Manifesting Your Change

Dr. Sheila Jaggard: 00:00:03

Hi there, you're listening to the Shift To Your Bliss podcast series. If you're in your 30s and beyond, with some life experience, and you're looking indeed searching for more in your life, your work and your career, then you're in the right place. In this podcast series, we will show you how to shift to your bliss. My name is Dr. Sheila Jaggard. I'm a world traveler from Machu Picchu, to the pyramids of Egypt. I've studied alongside Thomas Leonard, Bob Proctor, Dean, Grazi, OC, and Deepak Chopra. And after five decades, I created my very own formula to help you shift to your bliss. Welcome to the podcast series shift to your bliss. Are you ready? Let's dive in.

Dr. Sheila Jaggard: 00:00:53

Hello, again, this is Dr. Sheila. And here we are at shift to your bliss. The session today we're going to continue on about imagine, and we talked about that last session. And I asked you to go and visualize something new from the story that you had been telling yourself. I'm really pleased today that you've listened to me for several sessions. And today I'm privileged to have a friend, a client or colleague with me, who actually has a wonderful story to tell you. And you'll see in his story, all the elements that we've been talking about and shift to your bliss. His name is Jonathan Christian. And I am there is and I'm thrilled to have him here with me. So thanks for coming in. Hey, welcome. You have a story. You have a wonderful story

Jonathan Christian: 00:01:47

I have and I've got to gotta prove it.

Dr. Sheila Jaggard: 00:01:49

Yes, you do. Yes, you do. So yes, please tell your story to the to the group. And I'm gonna move over a bit.

Jonathan Christian: 00:01:55

so let's just time shift back to 2008. Okay, classic time for marketers, which is what my profession is. And of course, when recession comes, first things business do is stop marketing. Smart people do the opposite, but weren't many smart people in 2008. And I had this trifecta of a year because earlier in 2008, my mom had died from cancer. I'd been back to the UK spent some time with her had to leave. It was just horrible. And I don't think many of us realize just the emotional attachment we have to a parent until it's not that. Yes, right. So I had that. I had a client that his business was doing very well. But as soon as the recession kicked in, his business was not doing well at all. So my wonderful contract was terminated. And it's like, oh, and then all of the network down doing all of the reliance that I had on bringing in business had tilted. So there I am sort of down in the dumps because I lost my mom. Then I lost my main source of income. And it's like, oh, so I'm in a funk. I mean, there's probably stronger words but Funchal do. And it's a Sunday afternoon, and picking up my youngest daughter from a kid's party, picked up a bucket of chicken to take home for dinner because I was cooking. Oh, good, perfect. And somebody said this to me and I, I've heard it too many times to not believe it to be true. But I manifested a car accident. It's not that I crashed my car. In fact, I was stopped at a red light. I was coming up to red light, it was changing from orange to red, I was pulling up of stopping car was coming the other way. He decided to floor it beat the lights. It was raining he fishtailed he totaled his car in the sight of mine and I was very badly injured. And I never thought I was a cause of the accident. But listening to you and understanding the way you think I needed a quantum shift I needed that smack around the back of the head or whiplash or whatever you want to look at, to make me realize that what I was doing was just getting down and down and down and nothing was going to change until I changed. So that being the case and I couldn't see it at the time. The only prognosis for my accident was surgery. And it was pretty major surgery because it's my spinal cord. And they ended up replacing my C five six disc in my neck through the front of my face with a titanium implant. Which very aggressive surgery.

Dr. Sheila Jaggard: 00:04:40

So Titanium Man now

Jonathan Christian: 00:04:42

I am the Titanium Man. And the upshot is the they literally jack up your spine, ship out the herniated disk without touching the spinal cord. Insert this new disc put it all back together again. He told me I could have lost my voice I could have been paraplegic bla bla bla bla Oh, praise the Lord. It was a phenomenal surgery, and a great anger back to work. Oh, no, no, no, this is just the beginning said now that we've got your neck fixed, I need you to do absolutely nothing for the next six months to let it heal. I know, you do know, I'm self employed, right? I didn't have any clients, but it doesn't matter, I had to come find some. And you don't know, your body needs time to heal, and you need time to heal. So 2009 for me was my rebuild year, both of my body and my business. And if you look at the timing of 2009, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, they're all out there. But nobody was really understanding what it was about. And I'm sitting down on my dining room table with my Macbook or my Blackberry. And I'm looking at Facebook, and I'm thinking, this is the future of the world. And I don't know how I thought that maybe it's a superpower of just seeing what's coming in terms of trends. And guess what, I just been gifted six months to learn a new skill. Could I ever have spent six months learning that skill while full time consulting? Heck no. So I threw myself into Facebook, this is long before business pages or anything like it, I understood the Tao of Twitter and sort of really doubled down on my Twitter account, set up my LinkedIn created a YouTube channel started making some videos. And a friend of mine came over. And he wasn't really a friend. He was a mentor of my daughters actually at high school, chatting away, and it's what are you doing? So I showed him? That's for kids, right? Absolutely not, this is a future of business. And he said, So what are you doing for business? I said, truthfully, I don't know what I'm doing for business. I'm just using the time that I have to keep myself going to keep my brain going. He said, Have you ever heard if you are thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill? No, I Trysil had never been heard of it. He said it's a book I'd highly recommend reading. But there is a line in that, that I would recommend you take to heart. And it is this out of every adversity. every bad thing. Let's just say there is a greater or equal opportunity for advancement. You said I believe that to be true. And I believe that whatever you're going to be doing over this next six months will set you up for success. Well, I'll take that. Yes. So I'm doing this and he's keeping in touch with me. And he said, you probably don't know this, but I have an E zine called Marketing dangerously. And I have about a readership of about 3500 people every single week. Thinking about you. So would you like to be a guest writer for me? I went writer, he said, Yeah, blogging, I went, No, I had a blog. He said, No, you just give me the document alternative into the format that we need. He said, I want you to tell everybody you're learning about social media. said okay, so I became a social media expert in 2009, with our client, my name as the guest blogger and marketing, dangerous law. And you know what, within weeks, I started getting replaced these articles saying, we'd like to know more about that. I've heard about this, but we've never used it. And honestly, within six months, my consulting practice was busier than it ever was. And if I hadn't have had that accident, if I hadn't had the surgery, if I hadn't had the time to recover, I would never had time to learn that skill. So even though in my own sweet way, I just kind of listened to source I was just being guided to do what I thought was right, believing that Facebook was the future of business, which Hello. Couldn't imagined how it turned out. But now, you know, I have an agency with like, 15 staff clients all over the world. And we're still doing that. Pretty much same thing. 12 years later, all because of a flippin accident where I broke my neck. So coughing

Dr. Sheila Jaggard: 00:09:00

Well, you know, thanks for sharing that because the truth of the matter is your story before the accident was it last year, you'd lost your job. It lost your mom. What were you going to do? So what was your story?

Jonathan Christian: 00:09:20

I was I was toast. I was done. I was I was literally rudderless. Yep, had no direction. No motivation. No cheerleader in my background, no income coming in. Because when you're a man and you're self employed, and you have a family to feed, that's that's what your belief system is built on is how much money you bring in. Right. I lost it.

Dr. Sheila Jaggard: 00:09:40

And the interesting thing is, and we haven't had we haven't had the talk about the psychological depth charge, which is exactly what the accident was. But the opportunity for change sometimes comes when we least expect it Hmm. Not because we've asked for it. But because there's a part of us that knows something has to be different. Yeah. Yeah. And even though at the time, you didn't really understand how this was going to change, there was a part of you that said, I can't let this be the end of the story.

Jonathan Christian: 00:10:28

Oh, completely covered. And that's what I hung on to was like, I think I'm onto something here. Yeah. And I went all in. This is before smartphones, or iPhones even existed. But I just felt it was, I just felt this was something new and exciting that I could actually do. And as as a storyteller, I love to tell a good story. What does social media thrive on? Story, a great story. So it was a perfect fit.

Dr. Sheila Jaggard: 00:10:54

And the interesting thing is how you found, actually, it was brought to you what your next step was going to be totally, you know, and I want you to all hear this, that many times, we think we have to make it happen. And the truth is, if you sit back, and if you let what is going to happen happen, which is what you had to do, because you couldn't do anything else, then what comes to you is better than you could ever imagine, in your lifetime. True that. Because if you had tried to make this up, I don't know that you would have got there. Now, and the other piece of this, which I think is really important for all of you to remember, when you're recovering, and you can do nothing. You being given the gift to pursue something else, even though, you know you're not to pursue anything. So it landed totally, totally free. Yeah. And part of this opportunity for all of you is to realize that when you're in this shift mode, when you're thinking that, yes, I that story doesn't fit for me anymore. You're not sure what the next story is, but you know, it's that Yeah, I did start to believe that it's going to come Absolutely. And you know, the interesting thing is to you know, if fear and belief have something in common, we can't see them. So, for you all to hear this today. And thank you so much for sharing. The idea here is be open. I mean, you didn't have a choice. But you know what, I'll bet some of you don't have a choice either. And I didn't have a choice either. If I had carried on with my story, heaven knows where I would have ended up. Sometimes there's an intervention that you can't even imagine gonna happen. And there it is. So I encourage you to think this may be outside of me. This may be something that comes from nowhere I would have planned before. And it's the gift that moves you to your next place. Yeah. How magnificent, isn't it?

Jonathan Christian: 00:13:25

I I wouldn't change a thing. But at the time.

Dr. Sheila Jaggard: 00:13:28

You could have changed everything. Yeah. Yeah. And thank you so much. I you know, Jonathan, I, Jonathan and I have a lot of time to tell stories. And we love sharing stories with each other. That the catch to the stories is always isn't that miraculous? Isn't that amazing? And I want you in your imagination piece of this shift. To be amazed. provide yourself with the opportunity to be amazed because miracles happen all the time. Be open to it. Absolutely. And, you know, Jonathan was talking to me earlier and he said, people say that I manifested the accident while you absolutely did. Not you you but you remember, there's more parts to us than we care to think about or even know about. And yes, I truly believe we bring things people events into our lives. There is no coincidence. Well, folks, thank you so much. First of all for coming, Jonathan. And with any luck, I'll have him back again. And we'll be able to banter and carry on like we always do. Until the next time. I encourage you allow yourself so imagination time, Imagineering time, visioning time and when we get together next time we're going to talk about focus So if you have your imagination time, your Imagineering time, and then we get to focus. Let's see what's going to happen for all of you. Please remember, I'll be here again next time, same time, same place, and we're all on a journey. And we're all a work in progress. Until next time, this is Dr. Sheila saying, Stay with it shifters. We're on a path now. Keep going. Bye bye.