Click the audio player below to listen to this truly inspiring interview!
[audio:http://matthewferry.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Jim-Donovan-Interview.mp3|titles=Jim Donovan Interview]

You never learn anything when you succeed. You learn when you’re failing. You learn when you’re falling. You learn when you’re screwing up. So really engage the idea that you’re going to fail. You’re going to fall down. Get up, brush yourself off, learn that lesson, and keep going.

And I want you to practice going like this. Like, woo-hoo, that was awesome! Because it really is awesome that you are learning.

How you interpret a situation is your opinion. Did you even invent your opinion? No. You were conditioned like a dog to believe the way you believe. This is how you poop. Here’s where you pee. And this is how you get dressed. You walk like this and move like this and talk like this. You are just a puppet of the conditioning that you have received.

Consider you’ve never made any choices about what you really want your life to be. That all of your choices that you supposedly made have been influenced by what you were conditioned to believe early on is the right way to operate. Let go of some of that today. Know that your growth is where the pain and the suffering is.

So start to get excited about it. Start to get thrilled when you experience, when you come up against the wall, when you come up to something in your world that isn’t working. I just want you to say, “Yeah! This is it. I’m about to grow. Somethin’ good’s gonna to happen.” Try that and see what happens.

So, nothing outside of you determines the way that you feel. You, shifting your context, and looking at it from a different way instantaneously gives you relief.

So, the client is a real estate agent, and she is selling a house. The owner suddenly goes crazy when the buyer sends a request back and questions some of the work that they are doing on the house. And so the seller just went nuts, saying, “Who are they?” and “We did it,” and so on. And the seller started yelling, swearing and carrying on, and my client’s like, “What did I do wrong?” and “Oh, my God!”

And I said, “Whoa. You gotta back up and you need to look at it from a different context. This seller just wants to sell her house, and she doesn’t deal well with confrontation, so when someone questions whether she did something or not, her response is the response of a 3-year-old. Right? She screams and yells and throws a temper tantrum. And your job is to just go there with her and say “I know! I can’t believe it!” and get on her side, completely. Be completely and totally in appreciation and honor her 3-year-old style, and see what happens then.

So the first step is to recognize that it’s not you. The other person is having a response. And then the second way to control that experience is to honor and appreciate it. You can, literally, be exactly the same way that that person is, and honor their style. Try that life coaching. You can become the creator of your own experience and not be a victim of your circumstances. See what happens.

Now, I don’t mean it exactly like that, because when you’re mad, you will manifest, but you’re just going to manifest things that don’t work. So, you’ll manifest more resistance, you’ll manifest more things that frustrate you. You’ll manifest more things that annoy you, that agitate you.

In order to get into a flow where you manifest what you want, you’ve got to get into a state of no resistance. This means you’ve gotta let go of anger, frustration, annoyance, doubt, uncertainty, etc. All of those things will stop you from manifesting what you want.

For example, you resist people being liars. Well, I want you to notice that you’ll have a tendency to be pulled into lying yourself. What you resist, you will attract and become.

What you accept you can transform and change. The key is to work to accept. You need to know that you’re not the ruler of the universe, that the world is really not supposed to bow down to your infinite wisdom, and that your knowledge is not the all-knowing, all-seeing knowledge. Therefore, what you resist is not the truth.

So, when you’re resisting, you’re saying, “It shouldn’t be that way.” Well, how do you know? Who are you? Are you God? I don’t think so. So start to notice that your mind has designated you the Ruler of the Universe. When you resist things, you focus on them. When you focus on things, you become them. You attract them. You align with them.

What you want to do is you want to accept, appreciate, and understand. And when you do that, what you were resisting will literally transform and become something usable and go to another level that will take your life to the next level. I highly recommend that you work on acceptance, appreciation and understanding today.

And the answer is- nobody really knows. But all of the evidence, both in anecdotes and with science, provides us with an established notion that being grateful is extremely powerful in your life.

One of the things that I noticed happens when you start putting gratitude into your life on a daily basis, is that you begin to engage those happy chemicals. You start to feel the endorphins and the dopamine and the serotonin really start to kick in, and you can feel that. You feel your happiness start to increase. Why?

Your natural state is happiness, joy, peace, bliss. That is your natural state. But when you let your mind run the show, the mind’s job is to focus in on all those things that are currently going wrong in your life, and trying to either avoid them, fix them, kill them, whatever. So, if you listen to the thinking in your head, the thinking in your head’s job is to move you away from what could potentially be dangerous and then have you either avoid it, kill it, or fix it.

And so when you go into gratitude, you’re actually going beyond what your mind is thinking. You get focused in on how now is good. Now is right. Now works. And that’s a non-fearful state. And when you’re not fearful, guess what? You’re happy. You’re fulfilled. You’re satisfied. And I highly recommend that you take a daily dose of gratitude, and you utilize that in your life.

When you try to make changes, the people around you experience broken expectations. They’re thrown off. They feel uncomfortable. They feel uneasy because they’re used to you being a certain way. The world won’t let you change because you convinced the world you are what you are today.

The next step for you is to get clear about who you are and what you’re all about now, and then convince the world of that. And when you do, everything will change.

Those are thoughts of resignation. Resignation will destroy your dreams. It will destroy your life. Resignation is not the truth. When you are resigned and cynical about things, you cannot move forward with your life. You are basically taking the past and you’re inserting it into the future and you’re saying that the future will be like the past. And that, my friend, is a hallucination.

The future will not be like the past. The future will be whatever you choose, whatever you decide. You make new decisions and new choices. You take a stab at new dreams, and that is what will come true.

So, if something in my life is bothering me, the most powerful thing for me to do is to accept it and then as soon as I accept it or align with it, I can redirect it.