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Episode 786 · Jun 1, 2023

Living in the Present Moment: How to Break Negative Cycles and Find Real Joy

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In the third and final part of his series on Eckhart Tolle's *The Power of Now*, George Wright III of The Daily Mastermind brings together the core ideas from this landmark book and shows you how to apply them to your real life. Recording from the comfort of his massage chair, George makes the point in the most fitting way possible: true presence does not require a special setting. It requires a choice.

Over the previous two episodes, George covered why you are not your mind and why time is an illusion, and then how to become a silent observer of your thoughts. This final installment focuses on eliminating negativity, reframing your problems, and building a life that runs on joy rather than psychological suffering.

Why Negativity and Suffering Are Rooted in Time

Tolle's central argument, as George explains it, is that almost all negativity comes from spending too much time in the past or the future. Your mind replays old stories and rehearses future anxieties, and those loops perpetuate the same cycles you have been trying to escape.

The quality of your consciousness at any given moment determines whether your future will change. If your mind carries a heavy burden of the past, you will experience more of the same. The only place real transformation can happen is in the present. That is not a motivational cliche; it is a functional reality about how the mind works.

Your Life Situation vs. Your Life

One of the sharpest distinctions George highlights from this chapter is the difference between your life situation and your actual life.

Your life situation exists in time. Your life is now.

Your life situation is everything your mind has constructed: the problems, the disappointments, the hopes, the fears. Your real life is what is happening right now, in this moment. When you are overwhelmed with your life situation, you lose contact with yourself and your sense of being. Practicing presence means learning to set the life situation aside, even briefly, and returning to what is actually real.

Problems Are Mind-Made

George spends time on a section of Tolle's book that many people find uncomfortable: the idea that problems are illusions. Not that difficult things never happen, but that what makes something a problem is the mind assigning it that label across time.

Here is a useful test: how many problems do you actually have right now, at this precise instant? Not yesterday. Not next month. Right now. In most moments, the answer is very few or none. Problems need time to survive. They need a past to anchor them and a future to project them onto. Without that reference, they dissolve.

When you create a problem in your mind, you create pain. And as George points out, breaking that pattern starts with a simple decision: no more unnecessary pain. That decision becomes possible when you commit to operating from the present moment rather than from the stories your mind keeps running.

The Stories You Tell Yourself

George connects Tolle's framework to a theme that runs through personal development: the stories you tell yourself about who you are and what is possible for you. Those stories are almost always rooted in the past. "It always happens this way." "I'm not good enough." "This is just how things go for me."

When someone challenges those stories, it can feel threatening because the stories have become your identity. But the point is not to shame you for having them. The point is to help you see that most of what you have spent years convincing yourself is true is not your real life. It is your life situation, constructed by your mind, living in time. Your real life is only ever right now.

How to Find Joy in What You Are Already Doing

Tolle offers a practical test for whether you are operating in present-moment awareness or psychological time. George quotes it directly:

Is there joy, ease, and lightness in what I'm doing?

If there is not, it does not always mean you need to change what you are doing. It may mean you need to change how you are doing it. Give more attention to the process, not the result. As George puts it using an analogy he returns to often: it is the roots that create the fruits. When you focus on the process fully and with presence, the results follow. And when you are fully in that state, he says, you have already succeeded.

This is not abstract law-of-attraction thinking. It is a concrete strategy: direct your attention to what is actually in front of you right now. That attention is the practice.

Why Mindset Work Is the Foundation for Everything Else

George closes by pushing back on the idea that presence and mindfulness are soft topics disconnected from business and achievement. His own experience tells the opposite story. As he built external success, he was not as happy as he became once he started paying attention to where his thoughts were going.

All the strategies, investments, and opportunities in the world will produce less than they could if your mind is running on unexamined patterns from the past or anxiety about the future. Presence is not a detour from success. It is the foundation of it.

Action Steps

  • Catch the time-trap. When you feel anxious or stuck, ask yourself: is this a present-moment problem, or is my mind in the past or the future? Name it clearly.
  • Separate your life from your life situation. Your life situation is what your mind has constructed. Your actual life is now. Practice coming back to what is real at this instant.
  • Use the joy test. Before or during any task, ask: is there joy, ease, and lightness here? If not, shift your attention to the process rather than the outcome.
  • Observe the stories. Notice the recurring narratives you run about yourself and your circumstances. You do not have to fight them; just see them for what they are: mind-made, time-dependent constructs.
  • Read the source material. George strongly recommends picking up *The Power of Now* by Eckhart Tolle and working through it directly.

Presence is a skill you can build. It starts with a decision, and it deepens with practice. As George Wright III puts it, it is never too late to start living the life you were meant to live. You just have to decide to begin.

READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

All right, welcome back to the Daily Mastermind. George Wright III here with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education. We are on part three, three of three, of a highlighted chapter I'm reading on The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And today, especially if you're listening to this or watching this on video, you're probably wondering what the heck. I'm just doing it from the comfort of my massage chair in my bedroom. And I thought, man, what a wonderful world. What a great way actually to speak about being in the present moment. I was thinking this morning, the fact that I can record content for tens of thousands of people in a couple of dozen countries around the world from the comfort of my massage chair actually is pretty cool. It's pretty cool. I was thinking about it this morning because I was up really late last night studying and going through a bunch of things for today. And I got up this morning. Don't worry, I got up and had a great workout. And I work out at a private gym, which is just up against the mountains by Mount Tipanogos. And so you've got the snow-covered mountains, you've got colored leaves on the trees, and here I am working out with that as my backdrop. And I thought, man, What a great example of being in the present moment. I get up every morning half asleep and I work out and just studying this topic and just going through this topic has allowed me to become more present moment focused. So anyway, let's get right into it today. Day one of this three-part series, we talked about that you're not your mind and that time is an illusion because we're usually just caught up in the past and the future. And that your mind is really tied to time. And the key to getting outside that is to ground yourself more in the present moment. That's where you're going to get results. That's where you're going to start to see progress in your life and get rid of a lot of the negatives is if you can get into the present moment. And in the day two, we talked about how to really focus on accessing the power of now, of the present moment, by becoming a silent observer of your mind and becoming more aware of where your mind goes and why it's going there and being a silent observer, not a critical observer. And we've also talked about letting go of psychological time versus the clock time. We have to be tied to time to a certain degree, but it's when we get caught up in the emotions of it that it becomes destructive to our success and our fulfillment. And then today what I want to do is I want to kind of cap it off by talking about and really highlighting a bunch of this chapter on how to get rid of negative emotions and the problems that we have all the time. how to really eliminate those and live more of your life rather than your life situation. And you've got to be able to learn to reframe your problems. And we'll talk about how to create more joy by operating in the present moment. So this particular section of this chapter, I just highlighted a ton of this book. And so I may just kind of take some time to just paraphrase and read you some of the highlights that I have in order to give you the cliff notes But there again I really encourage you to get this book called The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle And this is chapter three called Moving Deeply into the Now because I really really believe that results in your mind your body your business everything are going to happen if you can get more present moments. So we've now moved into the section where we talk about negativity and suffering are all rooted in time. You know, he says, usually the future is just a replica of the past. And I think we know that. I think we've seen in our lives that patterns and cycles continue to happen, right? And transformation is really going to depend on whether or not you're present enough. Because if your mind carries heavy burdens of the past, you'll experience more of the same over and over. And the past will always perpetuate itself through your lack of presence. And the quality of your consciousness at any given moment is going to shape whether or not your future is going to change. And so if you're struggling with those cycles, that's what you have to be more conscious of. So what is it that determines the quality of your consciousness? Well, your degree of presence will do that. And the only place that true change can occur is in the present. So think about that for a minute. You can only create transformation if you're focused on the present. All of your negativity, it's all caused by accumulation of psychological time and the denial of the present. Future, you know, when you have too much future, it's because you have, you know, not enough present, you have too much future, or you have too much of the past, it's also not enough of the present. You've got to focus on the present moment in order to overcome those challenges and things that you're having. So you find, you know, let's say that you find it hard to recognize that time is the cause of your suffering, and this is a key thought. Until you've dealt with the basic problem-making dysfunction of the mind, the fact that the mind creates your problems in time, its attachment to the past and future and denial of the now, your problems are just interchangeable. See, you're going to say to yourself, well, look, this thing really happened, and this situation really happened, and these things are really there. That's true. But until you deal with the real problem, that your mind keeps going back to the past or your mind is still anxious about the future, your problems are just interchangeable. Even if you fix that problem, you're going to continue to have other problems that you obsess about. So when you can become aware of this function that your mind attaches itself to time, the past, the stories, the future, the anxiety, that's when you can really create a change. And that's really amazing to think about. So Eckhart goes on to say, you know, finding the life underneath your true life situation. This is a good one because if you think about it, we need to learn to get away from this psychological time thinking because things in the past didn't go our way or we wanted them to go our way and they didn't and you're still resisting or you're hoping that the future will basically keep you going and give you something better to look forward to. All of that is rooted in past and future. You have to learn this. You have to learn to forget about your life situation for a while and pay attention to your life And he goes on to say what the difference Your life situation exists in time Your life is now So your situation is time Your life is now Your life situation is all stuff in your mind Your real life is real So you've got to learn to live in your life, not your life situation, one that's created by your mind. And when you're full of problems and there's no room for anything new, you know, you're not going to create those solutions. So you've got to create space. And the way you do that is by focusing on the present. And I know I'm really kind of trying to hammer this home, but it's because a lot of you just don't really realize that 90% of your thoughts, your challenges, your negativity, your emotions are all things that have either already happened or not happened. And they're not even your real life because your real life is really only what's happening right now. And, you know, there's even a whole section on your problems are all illusions. I mean, let's think about it. Problems are man-made and mind-made, and they need time to survive. Without time or a reference of time, they don't survive, because let's think about it. How many problems do you actually have right now, this very instant? Exactly right now, how many problems do you have? Now, you might have problems that are going to happen or problems that have already happened, but what makes anything a problem? Well, the mind makes it a problem, and we become so overwhelmed with our life situations that we lose our own self, our own sense of being. And, you know, we create this identity around that. So when you create a problem, you create pain, and all it takes is a simple choice or a decision, no matter what happens, I'm going to create no more pain for myself. I'm going to just accept. Now, how do you do that? You know, you won't make that choice unless you've decided that I'm going to live more in the present moment and become more mindful because you have to access that power of the now knowing that at this very instant, other than some rare exceptions, you don't have those problems. Those problems don't exist in this exact instant. They only existed in the past and in the future. And so that's a pretty strong, strong thought. But it's also a thought that leads us to this common message we hear a lot in personal development, which is many of us are living out the stories that we tell ourselves, the stories we used to be this we are that it's always happened to us you know these things never go right i'm not good enough you know the past has shown me this and you know so people sort of get upset when we talk about problems are an illusion because it kind of threatens to take away their identity and it's it's an uncomfortable thought to take away your identity by talking about the fact that most of what you've spent your whole life convincing yourself as that you are is not even real. But you have to learn to stop doing that. And maybe it's difficult for you to let go of that. Maybe it's easier for you to think about the fact of just being more present, because when you're more present, you're not in that story that happened. You're not in that stress that's not happened. But that's what you have to do. So the final thought here is how to create more joy and how to become more aware. Am I doing stuff that's not psychological time? Am I doing stuff that's not detrimental to me? And Eckhart talks about if you're doing anything in particular and you trying to figure out how to become more aware ask yourself this question Is there joy ease and lightness in what I doing Because if there isn then time is covering up the present moment and life is being perceived as a burden or a struggle or difficulty. If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you're doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you're doing. It may be sufficient to just change how you're doing it. In other words, you might not like your job. You might not like your situation. You might not find joy and fulfillment in it. It might not be about what you're doing. It might be about how you're doing. See if you can give more attention to what you're doing. And this leads to that key idea that it's more about the process than the result. Don't be concerned with the results in your life. Be more concerned with the process. It's that analogy we've used of it's the roots that create the fruits. It's not all about the result. it's about the process. And when you learn to tap into the process, which is really becoming more grounded in the present moment, that's going to create the fulfillment, the sense of happiness, and things that you're probably looking for. So when this is your state of being, he says, how can you not succeed because you've already succeeded? So I think that some of you might be thinking, And George, look, I mean, this is all kind of like fluffy, you know, law of attraction type stuff. But I'm here to tell you that there are very specific, tangible strategies here that you've got to learn to adopt. And that is mindfulness and presence, being consciously aware of what your mind is doing to you, whether it's business, marketing, strategies, relationship or what. You've got to become more aware of where your thoughts are going. because without that, all the strategies in the world, all the investing, all the business, all the opportunities, they're just not going to get monetized. They're not going to be as fulfilling. They're not going to be as successful. That's why as I was creating a lot of success for myself, I wasn't as happy as I was as I became more aware of where my thoughts are and what I'm doing. So I hope those are some thoughts that have helped you. I hope this three days is something that you can really dig into and understand that you are not your mind. that you are the silent observer of your mind. You are the one in control. Learn to treat your mind as a tool and a tool to help you not to work against you. And make no mistake whether you're consciously working on it or not, your mind is working. So I would hope that you would spend a little time and effort. I'd encourage you to get that book. I will go back and forth between business strategy books and thought process and mind and neuroscience and everything. Do whatever you feel is going to help you to kind of break the cycle. And that's my thought for today. I hope it helps you. Hit me up. Let me know your thoughts. Let me know if this has been helpful for you. If it has, I'd encourage you to refer or share this podcast. And as always, our goal is to help you to unleash your true personal potential in life. And it's never too late to start living the life that you're meant to live. You just have to start making the decision to do it. And so we look forward to talking with you more tomorrow. My name is George Wright III, and this has been The Daily Mastermind. Have an amazing day. you

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About the host
George Wright III, host of The Daily Mastermind

George Wright III

George Wright III is an entrepreneur, investor, and the host of The Daily Mastermind. Over more than two decades he has founded and scaled several multimillion-dollar companies and built a renowned seminar business that put some of the world's biggest names and brands on stage. With 25+ years across marketing, sales, and executive leadership, he's made a career of turning bold ideas into results — and momentum into lasting growth.

Today his mission is singular: empower driven entrepreneurs everywhere to master their mindset, unlock their potential, and live their ultimate destiny. Through The Daily Mastermind, George shares the Prosperity Principles and strategies that help people create massive change — in their business and in their life.

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