvement.
What I've learned is that taking suggestions from others leads to all the results I'm struggling for in my life. Just like this video format, it's a suggestion. The hard part is realizing that, often, other people can better see how I can get what I want than I can, to see that I'm often blind. I'm grateful today that I trust the other people in my life. My wife gives me suggestions and I used to brush them off. Today, if my wife suggests I do it a certain way, then I do it most of the time.
Yesterday my wife suggested 45 minutes before my daughter's bed time, that we start getting ready and leave the family party we were at. I didn't want to go. I wanted to stay right up until the last minute, but I took my wife's suggestion.
I told her, “I'm not ready to go yet, but I bet you're right, I'll just do what you've suggested anyway.”
And guess what? My wife's suggestion was dead-on, exactly right, the timing was exactly right. I trusted my wife's suggestion, and I got a happy family out of it. A wife, happy that I did what she asked me, a daughter who was ready to go to bed right when we were in the position to put her to bed, when we had a couple minutes of crying in the bathtub.
When I didn't take people's suggestions in my life, I consistently suffered the same consequences over and over again. Today, one of the ordinary superpowers I have in my life is I take suggestions.
Do you think I felt comfortable going to find a counselor after my wife, my mother and several friends and family suggested I go get a counselor?
No, I didn't want to go get a counselor and spend money on it, but I did, and I'm really happy because I've been learning some amazing simple tactics from the counselor, a psychotherapist, who helps me stay on top of my moods. Simple things like looking straight ahead instead of looking down off to the right or the left.
If I want to pull myself out of my mood, I look straight ahead, look up. I watch for that tendency to look down and to the right, and move my eyes out of those positions if I want to get out of the mood.
That's the value I get out of taking suggestions.
I'm grateful to know another counselor, I'm not taking sessions with him, but he's a friend that I see at AA, he told me,“One of the things that you're doing really well, you take suggestions. When people suggest something, you actually do it.”
Now, if someone said you should jump off a bridge, I'm not going to go jump off a bridge, but most people's suggestions are given out of love. I hope the suggestions I've made here are given out of love.
I hope the examples I've shown are given out of my life experience both being on the receiving end of suggestions and not taking them, and taking them, and seeing the results as I give suggestions in my life, the people that take them tend to be pretty happy, the people who don't take the suggestions I make that are shared out of love and tend to do the same things, keep being miserable in the same ways.
Then I call and I love them, I listen to them, share the exact same thing they've struggled with for 10 or 15 years. Most of the time, I don't beat them over the head with suggestions, but when they ask, I'm giving them the truth even if it's uncomfortable.
"What you're doing is making it worse. If you want to make it better, here's how you go about it."
So thank you for giving me the courage today to sit down in this conference room in the Embassy Suites to try a video in a different format, to show that most of the day I'm pretty calm and relaxed. I don't have to shout at you to get my point across.
I love you. You're awesome.
Would you continue giving me suggestions, especially on Steemit, because that's the main place I read the comments?
Thank you very much for enjoying this with me.
I hope you have a wonderful day today.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk
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