Blossom Your Awesome

Choosing Good Moods With Matt O'Neill Blossom Your Awesome Podcast

February 29, 2024 Sue Dhillon Season 1 Episode 251
Blossom Your Awesome
Choosing Good Moods With Matt O'Neill Blossom Your Awesome Podcast
Show Notes Transcript

Choosing Good Moods With Matt O'Neill Blossom Your Awesome Podcast

Meet Matt O'Neill, is the host of the globally acclaimed 'The Good Mood Show' podcast. He is also the author of the upcoming book,  'Choosing Good Moods,'

Matt is passionate about using his platforms to teach others how to harness the power of their thoughts and emotions to create a life of fulfillment and joy.

His philosophy on choosing good moods is universal and applicable to anyone, regardless of their circumstances.

Matt  is on a mission to reveal the secrets to achieving your best self, conquering challenging emotions, and creating a positive mindset and always 'Choosing Good Moods!'

To learn more about Matt click here.

To follow me, get bonus content from the show, my own takeaways and favorite quotes, along with access to my newsletter Check me out here at my Substack.

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Or sign up for my Weekly Newsletter here.

To see more of my work check me out at my website where I write and cover mindfulness and other things to help you Blossom Your Awesome.

Or checkout my other site where I right about arts and culture, wellness, essays and op-eds.

Or follow me on instagram where I post fairly regularly and ask an inquisitive question or two weekly in hopes of getting you thinking about your life and going deeper with it.

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To see more of who I'm talking to on the Podcast, to advertise your brand on the Blossom Your Awesome Podcast or just get in touch click here.


Sue (00:01.099)
Hi there, today on the show, we have got Matt O'Neill here with us. I am so honored and delighted to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Matt O'Neill (00:08.77)
Sue, I am so excited to be here and I'm ready to blossom my awesome on this show.

Sue (00:16.071)
That is awesome. So Matt, you are the host of The Good Mood Show. You have an upcoming book. I think it's going to be out this fall. You're an entrepreneur. It goes on and on what you do, but give us the backstory here, why you launched the podcast, just building all of these businesses, and then we'll get into your philosophy and how you just maintain a good mood.

Matt O'Neill (00:45.77)
Yeah, well, I mean, it came from my upbringing and, you know, we all have, we all have generational things we inherit. One of my favorite books is Your Body Keeps the Score. And in that book, they talk about how if you can heal trauma that was passed down to you, you actually heal backwards seven generations and you heal forwards seven generations. So

I was born into a situation of a mood of shame, like deep shame. My grandfather came over on the boat from Ireland, so super close to me. The potato famine had kind of driven his family here to the United States. On the boat, his mom and his brother died of tuberculosis.

And when he gets to New York, it's just him and his dad left. And his dad can't get a job because he's got an Irish accent and all the Irish people are scabs. And so there's shame that I'm not as good as the rest of society. And the only job his dad can get is working in the horse stalls of the police station. And unfortunately, his dad gets kicked in the head by a horse and dies. And so my grandfather is orphaned on the streets of New York at age eight. You know, just nobody wants him.

Sue (01:58.348)
Mm.

Matt O'Neill (02:05.994)
He's abandoned by his mom, he's abandoned by his dad. Of course, they didn't mean to die. You know, it's not like they made that choice, but as a young mind, his mind started to think, I'm not worthy. You know, I'm not worthy of a dad, I'm not worthy of a mom, I'm not worthy of people that care for me. And that's really what this, the lie of the mood of shame is all about. Well, he went on and took his dead brother's birth certificate and enrolled in the army at age 15.

They knew he was a young boy, they knew he was an 18, so they just had him drive the officers around. So he learned how to drive, and he ended up becoming a truck driver. And on the road, he met his wife, who also had been abandoned by her parents, who also felt deep shame. And then they had my dad, and so that the world didn't beat them down, they decided they would beat him down, so that he would know he wasn't enough. And so what did my dad do when he had me?

Well, he might want to make sure that I knew I wasn't enough and that the world was harsh and he was going to be harsher to me. And so, you know, my household wasn't like this super joyful, happy place. And my dad ended up abandoning our family too. So then I felt like I'm not worthy of having the love of a father. Thankfully I've got like the most awesome mom ever who did teach me a lot of compassion and love and.

and unconditional love, and those were the things I learned from her. And when I started to grow up, I'm like, man, I want more for myself. Not only do I want to be successful, like that, you know, no one in my family had really been successful at this level, but I want to be happy. I want to be really, really happy. So I started to study everything I could read about psychology and spirituality and happiness, and I traveled and meditated with monks.

went to all these conferences and investing over a million dollars on courses over the course of 20 years. And then what came out of it was the good mood show philosophy and I just love sharing it with the world.

Sue (04:12.367)
That is so beautiful. Now, let me ask you, Matt. You know, so often I find people, I mean, life is hard. And a lot of times people exasperate hard situations, right? We make them last longer than they need to. What was it for you? Was there a moment? Where did that epiphany? Did you see something? Were you trying to replicate something else where you said, I want more and I'm going to attain more?

Matt O'Neill (04:43.118)
I was born with it. I remember being five and thinking, man, I'm going to write a book one day. And I can't even tell you why. You know, it was just there. I do think that we come into the world with a mission. And I think our soul has an agenda of what we could accomplish.

And I think it's implanted in us, like who we could be. And so at a very young age, I kind of knew that this was where my life was gonna go.

Sue (05:18.011)
And now for you, you know, as far as this revelation of, okay, I can choose to be in a good mood. Where did that come from? How did you start implementing that? And then we'll kind of get go deeper with that.

Matt O'Neill (05:35.03)
Yeah, that was an epiphany. And a mentor of mine, a guy named David Wirtan, gave me a book called Think and Grow Rich. And I was 25 years old. And up until that time, when I got into bad moods, I just thought they were like storm clouds. Like sometimes the storm clouds of bad moods would come over and you'd be in the dark for a while. You don't know why they roll in, they just do. And you just kind of have to wait it out and hopefully the storm will lift and things will get brighter again.

When I read Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill says in that book that your thoughts are things and that everything in your life is created by your thinking. I couldn't put the book down. When it was in my hands, I read it all night. It was 4 a.m. I was so excited about this concept that my thoughts were creating everything in my life.

I started to text people in the middle of the night, like this revelation, like I just had this huge wake up, like holy cow, so it meant that everything that was bad in my life, I was creating with my thoughts, and then if I wanted to change my life, I just needed to change my thoughts. Now, since the last 20 years, I've learned a lot more since then, and not every single thing is created and attracted to us by our thoughts, but some things are.

And as soon as I learned that concept, I started to dive deep into how to master my mind and start to use it to create. And what you learn next is not just your thoughts, really it's your emotional signature. So if your emotional signature is one of anger and frustration, you're going to bring and attract more things that will make you angry and frustrated. But if your emotional signature is one of excited or loving or joyful,

Everything around you is attracted to your love and joy and energy and light, and your whole life becomes more like.

Sue (07:26.959)
Mm-hmm. And so give us some practical guidance. Like, how do we solidify that mindset or live in a, like, a state of positivity?

Matt O'Neill (07:39.99)
Yeah, so it starts by understanding the brain. And our brain is wired to keep our bodies alive. Think about back in the jungle, we had to not eat the wrong berries or else everyone in the tribe would die. So our brain is constantly telling us to look for what's wrong. It's always scanning for what's wrong. If something's going right, it says, I'm not gonna use my energy to think about that, that's fine, let's see what could kill us.

Well, this means that our brains are constantly looking for all the negative. And as we just learned about from thoughts or things in the law of attraction, whatever we focus on, we get more of. So if we understand that 80% of our thoughts, and this is what the National Science Foundation has found, 80% of our thoughts are negative. We need to start to say, do I need to believe all of these thoughts? And the answer is no. You know, your heart beats on its own. You don't say beat heart.

It just beats, it keeps you alive. It just does its job, it beats. Our lungs are breathing in air, all on their own. We don't tell them to breathe, they just breathe on their own. Well, our brain spits out thoughts for us to consider, all on its own. We don't tell it to think, it just thinks. You try not to think, it'll do it anyway, and what it's thinking is negative thoughts that are trying to figure out what's wrong to try to keep you alive. So if you understand this, you start to say,

Okay, I'm gonna start to analyze all my thoughts and decide is this thought helpful or is this thought harmful? The most easy exercise that I've learned to counteract this negativity is every morning when I wake up, I grab a pen and a piece of paper and I write down three things I did well the day before. Every morning I start my day with this. Just what are three things that I won at yesterday? What are three wins?

You know, so this morning I was sitting in my chair. I've got my cup of coffee because that always makes me feel good too. I love coffee. And I'm thinking about the day before and I'm like, okay, what did I do well? I booked a reservation at the nicest steak restaurant in town for my eight-year-old daughter. We're going on a date tonight. I went to the store, to the grocery store, and I bought flowers for my wife for Valentine's Day that's coming up. You know, at work.

Matt O'Neill (09:57.31)
I had a meeting with Lisa and the two of us created a plan to keep all of our recruiting in one place. So that was three things I did well the day before. Well what happens when you do this every day is your brain starts to have to keep track of all the things you're doing well in the moment because it knows the next morning you're going to have to write them down. So it's trying to, it's now creating a file open in your day of what you're doing well in the moment.

Well, you start to notice how great you are all the time instead of everything that's wrong. And then you start to notice how great other people are because you're looking for what's going right and your whole world can change positive with just a five minute exercise, counting three things you're doing well every day.

Sue (10:39.219)
I absolutely love this, Matt. And I've never heard this before. We hear, oh, start with a gratitude practice or start with your list of to-do lists or things that you're gonna get done today. But I can only imagine how powerful this is, this idea of affirming the wins, like starting your day by affirming something that you actually got done. That's so powerful. I love that. I literally have never heard that before.

Matt O'Neill (11:07.01)
Well, give it a shot. Your brain does wake up and tell you everything you did wrong. You don't have to count those things. Like, you wake up and you're like, oh, that didn't go right. Oh, man, I said the wrong thing there. You know, this is what I'm saying is because this job is a scan for what you're not doing good enough. But we want to retrain it to find out everything you're doing great because whatever you focus on expands. And so I want to stack the wins so that I can win today, too.

Sue (11:34.823)
Mm-hmm. Oh, I love that. That's beautiful. Now, you know, for you personally, when your mind goes to that negative place, what does that look like for you?

Matt O'Neill (11:45.61)
It does it all the time. It's a silly mind. Ha ha ha.

Sue (11:49.687)
Hahaha!

Matt O'Neill (11:51.886)
So I wouldn't have the good mood show if I didn't struggle with bad moods. And actually I think that every single person alive has bad moods because it's just part of it. So there are eight signature bad moods and we talked about one of them. The lowest and most destructive is shame. What my grandfather felt that he wasn't worthy, he wasn't enough, that something was wrong with him.

And the next most destructive bad mood is guilt. Guilt says, I've done bad things and I deserve punishment. And the opposite of guilt, you'll know that you're stuck in guilt if you're judging everyone. Because the opposite side of the coin of guilt is judgment. So when you're looking at other people saying they're not doing enough, you'll know that there's guilt in your own subconscious that you don't think you're doing enough.

And, but this, you know, we can counteract that guilt with the counting the three wins. We counteract the shame by trying to find out where do we feel that there's something wrong with us. And you can just ask yourself that question. Where do I feel that there's something wrong with me? And, you know, what is that core wound that I have? And then whatever you find, you can write it down and then you can write the opposite. So for me, I wrote, you know, I found a core wound. I didn't think I was enough. I didn't think I was lovable.

You know, I thought that I deserve punishment. I thought I deserved to be abandoned. Once I wrote these things down, I said, is this the truth? And of course it's not. It's just a lie. It's a lie that our subconscious creates and it's a lie of shame. And then you can write next to it the real truth. Well, am I enough? Yeah, you know, God loves me. I wouldn't be, if I wasn't loved enough by God, I wouldn't have even been created. You know, do I deserve to be abandoned? No.

my wife is here, my mom is here, all these amazing people in my life, they haven't abandoned me, so I don't deserve to be abandoned. And so once you can find these lies in your subconscious, you can then affirm the truth, and the truth is so much stronger than a lie that if you start to repeat the truth to yourself just for a few days, the lies just dissipate. The other bad moods from there are hopelessness, you know this feeling that I can't

Matt O'Neill (14:13.79)
I can't get anything right and it's not going to get better. That's a really dangerous mood. Of course I've been there before too where things just seem totally hopeless. And the only way out of hopelessness is to ask someone for help. Because when you feel completely hopeless you don't think there's any hope for a brighter future. So if you ever feel like life is beyond hope just ask somebody for help. Get around somebody that's in a higher vibration and they'll pull you up. You know there's also sadness.

You know, something changes if someone passes. And so it's a really, sadness can be a really beautiful emotion because nothing stays the same. And anytime we lose someone or something, it's an opportunity for us to recognize that they were never owed to us. You know, that they were gifted to us that anything that we have is just ours for a moment. And we just get the chance to hold on to it while we get it and experience it while we get it.

And then if we lose something, we can then look at what we still have, the people that are still here, and say, I'm so lucky that you're here today, because you're not owed to me. There's no guarantee you'll be here tomorrow. I'm just going to hug you today. So sadness can really open us up to understanding how precious each moment really is.

Sue (15:28.331)
Wow, that is so powerful. Now, Matt, give us the others, all eight of them.

Matt O'Neill (15:36.414)
Yeah, we've just gone through the lowest four. The next is fear. And fear can paralyze us. When we feel afraid, what we usually do is get very small and shrink, and we freeze. Fear is you're gonna fight, you're gonna fight, or you're gonna freeze. And so usually when we're feeling afraid, we have a tendency to get really small and not take any action. And I coach my daughter, who, she's five.

and she was really painfully shy in social situations. She wouldn't go say hi to anyone. She got the wrong ice cream and she loves ice cream. And she wouldn't eat this ice cream. And I said, well, let's just go back to the counter and you can get a new ice cream. And she says, no, no daddy, I'm not gonna do that. So she wasn't even gonna eat ice cream. So I coached her on how to overcome this fear. And the first thing I did is they gave her a positive mantra. I bought a picture of a lion and on the picture it said, I am brave.

and I hung it over her bed. So every night we would look at this lion and I'd say, Kelly, you're brave. And this was just replanting a new seed in her mind that she wasn't fearful, that she was powerful. And then I said to her, hey, what do you feel when you're afraid to go say hi to somebody? And she said, I feel these butterflies in my stomach. And I said, great. So did you know why God gives you butterflies in your stomach? And she says, no, why?

He said, he gives you butterflies when something awesome is about to happen. It's a signal that you're about to have the best time ever. And so we just re-identified what these feelings, these sensations of fear really mean. They're really a signal for us to act. And so I said, tomorrow when you go to school, you're gonna feel butterflies when you go to talk to somebody. And I promise you those butterflies are a signal of what you should do. Just go say hi to that person and you're gonna see how great it's gonna be.

And she came home that day and she said, Dad, I did it, I felt really the butterflies. And I went and I said hi to this girl and we played the whole recess. And this has completely changed everything for her. It's a year later and I haven't seen any of that social anxiety again. But this is, we can do the same thing with our own fear. Anytime we feel the sensations of fear, usually it shows up as a tightness in us, butterflies in our stomach. It's a sign for us to take a step forward because something great is about to happen.

Matt O'Neill (18:01.002)
So beyond fear, there's desire. And desire is a super awesome mood. It's incredible. Everything starts with desire. We wanna desire a better life. We wanna set all these goals. But ultimately it's a bad mood because it's insatiable. So I've been there of course, as I was building my career, I desired all these things and I would accumulate all these things. I thought that was gonna be the secret to happiness. You see the unhappy billionaires.

you know, that never have enough. You see, of course, you're in California. You see all of these people that have everything and then some take their own life, right? Because if you stay stuck in desire, you're looking for the external world to fulfill something internal, and it can never do that. So that's why desire can be a trap. But it also can be a really good thing because you can set your desire at it, like, hey, I'm gonna desire to have greater connection with other human beings, or I'm gonna desire to have a greater mood frequency.

Beyond desire, there's only two more bad moods. And the next one is anger. So when we feel desire for something and we don't get it, we get really frustrated and angry. And anger also can be a really positive thing. So as we go up the scale of moods, each mood has more energy than the one before it. Anger can be really good. If you're frustrated about something, it means that you're ready to make a change. So anytime I get angry, I grab a pen and paper and I say, what do I need to change?

I'm not happy about something here, so I can either just bitch about it and be upset, or I can actually do something with this energy and make a change for the better. So I really like the emotion of anger not to express towards others, but to turn that energy into me and say, what could I do about this situation to make me happier? And the final bad mood is pride. And pride is where we get to this point where we think that we're hot stuff.

and that we've done everything and it's all on us and it's all it's been us all by ourselves and that we're better than others. We're constantly comparing ourselves to other people. And this again is a really shallow existence because it's just not true. We've done nothing on our own and all of our gifts were given to us by a greater power. So anything we've done we have to have humble gratitude anyway.

Sue (20:22.699)
That is so powerful. I love that breakdown and so many of these moods that we constantly are activating, right? And without even realizing we're putting ourselves in a bad mood by being into that frequency. Now, let me ask you, what is your guidance to, you know, people who don't believe it's a choice to be in a state, a happier state or

Have a good mood.

Matt O'Neill (20:54.943)
Yeah, we can't help them.

Sue (20:55.367)
Yeah.

Matt O'Neill (20:59.734)
Because intuitively we all know, you know, you can't fool yourself. There's a piece of you that knows that you are the creator of your perspective, of your reality. And if you're anyone that is going to pretend that they're not the creator of their own reality, is someone that's just not ready to take accountability for their life. And so you can't help them. I know.

Sue (21:28.208)
Mm-hmm.

Matt O'Neill (21:29.442)
They know there is a piece of them that understands that any misery they have is self-created, self-inflicted. It's not because of the external events, it's because of the way they are choosing to view the external events. Everyone's got a victim story, everyone's been through hardships, but not everyone is suffering. Only those who choose, because you think you're, the thing is when you're choosing to be in misery, you think that you're gonna get something for it.

You think that this misery is going to help you in some way. Like well, if I'm really miserable enough, then I'll get sympathy from others. Or I'll be able to get bonding and friendship with others commiserating over how bad things are. Or if I complain enough, people will give me things. So it's a game that we play to try to get things. But what that person doesn't understand is that it doesn't matter how many external things you get, if you're miserable, your life is miserable. There's no winning there at all.

It doesn't matter. So yeah, it's just a game they're playing and they can stop pretending any moment and start to choose to be happy.

Sue (22:38.675)
I love that. That is so just, you've got so much just belief in that. And so, you know, what's interesting, and you know, this, Matt, is when people are in that state of commiserating or whatnot, there are so many excuses, right? They're like you say, they're focusing on all the external stuff that's happening to them, that's outside of their control versus, okay, what can I control right now?

make the shift.

Matt O'Neill (23:09.91)
Yeah, I do want to caveat. I'm not going to downplay someone who has a bipolar disease or who actually needs medication. I do believe there's a place for medication for people that do have a chemical imbalance. I just think the majority of people that aren't dealing with an actual diagnosis that are miserable are choosing it.

Sue (23:32.803)
Hmm. And what is your, give us some practical tips for getting really happy, like long-term sustained happiness. I mean, we know life stuff comes up, it happens, but how do we get those things to not just floor us and even, you know, to the best of our ability, kind of ride through some of that hard stuff also.

Matt O'Neill (23:59.658)
Yeah, the first step is humility. And I say humility because it is recognizing that we're gifted everything that we have, and so it's becoming humble to a greater power. For me, it's prayer. I pray every day a prayer of gratitude. I say thank you for giving me today. Thank you for my heart beating today.

Thank you for the people that are in my life, my children, my wife. Every morning I start with a prayer. And then I ask for guidance. And just this humbleness, this humility, I say, God, guide me today. Wherever you want me to go, whatever is gonna happen today, whatever I'm supposed to say, whoever I'm supposed to meet, let me meet those people, have those experiences, and do the best work I can in the world for however you see it.

to play out in the best way possible. Well, this humility then allows me, no matter what happens in the day, I know it was guided because I've asked to be guided and it's supposed to be the way it's supposed to be. And then when something happens that my ego doesn't like, you know, I lose some money or I wreck my car or I hurt myself playing sports, I'm like, well, this is what was supposed to happen. I don't know why, but it's gonna serve the greater good. So that's a...

another mood of acceptance. We don't always know why things happen, but if we just accept that everything that happens is supposed to happen and then figure out how we can make the most of it, these are mindsets that can just lead to a much happier life. You had mentioned one. I'm a huge fan of it and it's gratitude. So I have been writing down three new things I'm grateful for every day for the last decade.

You know, everyone talks about it. Great. Well, it's because it works. You know, a gratitude practice that is something that makes you grateful for everything in your life is a great thing. You know, what's the alternative? Be ungrateful?

Sue (26:14.412)
And I have to commend you here, Matt. So this idea of writing three new things, right? Where people so often struggle, people who don't have a gratitude practice. It's like, oh, what am I grateful for? Even when you start switching those out and looking for a new thing and another new thing and a new thing, you find yourself being in gratitude for the smallest things, right? And that's so amazing.

Matt O'Neill (26:38.046)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like, you know, tomorrow I'm gonna have a thing that's gonna say I'm so grateful that I got to have this amazing conversation with Sue. She's doing so many great things in the world, lifting the whole world up, and I'm just grateful that I'm at the place that she wanted me to help lift her community up. Like, how amazing. Like, the gratitude for that is just exploding, you know? But every, there's so many things that happen each day to all of us.

that of course we can find three things from the day before that are new that we're grateful for. But it does get like super cool when you get grateful that somewhere along the line, someone paved a road that you no longer have to drive on a dirt road. Like how cool is that? Somebody designed a car and you get to drive in your car. Somebody picked apples and then drove them to a store and instead of you having to go.

plant a tree, you can just go to a store and eat this incredible apple. Like how amazing, like there's so many things you can be grateful for. Absolutely everything.

Sue (27:44.307)
Well, that sounds like another book right there. So I want to ask you, talk to us about the book. Like, I know you said you always wanted to write a book. I feel like there's going to be more books. But what's the concept behind the book? When is it coming out? Give us those details.

Matt O'Neill (27:46.638)
I'm sorry.

Matt O'Neill (28:04.042)
Yeah, so I started writing the book 18 months ago when I started the Good Mood Show podcast. And I did them simultaneously. And of course, after we've had 100 episodes, now I know you're on episode 200 and something. I'm so proud of you and what you're doing in your podcast. But after 100 episodes of talking with people and learning from experts like you about how to feel good, it's reshaped the book.

So the book is about the ascension from the eight bad moods and then how to choose the eight good moods. And I'm working right now with my editor. I've written all the chapters and we're just really fine tuning and refining. We're adding in quotes for people that have been on the podcast before and just adding some more layers to the content that's already there. I'm really, really excited about it because each chapter teaches you how to continue to elevate your mood.

Ultimately, the pinnacle is, is that you get to the mood of love. And the mood of love is not like romantic love, although it's part of it. It's how can I love every single person exactly as they are? Like how can I love everything exactly as it is? Even the people that I would say shouldn't act the way they're acting. Could I just love them as they are? Understand they're on their own journey, they're owning the...

learning their own lessons. It's nothing for me to teach them. They're just lovable as they are and they'll figure it out at some point. And when you can love everyone, and this isn't the easiest thing to do, I'm working on it, then what happens is your heart just opens up to this immense joy because nothing needs to change, no one needs to change, everybody is just lovable. And that's a joyful place to be.

Sue (29:58.551)
That's going to make me cry. Now, can you tell us, give us a couple, a few, the top two or three. I know you said love. Is that like number one? That's got to be the, like you said, the pinnacle, right?

Matt O'Neill (30:11.666)
Yeah, you know, the final chapter is peace. And, you know, for me, I'm still working on love. So I just wanna continue to find everybody lovable. And I know this is a really hard thing to do because sometimes people make some really bad decisions and do some really awful things in the world. How could you love the monster? Well, my dad was the monster.

You know, and as I described it when we started this episode, he didn't choose for his parents to be abandoned by their parents. They didn't choose to be abandoned, but they kind of took on these lies that they were unworthy. And then when you think that you're unworthy, you do some really awful things because there's something in you that's so hurt, you just have to try to hurt everybody else. And when we recognize that even the monster deserves love,

and that they just have been believing some lies that aren't true, you can see that they're also lovable. And that's really how we're going to heal people. I love Martin Luther King who had every reason to hate a lot of people. But he said, hate isn't going to cure this. Only love is going to cure this. And that's how I believe too.

Sue (31:34.615)
Oh, I love that. I just actually wrote something along these lines about, you know, so often reminding ourselves that people like haters and people who hate are the most desperate people who need love more than anyone else. Like that's it's just externalizing his hate, but really, they're like screaming out for love.

Matt O'Neill (31:56.734)
Oh, it's so true. It's so true. Yeah, yeah, that's one of my favorite quotes is, every form of communication is either a loving gesture or a cry out for love.

But they're spewing all this hate, and you can't just go give them a hug because they're pretty prickly. Some people, we just gotta love from afar. Like I don't need to go get close to the hater. One of my favorite authors is Sharon Salzberg. She wrote a book called Unconditional Kindness or something along those lines. And she...

Sue (32:24.639)
Right.

Sue (32:31.107)
How you.

Matt O'Neill (32:40.014)
In the book, she said, well, what should I do if someone on the streets is trying to take me and rape me? You know, they were talking about this concept of unconditional love. And her teacher said, then I want you to grab that staff that you have next to you, and with all the loving kindness you can, bash him in the head. It's always stuck with me, because just because we love somebody doesn't mean that we need to be harmed by them.

Sue (32:59.955)
I'm sorry.

Matt O'Neill (33:07.626)
You know, there are some people that are so hurt that they're trying to hurt others. There's probably family members and all of our families that every time we get close to them, they wanna harm us for some reason, not because they're bad, but just because that's their nature. And those are some of the people that I recommend we love from a distance.

Sue (33:29.299)
Yes, absolutely. Now, so love and peace. Can you give us one more of those higher vibration frequencies? I know it's you're giving us little insights from the book here, but give us one more.

Matt O'Neill (33:45.962)
Oh yeah, I'm happy to share all of them. The first good mood, as I'd mentioned, is humility. Once we start to act with humility, and this is like a quiet reverence for the gift of our life that we haven't really done anything, and even if you're not super into God, that's totally fine. At least you can recognize that you wouldn't be here without all of the ancestors that brought you to this point.

So we can give reverence to all the people, all the mentors, all the coaches, all the people that have helped us get to where we are that we have done nothing on our own, that we're standing on the shoulders of others for everything, that's humility. When you get to that point, you realize that you don't really wanna harm anyone. And this is like living with pure integrity. You just want to affirm what's good in everyone. And the next mood that comes from that is confidence.

Because once you start to make non-harming actions and you just start to affirm and approve of and help other people, there is a knowing in you that knows that your future will be blessed because karma's real. And when you're doing good deeds in the world, a confidence comes over you, not a prideful, arrogant confidence, a quiet confidence that says, I know I'm doing good and that my future will be blessed. And this turns into an unshakable confidence.

So then if something bad happens, it's no longer this guilt like, oh man, I deserve that punishment. It's more like, okay, this thing happened. I know my actions and deeds are pure, but I have confidence that this wasn't because of my actions. This may be here to help me. And that's where you can start to have confidence that even your problems are gifts for you. And of course, I know you've experienced that, Sue, where something you thought was really bad in the moment ended up being like one of the greatest things ever.

And you're like, wow, I would have never be here if that thing I thought was terrible didn't happen. And so that's where this confidence can come in. And the next good mood is responsibility. And so once we start to feel really confident in our future, then with that newfound confidence, we start to take responsibility for everything. And we start to say, if it's in front of me, it's my responsibility to do the best I can. And that's a super powerful mood of just,

Matt O'Neill (36:08.018)
of just owning that I am a powerful being in this world and if something's within my view, I'm meant to do something positive about it. Beyond responsibility is gratitude, and then from gratitude we get to love, joy, and then peace.

Sue (36:23.911)
Wow, oh my goodness. Matt, okay, so a couple of things. That was just all so powerful what you shared and I just have loved all of it. And I just, first and foremost, wanna thank you so much for your time and all of your amazing insights. I think people are gonna have so many powerful takeaways and it's been amazing.

Matt O'Neill (36:47.946)
Oh my gosh, thank you. Thank you for opening a space where you're just helping people feel good and empowered in their lives. It's awesome.

Sue (36:55.923)
Uh-huh. Well, you're doing the same and I just love what you're up to. And it's truly been so amazing. You've been so incredible. Now in closing, if there were just one message, your hope for everybody, what is that closing message you want to leave us with?

Matt O'Neill (37:13.302)
Yeah, know that you are enough as you are.

Sue (37:18.251)
Hmm. I thought that was a beautiful closing message. You've been so wonderful, Matt. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Matt O'Neill (37:26.167)
Yeah, thank you.