Hello my friend,

I’d like to start this newsletter by thanking you for reading and being a member of this emerging community dedicated to owning your life. 👈

🎁 📧 If this weekly gift in your inbox has been impactful; the #1 thing you can do to support is send it to friends and fam so we can grow this community.

You can send them here theowned.industries to sign up for free!

👉 Now let’s own our focus and choices, so we can own the outcomes of our lives.

Question of the week 🤔

“Are you in the gap or the gain?”

🥊 One of the pro boxers I coach recommended me this book called The Gap and the Gain and I love the simplicity and power of the message.

Most of us high achievers are always comparing where we are (what we have already achieved) against where we would ideally like to be (our vision in the future) while completely forgetting where we started.

Dan Sullivan calls this the GAP, because it always makes us feel in a deficit, like we haven’t done enough yet to feel good. 👎

The solution is to reflect more on the GAIN, which is where we started in the past vs where we are today (what we have achieved.) 👍

🙏 This reframe puts you into a state of gratitude and appreciation for the journey instead of a never ending feeling of notenoughness (made that word up.)

So in any situation where you are feeling defeated ask yourself am I in the GAP or the GAIN? Am I sulking on not being where I want to be yet or am I enjoying the present while feeling gratitude for how far I’ve come. 🙏

This message is right in alignment with the theme of this newsletter, because it requires us to OWN our FOCUS in the present moment.

Let’s stop measuring ourselves against an imaginary future and instead measure ourselves by what we have achieved compared to where we started.

Breaking Negative Patterns

The trouble with self sabotaging patterns is that they live at the subconscious level and are often hidden from our conscious mind. 😣

I see people very close to me who have been stuck in patterns for decades that don’t get them favorable results. Nonetheless they still choose not to change their behavior, because they are unconscious of the fact that they are even stuck in a pattern that doesn't serve them.

🧠 Their subconscious wants to keep them safe, so it hides the fact that what they are doing is harmful and their conscious mind rationalizes why their behaviors are justified.

We all do this in some form or another and the key to breaking these negative patterns is AWARENESS. 👁

Now there are a lot of people out there who have no interest in doing the work it requires to gain greater depths of awareness, but for those of you who are ready to find out how great you can become and how good life can get, try this..

⏰ Set 5 alarms daily that go off every 3 hrs and ask you “how are you feeling?” and “what were you focusing on that made you feel that way?”

✍🏻 Document your answer in a notes app or a physical notebook every time the alarm goes back and do this for a full week.

The act of checking in like this will unearth some of your patterns and bring you face to face with what negative patterns you need to change.

For those of you who are ambitious, I have an entire course on this (check out the course here)

The Dizziness of Freedom 😵‍💫

I saw this great quote the other day by Ted Chiang “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” 

When we have too much freedom and not enough responsibility, we tend to feel anxious and we want to offload our attention.

📱 For me that often shows up as mindless social media or email checking.

The solution: More Awareness.

I made a deal with myself that I could check social and email as much as I wanted as long as I documented a tally in my notes every time I did it.

Magically I no longer had the desire to check as much.

The reason being was because the action of checking went from unconscious to conscious. When I am conscious of my behavior I don’t want to check social or email.

In reality, the mindless checking is just a treatment for the dizziness of freedom in the present moment.

It’s my intention going forward to continue with this new habit of tallying my social and email check-ins, so I can break the negative habit and step into the present moment to own my focus.

So far so good. Despite needing to check social and email for my work, I have been able to limit my check-ins to just a few times a day.

Anyone else going to give this a try? 👊🏻

Feel free to reply and let me know how it goes after you do.

Where Focus Goes Money Flows 🌊

💸 2021 has been a really interesting year for me financially. 

📈 2020 I made more money than I could ever need to make in a year. 

This income was mainly through my company Jump Rope Dudes.

I decided to switch my main focus in 2021 to give more energy to my greatest area of expertise (mental performance coaching) and saw that business double in revenue within the first 6-8 months of the year.

Simultaneously I saw the revenue in my other company plummet to levels we haven’t seen in years. 📉

This experience affirmed to me how powerful it is to have a singular focus when attempting to grow a business or just make more money in general.

The more narrowly you invest your focus; the more potent that focus is.

You have to ultimately make the choice for yourself.

👉 What deserves the majority  of your focus?

👉 What’s going to get you closer to your long-term goals?

For me personally, I have chosen to put the majority of my energy back into Jump Rope Dudes for the time being, because I believe that with a few years of focus this company has a shot at providing me financial freedom for the rest of my life.

I continue to work with my 1 on 1 clients doing mental performance coaching, but I am not attempting to scale this business at the moment.

I figure I have the rest of my life to go all in there once I secure the bag. 💰

Find Your Passion(s)

Speaking of career choices I shared my video on the Ikagai in a early newsletter, but I wanted to further explore the path to finding your passion.

I feel like so much of it is having the courage to not suppress your natural desires and then staying relentlessly curious in regards to what you feel pulled to do.

The thing about finding your passion is that you might find it 10 times in your life or you might find it once. 🤷‍♂️

Life is a journey full of twists and turns and you have to be okay with following your curiosities as they emerge.

Speaking of jump rope dudes. I had no clue that I would end up teaching jump rope fitness on the internet to millions of people, but through following my curiosity I discovered that it checked a lot of boxes for me.

It has provided me an outlet to be a transformational coach, to travel the world sharing positivity, to scale a business and so much more.

So although I never thought to myself when I was a kid “I want to be a jump rope coach” I have found passion in the work I do through the things I get to explore within the business.

Is there something you have been curious about exploring?

Do the thing!

Conscious Communication 

Want to be a great husband/wife/father/mother/son/daughter/friend/business partner [insert relationship]?

I’ve found the key to great relationships starts with the ability to consciously communicate with the other person.

What I mean by “consciously” is that you connect to the authentic feelings you are having in the present moment and you share them in a way that lets the other person know what your experience is without blaming them for it. 😊

Many of us fear this type of intimacy so we either suppress our real feelings or we blame others for how we feel.

To consciously communicate is to be vulnerable enough to own your feelings in the present. 

🔹 That might mean saying “I am feeling nervous” to someone on a first date instead of trying to convey a false sense of security.

🔹 It might mean telling your child immediately and with authority that their behavior is not acceptable even if you are in public and it might make you feel uncomfortable.

🔹 It might mean telling your parent that although they are well meaning that you don’t feel good when they act in a certain way towards you.

The ability to consciously communicate your feelings instead of suppressing them allows you to sink into much deeper states of connection and makes life much richer.

It also saves you a lot of drama in the future, because you are dealing with issues head on in the present moment as they come up.

Conscious communication is a skill and like all skills you will get better at it the more you practice. Is there someone you need to have a conscious conversation with right now?

Try it out and be kind to yourself. ❤️🤗

That’s the newsletter for the week.

Own your focus. Own your choices. Own your life!

All the best,

Brandon

#theowned

P.S. Want me to help you program your mind for positivity, peace and growth?

Check out my mobile app with dozens of guided meditation experiences.