How much attention do you pay to that outlet next to your bathroom sink?

Weird question, I know, but stick with me and you’ll see why this is important. (I promise this entire article is NOT about bathroom outlets!)…

If I had to guess, your answer is probably “none.”

That’s fair… I never used to either until I realized their significance.

These GFCI outlets saved young Bella’s life…

While taking a shower, this 6-year-old girl pulled the hair dryer into the stall.

Can you imagine this near tragedy?

Fortunately, her dad had installed GFCI (Ground-Fault Circuit Interrupter) outlets so as soon as the powered appliance came in contact with the water the GFCI circuit was disconnected before killing her.

Within a split second of live electrical power coming into contact with water, this specialized outlet disconnects the circuit to prevent electricity from rolling through and killing you, just as it did to save Bella’s life…

Kind of important if you ask me!

Sometimes in life we need those little “shocks,” or wake-up calls, to help us refocus, as long as it’s followed by some sort of disconnect from whatever our current reality is in that moment.

GFCI outlets are essential in our lives (and required by code), making them a perfect reference for my version of the acronym:

GFCI is a series of powerful mental exercises that will significantly change the way you develop a winning mindset and provide perspective in any situation, making it one of the most powerful mental tools you could ever invest your time and energy into mastering.

By drawing a comparison to the GFCI outlets in your bathroom, I’ve now created an instant trigger — a mental reminder every time you walk into your bathroom or see an outdoor outlet — to complete these quick mental exercises each day. I believe my version of GFCI will save your life from the shocks of the past as it has for me.

So, let’s break it down!

First and foremost is Gratitude — This will be the first game-changer.

Dedicate a few minutes each morning to reflect on and appreciate everything you’ve been blessed with and the opportunities you’ve been given. Implement this mental exercise throughout the day. Use it as your mental “cheerleader” to keep you fired up and excited about who you are, what you’re doing, and where you’re going.

I promise you, this exercise alone was originally the single greatest thing that absolutely transformed how I think and feel about my life.

How are you starting your day each morning? Do you struggle to drag your tired, groggy self out of bed or are you jumping up ready to explore the day?

Sure, your quality of sleep may play a role in how you feel when you first wake up, but Gratitude gives you the power to determine how you lean into the rest of your day.

When I wake up each morning, my first thoughts are…

There’s no way I’d be the man I am today if he hadn’t left. He always had great ideas and thoughts in his mind but he never really knew how to be a father since his own father died when he was 12. He was simply repeating what he knew as a kid, continuing that cycle of abandonment.

Despite the pain it caused me at the time, daily Gratitude helped me recognize that he actually created an opportunity for me to change a significant part of my life. I was determined to break this chain in our family… I was committed to be there for my family even though he wasn’t there for me as a child.

I sought out a father figure and learned to recognize the good and bad influences in my life very quickly… And I owe all of the lessons learned through those experiences to my habit of daily Gratitude.

Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D. is the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude and a professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. In his article, How Gratitude Can Help You Through Hard Times, Emmons discusses the importance and power of a grateful attitude under dire circumstances.

We’ve all suffered through various levels of pain and trauma in our lives, but harboring that pain doesn’t allow us to ever grow and move forward. What happened in the past cannot be erased… Those experiences will follow us for the rest of our lives, however we can change the context and narrative of those memories. By training our minds to harvest the lessons and positive aspects from those experiences, we can be grateful for them rather than continuing to live in the misery they created.

This is why Gratitude is such a critical and powerful tool to develop. It doesn’t have to be complicated, just a few simple sentences to mentally acknowledge and reinforce the blessings you’ve been given.

Gratitude gives you the ultimate power to develop a new perspective in your own life once you’ve develop the right mental framework around it.

Think you’ve got it hard? Okay, you’ve been acknowledged for your memories of pain and struggle….but hard compared to what?

In his book, The Gap and the Gain, founder of Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan, describes a very powerful concept called “The Gap.” You can think of it this way…

You’ve been dyingggg for a new car — A brand new red Mercedes.

You can picture yourself pulling up to the office in your shiny red ride, feeling on top of the world.

You can feel the warm breeze of a summer evening cruise with the top down.

That red Mercedes is everything you’ve ever dreamed of.

Only problem is, your significant other surprised you with a white one…

How DARE they!

Instead of appreciating the fact that you just got a brand new Mercedes, all you can focus on is how disappointed you are that you didn’t get the red one you so desperately wanted.

This is the gap where so many of us get stuck.

We forget to acknowledge the massive gifts laid in front of us and complain about the packaging. Fill in your own example here… think about when you may have done this yourself.

We have to consciously start developing a grateful mind and learn to appreciate the things we DO have and the progress we have made, rather than getting hung up on what we’re missing… FOMO!

Ask yourself, “Compared to what?” I promise you… someone, somewhere, doesn’t have the amazing opportunities you have in your life.

Much like physically training your body, Gratitude is a daily exercise and you’ll only get out of it the effort you put in. I challenge you to make Gratitude your first priority each day and watch how it transforms your life.

After all these decades, it still blows my mind that all these gurus repeatedly teach this concept of Gratitude, but consistently leave out its equally, if not more important counterpart: Forgiveness.

Being Grateful is a critical fist step…I’ll get my day started on a positive note and I’ll be excited about whatever I’m focused on for awhile, but I continually found myself running out of steam and into roadblocks.

I was still getting angry with people…

I was reverting back to negative childhood habits…

I was holding on to things that happened and people that wronged me, almost as if I needed a constant fire burning inside to keep me going.

I was raised in a community where the common mentality was to put others down and prove people wrong. Growing up in the “house of sarcasm”, I developed a thick skin and learned to just “shrug things off” even though the belittling comments hurt and added up.

My dad left our family when I was 12 and was always on the road long-haul trucking the years prior, so he was never really around to teach me how to be a man… How to be loving or physically and emotionally tough.

Even though I was one of the biggest kids in school, I was mentally weak and wouldn’t stick up for myself, making me an easy target. People picked on me for being a fat, ugly, red-headed kid… They told me I had bigger boobs than their sister and made fun of my Bucky Beaver teeth.

I heard it all and brushed it off (which means I stored it) for so long that I didn’t realize, after all the years, I had never actually forgiven these people… I carried that anger and pain with me for decades.

I had never moved past those experiences and deep in my neural network I was still holding on to that pain and those emotions… And it took A LOT of Forgiveness to a lot of people in order to heal my heart.

I learned that exercising Gratitude each day was a critical step, but that happiness never lasted long-term. It was always more of a fake-it-til-you-make-it type model until I really understood the power and importance of Forgiveness in combination with Gratitude.

In fact, today I believe Forgiveness is actually a greater, more powerful tool than Gratitude and in order to receive the exponential power of this process, Forgiveness must be exercised simultaneously with Gratitude.

Gratitude is like having a motivational guru in your ear to get your day started… That motivation can wear off quickly if your mind and heart aren’t settled.

Forgiveness is like having that person who deeply inspires you to be the best version of yourself. It’s that coach, parent, sibling or great friend that makes you feel like you can take on the world day-after-day, and that feeling is the inspiration you need in order for Gratitude to work long-term.

You’ll never perform at the highest level without solid emotional health, and the only way to strengthen those muscles is to exercise them daily with Gratitude AND Forgiveness.

I love powerful frameworks using acronyms because they provide an easy brain pattern for us to remember important concepts. Since this particular article focuses on GFCI (which also happens to be the acronym for a specific type of safety outlet you’ll find in every bathroom), I found it only fitting to add in this concept developed by leading forgiveness expert, Dr. Everett Worthington, Ph.D.

Worthington’s R.E.A.C.H. method provides an easy framework for helping us “REACH Forgiveness of Others”:

R = Recall the hurt.

To heal, you have to face the fact that you’ve been hurt. Make up your mind not to treat yourself like a victim, and not to treat the other person as a jerk.

E = Empathize with your partner.

Put yourself in the other person’s chair to help you see why they might have wronged you.

A = Altruistic gift.

Give forgiveness as an unselfish, altruistic gift. We all can remember a time when we wronged someone and the person forgave us — We didn’t want to disappoint that person by doing wrong again.

C = Commit.

Once you’ve forgiven, write a note to yourself… “Today I forgave _____ for hurting me.” This helps your forgiveness last.

H = Hold onto forgiveness.

We write notes of commitment for when we’re tempted to doubt that we really forgave, so we can re-read them as a reminder that we did.

Practicing Gratitude and Forgiveness, in combination, is about retraining your mind and heart to experience the world differently… Your new world that YOU get to choose.

Part of this process is learning to identify and analyze the unique triggers established by your past experiences that take you out of a happy state and launch you into a state of pain. As soon as those triggers are set off, your system automatically goes into “protect” mode to avoid reliving that pain of the past.

This GFCI model is designed to help you start moving through those old experiences by attaching new meaning and emotions to reprogram the triggers that currently bring you pain.

Take a moment right now to start developing this new habit.

Start by thinking of someone who has wronged you at some point in the past that you’re still stewing over.

Find a lesson in that experience that you can be Grateful for, then Forgive that person so you can move forward and leave the emotional baggage. Don’t make it complicated or overthink it too much, but make sure you’re honest and sincere. If you don’t learn to truly internalize it and actually mean what you’re telling yourself, then they’re just a bunch of empty words and you won’t get any real value out of the exercise.

As difficult as it may be, we have to allow ourselves to forgive because when somebody is giving you grief, that’s really just their negativity that they’re projecting onto you.

You don’t have to accept their grief or negativity!

That’s the power of a strong emotional mind.

Once I allowed myself to forgive those who had wronged me, I was finally free to assign Gratitude to those experiences and appreciate the lessons they had taught me.

Today, I thank those bullies in my past because they forced me to be tough and motivated me to prove the naysayers wrong. Once I was on my own after High School, I was super driven, putting all my focus and energy into my work. I started making more money than my peers and developed a great lifestyle for myself.

The challenge is, I was still running off this model of proving people wrong, and after a while nobody was telling me I couldn’t do it anymore… I no longer had anything to prove and it took a good decade for me to figure out what it was that would drive me now.

GFCI will ensure you don’t have to wait an entire decade for results. You can achieve immediate results once you start the GFCI process.

Over time I recognized that there are so many people out there hurting, so my new mission in life was not to prove people wrong, but to help them transform their own mindset so they could start getting new results through Gratitude and Forgiveness.

If you truly want to have long-term success, you have to give people room to grow even if it’s at a different rate than you. You need to decide for yourself that you’re going to leave your old ways in the past and no longer live in that model, and this starts with developing the habit of daily Gratitude and Forgiveness.

You must be willing to be vulnerable and face some hard truths to get clear about your roadblocks and the things that have been holding you back.

Acknowledge that you can’t change your past and that your life is not your fault. Your community did the best they knew how with the information and experiences they had, and now it’s up to you to take control and start creating the life you deserve.

Wake up every day with a grateful heart and have the courage to forgive yourself and those who may have hurt you… They did the best they knew how.

Remember… They only hurt you once. But you continue to re-live that pain by harboring the experience and refusing to forgive and move on.

It’s time we commit to not being “that person” anymore and commit to daily GFCI. I can promise you, the best place to start is simply Forgiving yourself. So take a moment and start right now.

Gratitude and Forgiveness are incredibly powerful mental tools in helping us cure the pain we faced in the past, giving us the mental freedom to face our future with a clean slate.

Starting and continuing any new process can be difficult because our mind and body is driven to conserve energy by operating in its autonomous state. This is why it’s so hard for all humans to break old behavioral habits. Our system burns a tremendous amount of energy adapting to new ideas and processes, so this is why making changes and accomplishing anything worthwhile requires a powerful declaration to the new state we’re striving to create.

It all comes down to your Commitment.

Commitment is an acceptance and declaration of a new obligation expressed to the world through actions, not only words — A proclamation that I’ve now defined something worth-while, and I’m committed to making it happen at all healthy costs.

Developing a habit of Gratitude, Forgiveness and Commitment is a process that requires time and persistent effort. As John Wooden — the greatest NCAA basketball head coach of all time, winning 10 National Championships in just 12 years — once said…

In order to achieve the exponential results that I know are possible for you (because I’ve seen them in my own life and so many others I’ve worked with), you have to commit, “all-in,” to the GFCI process and your vision.

You have to commit the time and energy into shifting your mindset and unraveling limiting beliefs.

Wherever you are today is a byproduct of everything your community has taught you up to this point in your life. It’s okay to give yourself some room and time to deconstruct your current belief structure in order to rebuild it again, even stronger.

It’s not going to be an overnight process…

You’ve experienced life for potentially decades to arrive at your current mental state, so give yourself a break on this journey to unlearn what hasn’t worked and open yourself up to new possibilities.

There are two main components that need specific attention in order to drive and complete a commitment. The first is identifying the W’s — What, When, Why, Who and hoW. What is it that you want? You must have clarity. When do you want it? You must have a specific timeline. Why do you want it? Your why must make you feel something emotionally, or you won't do anything long enough to complete the commitment. Who can help you? Your who’s will make or break you, so find some amazing people to help you get out of your own way. The right who’s will save you decades of your life and supercharge your results. How do you do it? Find the right who’s and you wont need to learn the how?

The second main component of Commitment is resources. The four main resources are time, money, people and ideas. To create a fighting chance at keeping your commitment you must learn how and when to deploy your resources, with a specific activity level, to get results you can measure, then adjust and repeat the process. This may sound a bit daunting at first read, however find the right WHO’s in your life and this will be a breeze and the results will blow your mind.

Make the commitment to yourself that it’s time to start living by your own rules and then actually see it through. Commitment is a daily exercise in achieving, so start with small commitments to build personal momentum. This will build your confidence by getting some ‘wins’ under your belt. If you want to build significant trust with people, work to be known as someone who commits and see’s the project through completion.

Once you are committed you now must be very intentional with your resources. Becoming intentional is learning what resource to deploy at what time and then moving to simultaneous resource deployment to achieve exponential results… we call this leverage.

People always say, “You have to find balance in your life.”

… And how’s that working for you?

I hate to break it to you but there’s no such thing as balance in life… only Intention. Our resources are precious and without proper attention there is no intention.

Our lives consists of 4 main Domains: Health, Relationships, Recreation, and then Wealth (in that order). The challenge is, the world teaches them backwards and without intention.

We’re taught that the only way to join the “1%er club” in their model is go make a pile of money, then spend it on a bunch of stuff to impress a bunch of people you probably don’t even like.

Their model only focuses on making money and spending it. It doesn’t teach anything about the other critical 15 subdomains, which is why so many of us are not living a truly free and joy-filled life. As we have not been provided a human play book and only work with our communities version of how the world operates.

We can’t pour all our time and energy into a single subdomain and expect the other 15 to magically flourish…that’s insane! We must nurture all 16 consistently and in an integrated way to achieve intentional results.

This is why it’s critical that we are extremely intentional about how we invest our time.

You can’t just sit back and allow life to happen to you, you need to pick a lane for yourself — not for anyone else — and then get after it.

Develop unique skill sets that you can take into a market and add tremendous value.

Intentionality will take your life to the next level and help you become a focused expert at whatever it is you choose.

Whoever you are, whatever you do… Do it with intention, passion, excitement and commitment. You don’t necessarily have to be the entrepreneur or the business owner, but whatever your lane is, get after it!

No one magically wakes up an expert at anything, you have to be intentional with your resources.

Your past community did the best they could at the time to shape your beliefs, but what worked back then may no longer work or may have never worked for you.

Get your intentions straight and be fired up everyday to get after it. There’s no such thing as a balanced life… only an Intentional one.

From now on, every morning and evening while brushing your teeth, look at that GFCI outlet and know that this special circuit saved Bella’s life and now will save yours in a new way. I want you to think of me and this GFCI article and know that this model will radically transform your emotional state at will if you are willing to make it a daily practice. GFCI outlets are in your bathroom, kitchen and outside of your home, protecting you from getting electrocuted and serving as your daily reminder to live in a state of GFCI: