The Kevin Miller Podcast

The only reason you would be here and listening to this, right now, is because you already know the power of self-help. You are a believer. I’m here today to support and affirm you, and actually give you even more power for your self-help endeavors by dispelling some of the criticism self-help gets. The term self-help, in truth, can cause some feelings of anxiety, or fear for some people. None of us truly want to feel alone in our life and we can often doubt ourselves, so the idea of having to rely on self can be troubling. And there are plenty of people who, with vim and vigor, and I’d also say some wounding, who preach about how you can “only rely on yourself,” and that has a lot of danger in it as well. And yet here I am with a podcast named Self-Helpful as a massive advocate of self-help, but also an admitted critic to when it’s abused. In this episode, my new short form and direct, just me to you, I want to offer some perspectives so the concept of self-help is even more inspiring and equipping for you and you can use self-help resources in all forms, as powerful tools in your life to get…where you want to go. With peace, joy and ultimate fulfillment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You have some giftings. Some inherent skills and talents. Or think of it this way, you have some things that come to you easier than they do to others. I can look at each of my kids and tell you what abilities seem to come more naturally for some than others, right out of the womb. That doesn’t make them an expert but it showcases the areas they will more likely be able to achieve mastery in. The thing is, what comes fairly easy to us we generally devalue. It doesn’t seem so impressive to us. One because it is just easier, and two, we often end up around other people who can do what we do well. When I was a pro cyclist it wasn’t that impressive to me, cause I was always around other pro cyclists and was focused on all the guys who were better than I was. You have some natural giftings and talents. Once you become aware of them, you most start honing them. Then you’ll serve yourself well to figure out how to work at them. Not all of them. I think I have a lot of giftings and some I don’t care to monetize, they are just for my enjoyment or even just for my family. But finding a gift you can monetize is…glory. In this episode I’m back with Japan’s #1 self-help guru, Ken Honda, author of Happy Money which was the focus of our first show together. This is my Values, Motives, & Habits episode where we go behind the curtain of Ken’s life. When we talked about the category of career this was Ken’s primary focus, helping people find their gifts and monetize their gifts. He finds it to be a primary source of, happy money. When you work at something you enjoy and find great value in, you are happier with the money you get as a result, and even happier to spend it, manage it, save it, and invest it. This focus stood out to me, but you’ll also hear Ken Discuss topics such as he he sees money as spiritual. His focus on relationships of what he can do for another person, which sounds pithy, but belies the fact we generally are in front of another person thinking about our own needs. Health and wellness is a challenge for Ken as he says he loves American food, hamburgers and fries, and in his culture is teases as a chubby guy. Mentally he struggles with the world's suffering which he has a sensitive heart for, and works to bolster himself so he can better handle it. As a celebrity in Japan he is often noticed out in public and takes great delight in striking up conversations with fans and getting to know them. I've already gotten feedback on our first discussion together, with people attesting to the joy in hearing Ken Honda's happy demeanor and desire to serve others. You can find Ken Honda’s book, Happy Money, anywhere, and connect directly with him at Kenhonda.comThe Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance.  Other sponsors include Peloton! Try Peloton risk free with a 30 day home trial (new members only; not available in remote locations). See additional terms at onepeloton.com/home-trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There was a time before money when we gathered, harvested, and produced what we needed. Or we took what we gathered, harvested, and produced and traded with someone else for something they had. It was an exchange. Today we gather, harvest, and produce a product or service that is sold for money. And we are given money. And we pay money for most all the product and services we need. Money is simply a unit of exchange. And yet it is anything. Anything but simple. And today many of us, most of us, have some negative feelings toward money. From irritation towards suicide, and most of us have negative feelings that keep a level of anxiety going and it's eating away at us, little buy little and eroding our mental and physical health and our overall wellness and success. My guest today is a self-help legend and celebrity in Japan where he's sold nearly $9 million books about this topic. Ken Honda is the author of Happy Money: The Japanese Art of Making Peace with Your Money. But it's not money Ken is concerned about, it's your happy soul. This is why he has most of his own country following him, and now is claiming hearts around the world, including now, America. He joined me via Zoom from near Tokyo and we just had a super sweet time together. So much so that he requested my book and will be endorsing it for the Japanese market. I think you'll find a significant paradigm shift in your perspective on money and a new hope for feeling better about it. I did. Truly. There are products and services we don't want to spend money on. Such as, we don't want to give $1,000 to a car mechanic to fix something that went wrong on our car. So we give the mechanic money with sad feelings. Sad energy. And the mechanics is on the receiving end of getting sad money. Would you like to change this perspective, as the customer and the mechanic? Listen in to Ken Honda. He's going to help. We start off addressing the common negative feelings many people have towards money, and turn it on its head. It's not money we are upset with. It's really the work we don't like and aren't proud of, that we are doing to earn money. It's more about how we are earning our money than the money itself. I think you will be so stoked with this episode you'll want to share it with everyone you know. The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Other sponsors include Peloton! Try Peloton risk free with a 30 day home trial (new members only; not available in remote locations). See additional terms at onepeloton.com/home-trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue on with our Functional Medicine questions from listeners for Randy James, Medical Doctor and Functional Medicine expert who addresses questions from his experience with thousands of patients striving to get past the mere symptoms of their health and discern the root cause issues so they can have true…wellness. This is my Functional Friday episode where we focus on our health and wellness so we have the physical and mental capacity to help ourselves and others. In this episode, Ted asks how to maintain muscle tone after 65. Beth feels most successful people have coaches and asks how to find a coach you can trust? Wayne wants to know about testing options like food allergies. Mark shares about finding a functional medicine provider in his area, and Don asks how to kick chronic ear infections. Again, there should be a topic or three that is highly relevant to you or someone you love.The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi Self-Helpful listeners. This is a new format of episode and it’s just you and me. While I may be your guide here on the podcast, digging into self-help messages with today’s more important influencers in the world of personal growth and development, you know I’m also a fellow traveler on my own journey to grow and progress in my life. With that in mind, I’m here now to share a short episode with you on how a recent message is influencing my own life, and see if you relate. I’m like you and living in my own story and these podcast guests and messages change my story. So I’m calling this part 4 of my series on Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller’s book, Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts with Your Thinking. There are some significant points from the message I’m really pondering and grappling with regarding my own story and life experience.. This concept of, “It’s all in your head” is dramatically hurtful and hopeful to me. Walk with me a minute as I explain. The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In minding our mindset and thinking about our thinking, we bring into question how much of our perspectives and even beliefs are based on the fictional stories our brains write to protect us. This sounds minimizing of our so called realities, but I just want you to think about occurrences which have happened in your life, things you’ve experienced with other people, and how they later recount the reality that happened, and you’re standing there thinking, “That is not at all what happened!” As you had a very different experience. And that’s the issue. Something happens, and we all experience it differently. The thing DID happen. But we all perceive it differently. It means different things to you. What excites one person may terrify another. And this type of natural reaction in our minds is normal. The opportunity we are hitting on here is in accepting that a good percentage of our reality and therefore beliefs are made up in our mind from how we’ve experienced things. Our mind and experiences and memories are not made up of facts. They are made up of stories. And as such, we can evolve to consider a bigger story and more context and possibility, and this can radically alter our lives. This is part 3 on Michael Hyatt’s book, Mind Your Mindset, and today I asked a special guest to co-host with me, Broadway and film star Renée Marino who I did a series with here on the podcast just recently regarding her book and message, “Becoming A Master Communicator.” I asked Renée to come discuss this topic with me because what and how we communicate, her specialty, is ultimately a reflexion of our mindset, and also because we just had such resonance and energy in our previous shows, and I got such good feedback about it, I wanted to bring her back on. The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve been talking about the need to mind our mindset, which is the title of Michael Hyatt and Megan Hyatt Miller’s new book, with their research showcasing a majority of what we think and believe is not fact, but the stories our brain creates to help us make sense of things and ultimately protect us. I’m back for part two with Michael to walk and talk through his personal Values, Motives, and Habits. We begin on spirituality and he shares his appreciation of his faith community helping him not be left alone with his own stories and benefitting from their input and correction. It struck me how important relationships are as an overall antidote to getting lost and isolated in my own stories and beliefs that again, per Michael and Megan’s research, is not fact but the story my brain has written. I need input from friends and guides and coaches and therapists to balance me out. This is acute to me as in my own introversion and self-protection can drive me to isolate and be left alone to get lost in my own stories and i have to proactively seek out and share my stories with others to keep me from getting lost. Michael also shares about his desire for loyalty in relationships, dialing up his energy to live longer and better for his family, how he starts his day, getting bored with his work and liking to change things up, how a financial advisor my dad recommended to him gave him a new lease on his outlook on money, and how he feels his non-productive time leads him to his greatest productivity. Again, Michael Hyatt’s new book is called Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts with Your Thinking. You can get the book and his MIND YOUR MINDSET COURSE for free at mindyourmindsetbook.com/selfhelpful. The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We continue the question and answer session from our last Functional Friday episode and here we address listener inquiries about balancing exercise in regards to our effort and always killing ourselves. Losing momentum is a big topic, as anyone with a new health & wellness initiative will…lose momentum. We address the faith you have in doing what you set out to do, how to stop nervous eating, and end with a biggie…how to kick the sugar habit. Which nobody really wants to do, including me. I’m with my fun Functional Friday co-host, Randy James, Medical Doctor and Functional Medicine expert, and just as with the last Functional Friday episode, much of what we discuss are examples Randy shares from first hand experiences with thousands of patients who pay cash to have him get to the root problems of their issues. Not everyone can get in to work with Dr James, but you can inquire at truelifemedicine.com or just email them directly at info@truelifemedicine.com  The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Just think positive. It’s all in your head. Look on the bright side. Just write a better story.” Who here has had one of these cliches spoken to them and it just pissed you off or deflated you? It feels so affirming and even offensive to an honest experience and feeling we’ve had. The events we experience in life are…our truth. They happened and we were there and what we experienced is just, true. And yet right there is the problem, and opportunity. What we experience is just how our brain processed the event. As you’ll hear in this episode, two people are in the woods and a bear walks past their camp. One is ecstatic about experiencing a bear in the wild while the other is terrified of the possible danger because they had a friend who was hurt by a bear. What is true? They saw a bear. The rest of the experience is just what they thought based upon their personal perceptions. This is our life. A bit of fact and the rest we make up around it. With that in mind, we have the opportunity to question what we think and feel and work to consider a bigger and more reasonable reality than our negative propensities often manufactures. This isn’t just an idea, this is brain science, and my guest is Michael Hyatt and this is my fourth time having him on the show. Michael was CEO of Thomas Nelson publishing and today is a prolific author of wisdom and leader and mentor to a lot of the celebrity guests I’ve had on this show. Michael has had several New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling books, including Platform, Living Forward, Your Best Year Ever, Free to Focus, The Vision Driven Leader, and Win at Work & Succeed at Life. But this new book written by him and his daughter Megan, is top shelf for me. The book is called Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts with Your Thinking. But I ask you to wait right there. This again is not just another pithy swipe at just trying to put a silver lining on things. You’re going to hear Michael site scientific research on how our brain literally takes any incident, let’s call it an objective reality, then your neurons go to work concocting a story around it so you can make sense of it, but what is really mind blowing to realize is the primary story your brain goes to work creating is a story that will protect you. This makes sense evolutionary when you are literally often in survival mode. But if you truly grasp that life is happening and your imperfect brain, and we’ll get into that, goes to work doing what it can with what it has, which is not everything needed, to create a story that protects you in the moment. This is why you hear a friend or your spouse tell a story of something you both experienced it and you are sitting there wondering what on earth they are talking about. You were there and that is not at all what happened, right? Well. It’s not right. Or wrong. It’s the story your brain wrote. And if this is the case, much of the trauma and limitations and negative beliefs we have about ourselves in reference to what we have experienced, or what we think we have experienced…are in question. And maybe, we are capable of more. This is the episode. Get Michael’s book you also get his MIND YOUR MINDSET COURSE for free, it’s normally $479. mindyourmindsetbook.com/selfhelpful. The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If we are really honest, we begin most relationships with an agenda in mind. A transaction. We are wanting something for ourselves out of it. I know many people will reject that, and I reject their rejection. We either are hoping for something from the other person, or what we are doing for them makes us feel good about ourselves. Which is ok! Our focus today, is before you seek to get anything from anyone in a relationship, you need to earn the right. And in a relationship, this usually takes a while. But most people start relationships by talking about themselves or trying to solidify an opportunity, whether it’s a job, a date, a new friendship or a work opportunity. And they do it prematurely, before they’ve actually made any true, meaningful connection and in truth, provided some value to the other person. This is part three on Renée Marino and her message on becoming a master communicator. This is my peer discussion my co-host is Dan Miller. One, because he’s a professional communicator. Two, because he and my mom met Renée at an event put on by a big publisher and they texted me saying I just had to have her on the show, which I’ll be forever grateful for. Three, because as most of you know, Dan is my Dad, and we have great conversations together and as you’ll hear at the top of the show, I credit him with schooling me as a kid in how to communicate and win friends and influence people. I cite it as the best education I ever received and it’s very much why I find myself now with a top ranked podcast. We got overwhelming feedback about my first two episodes with Renée Marino, so I really encourage you to check them out if you haven’t yet. You can find Renée’s new book, "Becoming a Master Communicator,” anywhere and when you do, go to FreeGiftfromRenee.com for two gifts she has for you. You can find Dan Miller at 48days.com The Self-Help(ful) podcast is brought to you by Ziglar, your premier source for equipping coaches to help leaders and top performers excel professionally and personally. Visit Ziglar.com and let them inspire your true coaching performance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices