Do Things Happen To You? Or For You?

 

In this episode, April Shprintz shares some exciting secrets with you. She explains the game-changing idea of viewing the world through a new paradigm—with the mindset that things don’t happen to you, they happen for you. This is where the magic starts to happen. And this is where things get fun!

But before that, April shares a simple practice that will help you see more mindset momentum and greater success in your life.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Do Things Happen To You? Or For You?

Hey there, soon-to-be winning mindset master. It’s happening as you’re tuning in. You made it to episode two, which is awesome. I feel like that means we’re friends, so I’m going to be spilling some real secrets now. This episode is exciting because I’m going to explain the idea of viewing the world and everything that happens to you as happening for you instead of happening to you. This is fun. This is where the magic starts to happen.

Before that, I’d like to start with the wins of the day. This is something that I do every day as part of my journaling practice. I don’t have a super robust journaling practice. Sometimes I only spend five minutes on it. Sometimes even less than that because I’m recording my wins. The reason I do those three wins of the day is because as you’ll hear me say over and over, we get what we focus on. I am always trying to focus on the best things that have happened to me because then I’m going to notice more opportunities and more great things. It gives you some great mindset momentum.

As a matter of fact, the process for doing the three wins is something I outline in the free gift that I have for you on my website. You’ll see where you can click down on that first page and get that free gift. This is part of three different things that I give to you to help you accelerate getting that winning mindset in a week. What’s great is you’ll see results from doing these steps in a week and it’ll make a huge difference for you. If you continue to do it after that, you’ll get more and more results. It’s almost like a little mini-mindset routine that you can do at the times that make sense for you during the day. I love it. It’s all things that I do every day and it makes a tremendous difference.

Back to the wins. My wins of the day, I usually look back on the day before. For yesterday, number one is I started a new fitness program about 2 to 3 weeks ago. I’m starting to see results. I’m very excited because for me, when something is a little harder and for me, new fitness programs for whatever reason are always a little difficult because I want to get to the result as quickly as possible. I’ve learned to train myself to get excited about the small gains because then, I’m not as focused on why I am not there yet. I’m focused on the thing that is awesome, which is the small gains. I noticed one yesterday and I was thrilled.

The second one is I got some great design work back from someone that I’m working with on some things to give to all of you. It was the second run and it was perfect. I was excited because I don’t know how you are when you work with people creatively, but I can’t always put words to what I have in my mind initially. It usually takes two tries for someone to come back with what’s in my mind because I feel like my words don’t always do it justice. It’s awesome and it’s something for you guys. I’m excited about it.

Third is probably my biggest win. Here’s the thing, wins can be about work, your personal life, your dog, your friends, you saw a wonderful flower, or they can be about anything that matters to you, big or small. The important thing is noticing them. My third one was moving to me because I was talking to the client of one of my clients, setting up their relationship that they’re going to have moving forward working on the contract. I happened to convey to this gentleman how much both my client and I believed in him. He’s trying to do a big thing. He’s at that point that we all get to.

I don’t care who you are and how many huge successes you’ve had. If you’re honest and you’re willing to be vulnerable with people, you will say every time you’re going to do the next big thing, you’re scared and you’re worried maybe you can’t do it. When I was talking about how much we believed in him, he got a little choked up. It was amazing because I knew in that moment that he would be able to borrow that belief to do amazing things because of the confidence that other people who had done things like that before had in him.

As you get to know me a little better, you will learn that belief is everything. It’s a big part of mindset. Mindset gives you the belief that you can do anything. There have been people throughout my life who have believed in me and that made all the difference in the world. When I hear this very professional, strong man get a little choked up, I know he gets it. He understands that all these people have belief in him and that’s going to strengthen his belief in himself. Long for a win of the day. It meant that much to me. It was cool.

Belief is everything. It's a big part of mindset, and mindset gives you the belief that you can do anything. Share on X

If you don’t do anything else from tuning in to this show, I would love for you to do your wins of the day. You can say them out loud. You can write them down. I think it’s more powerful if you write them down. Let’s commit to doing that, to noticing the wins. They can be little. That’s going to be a game-changer. Everything that you do when you’re looking to develop a winning mindset compounds each other and makes it easier and better.

First, I’m going to tell you a little secret because you know you’ve made it to episode two and so we’re friends. I have been recording these few solo episodes so that I can tell you about the basics, we can get to know each other and become friends. I started recording them in the studio and it felt too stuffy. It didn’t feel like we were having a conversation. What I ended up doing is sitting in my car recording these for you because I have pretty good audio in here.

I did a show years ago before the pandemic called Business Advice On The Go and blatantly copied it from comedians in cars, getting coffee, and carpool karaoke. I would pick up entrepreneurs and answer their questions in the car. If that sounds like something fun to you, I have that on YouTube. I’m comfortable sitting in my car talking to someone. You and I are here all by ourselves and we’re going to talk about some cool things.

Onto viewing things as happening for you, not to you. That’s a real fundamental shift for a lot of people. Why it’s so important is when you make that change, when you reframe what you’re thinking about so that you can see that it may be a great thing, even if it doesn’t feel like that at the moment, you feel empowered. What’s so interesting about feeling empowered versus feeling like a victim or stressed or under the gun, so to speak, is your mind will offer you solutions and ideas or at the very least, a calmness that you wouldn’t have otherwise. It makes all of life so much easier.

 

For some people, they have all these thoughts about, “Bad things happen in threes,” or, “I have bad luck,” or all of these things that they’ve been taught over time. The weird part about it is if you believe that, you’re going to look for it and you’re going to find it. There is a phenomenon called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It talks about the way that your subconscious mind is always working for you.

I am a certified hypnotist, so I’ve studied this. Your subconscious mind, if you don’t know anything about it, depending on what scientist you talk to, it’s responsible for 80% to 90% of your brain function. It’s the piece that keeps everything going. What I mean is your conscious mind is doing things like your willpower, talking to people, or any of the tasks that you’re focused on. While your subconscious mind is like, “Don’t worry. I got you. I will handle the breathing. I will handle your memories. I will handle pumping blood.”

Interestingly, you can tell it what’s important and what to focus on. A lot of people do this by default and they don’t realize they’re doing it. If you want a great example of it, think of the last time that you bought a car. The moment you bought that car and started driving it, how many cars like yours did you see on the road? Did it not feel like everybody went and bought your same car right when you did? They didn’t, but you by purchasing that car and by making it yours told your subconscious mind, “This is important,” and it started pointing them out to you, so you saw them everywhere.

It’s why I like to call our subconscious mind our unpaid assistant because if we are very deliberate and intentional about what we tell it to notice, it notices more of them. By the way, that’s also the science behind the wins. You start to tell it that those wins are important, so you start to notice more of them. That creates momentum for you to start putting yourself in the position to have more of them.

Back to things happening for you, not to you. If you think back to your life, there have been a lot of situations that at the moment were tough, scary, sad, or stressful. A hundred percent, they were. Once you get past them, you realize that it happened for your greatest good and that you were fortunate that that happened to you. That’s what I mean by life is always working out for us. Things are happening for us, not to us. It’s up to us to figure out how. Sometimes you can’t do that at the moment. You’re not in the mindset to do it or you don’t have enough information.

Life is always working out for us. Things are happening for us, not to us. It's up to us to figure out how. Share on X

I’ll give you an example. I live on a bunch of golf courses in South Florida. I live in a subdivision called PGA National. If you’re a golfer, they play The Honda Classic here every year. Right during the pandemic, they had this one golf course that all the grass died on and people paid a premium to live on the golf course. There’s five of them here and all the grass died. They started to let it go and drive past it. I was like, “This looks terrible.” I found out they’re going to redo this golf course. They made a $100 million investment in the community and the resort and they were going to make it way better.

I went down to see the golf course. At that point, it was torn up. It looked so bad. I posted a video of this on LinkedIn because it looked like they were tearing the whole place down. If you didn’t know that they were building this gorgeous golf course or maybe you didn’t know what golf course construction looked like because maybe people who did it didn’t think it was any big deal, you could be upset about the way the neighborhood looked while they were doing that. Yet, it was an in-process amazing new golf course being built.

Here’s the interesting thing. When you think about things happening for you instead of to you, how many times is your life that golf course? Something that doesn’t look great at the moment, it’s pretty upsetting, is on its way to being something amazing. By looking at how many times this has happened in your own life, you can start to build that trust and belief that no matter what’s happening, it is happening for you, you’re going to trust that, and you have to figure out how.

 

I’ll give you another example from my childhood. I wanted to go to an amazing broadcasting school called Boston University. For those of you who are familiar with my story, you know that I came from super humble means/ The only way I was going to go to college was with a scholarship. I applied under the early decision to Boston University. I won’t go to any other school. I won’t apply to any other school. I won’t accept their scholarships. Looking back, if you’re someone who cannot afford to go to school other than buy scholarships, maybe you don’t narrow it down to the one university. We’re not here to talk about how bright or not bright I was at 17. I was like, “This is the school.”

I did get accepted under early decision which was huge because they didn’t accept that many people and I did get a partial scholarship. I’ll tell you, that tuition was $28,500 a year without books or room on board. No one in my family had made that much money in a year in my entire life. There was no way, even with the scholarship, that I would be able to find that money. I was terrified of taking out loans and things like that because I wasn’t sure I’d pay back. I had a different mindset about money when I was younger.

I ended up not going to college my first semester and I felt like a huge failure. To speed up the story, what ended up happening was that I went into the Air Force. I got to be a broadcaster much faster than I would’ve if I’d gone the traditional route. I also got to broadcast to an audience of 75 million people, which was, at the time, 90 times the size of CNN. I got to see the entire world. They paid for my education, undergrad, and graduate school. I made amazing lifelong friends. That was the best thing that could have happened to me.

In those months, and there were months where I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I failed at life. It’s over.” You could not have told me that this was a good thing. That was one of the bigger struggles that I had because I didn’t have all of this information about mindset and I was trying to get through it. Looking back, I would never change that. There are so many stories like that in all of our lives. If you sit down and think about those, and even better write them down. The reason I say write them down is because then you can go back to them. You can start to build that trust within yourself that no matter what’s happening, no matter what it seems like, it’s happening for you, not to you.

If you go back and look at COVID, there were things that happened because of that pandemic for people that were big net positives in their lives. It’s only usually after that you can see this. If you’re able to understand how many times things have worked to your benefit, then when you are experiencing that stress, fear, anger, or any of those things, you can help remind yourself, “Things are always working out for me. Things are happening for me, not to me. It’s only up to me to figure out how. That may be a little later when I have a little more information.”

What I’ll tell you is to get your mind off the subject if you can’t immediately think of 3 or 4 ways this could be happening for you. Let’s say, for example, you lost your job and that’s a tough one. What if you lost your job because you’re going to get one that is so much better than the one that you had, has a better work-life balance, better pay, is closer to your home, and is more in line with what you want to do?

If you can’t get there where that starts to feel like relief and feel good, then get off the subject for now. Think about other things. Think about things that make you happy and relax you. Come back to that subject when you feel better about it because our feelings and what comes up in us, the adrenaline, may keep you from being able to see things as happening for you rather than to you and doing a reframe.

 

Eventually, when you come back to it, it will make much more sense and you’ll be able to much more easily do it. This is the principle though, just keep thinking about it. If it doesn’t 100% resonate with you right now, don’t worry about it. You’re going to hear things on this show that are new ideas. You’re going to stretch your brain a little bit and start to see them play out in your life. Here’s the cool thing. I tell you about the idea. I tap into your subconscious mind, your unpaid assistant. I say, “This is a thing and this is important. Look for it.” Your subconscious mind is going to point examples of this out to you. It is on our side to help you build this winning mindset and it’s going to be fantastic.

If you have any questions, you want to share a win with me, big or small, or you want to give me an idea for the show, please reach out to me. I want to talk to you. You can go to the website, WinningMindsetMasteryPodcast.com. There is a section at the very bottom for you to ask me a question in your own voice. I will personally privately answer that for you so that we can have a two-way conversation. While you’re there, you can also learn how to subscribe to the show and leave a review if you’re finding value in it, to win an entry into the grand prize drawing. That grand prize is to have a private VIP day with me where we can talk all things, mindset, business, or life, it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is that you want help with, I am here to help. I’m excited to hear from you. Here’s to your success.