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Rachel Denning (00:00.654)
Hey my friends, welcome to another episode of the Extraordinary Family Life podcast. What I'm about to tell you has the power and potential to totally transform the quality and course of your life by tiny little degrees. Whoa, I'm so excited about this. I've been thinking about it for weeks. So I'm taking violin lessons and learning to play the violin. And I've been told with a...

little tongue -in -cheek that only the first 10 years are hard. So I'm looking forward to that challenge. I recently did some research. Okay, well here's how it happens. I kind of ignorantly felt myself getting frustrated that I have to tune the violin every time I want to play it. I'm like, what? This is lame. If I didn't have to tune it every time, can I just pick it up and play it? And the reality is, no, you can't.

like it needs to be tuned. And those of you who are musical are gonna laugh and smile at my ignorance, but it has to be tuned, right? It has to be tuned every time you play it or it'll be off pitch or off tune. So I was just like, this is fascinating. So I started doing a little research. The most expensive instrument in the world was a violin and it sold reportedly for $16 million. Oh baby, $16 million.

Now surely, and there's lots of violins that are in the millions, surely a violin that costs $16 million will tune itself, right? And the answer is not so. Not so. We have to tune, well, okay, here's a cool thing, right? You have to tune every time. And when I ask someone musically, I'm like, hey, how often do you have to tune the instrument?

And the answer was perfect every time you pick it up.

Rachel Denning (02:00.494)
How often do you have to tune a beautiful, expensive, wonderful instrument every time you pick it up? And the message was so powerful and so clear to me, and I want to convey this to you, how often do we need to tune ourselves? Well, every time we pick it up. Starting every morning when we get up. There's just something about going through life, right? And same with, we can go with this metaphor, I'm gonna go with it.

You're playing that instrument, same with a guitar. My son is learning the guitar and he's just progressing so much. And he'll play for a bit and then you got to tune it back up, right? And playing on the violin, you got to tune it back up. And every time you might do a performance, you got to tune it back up and make sure it's on pitch, on tune. And the same is true for us. And just going through life can knock us out of tune. Right? Just let that sink in. Just going through life can knock us out of tune. What's interesting is just going to bed.

knock us out of tune. Any of you wake up out of tune or you feel like, cow, I gotta reset again? Didn't I just do this yesterday? Right? But we eat every day. We don't say, oh, come on, how am I hungry again? How am I eating again? I ate last Thursday. Give me a break. There are just things that are the part of the maintenance to be alive. And this tuning I want to invite you to consider is one of those things.

that we need to make it a part of who we are and how we live, that we're constantly resetting our mindset and our mood. We're constantly resetting our mindset and our mood. We're getting ourselves in a condition to leverage our mind, leverage our emotions, to be in the

condition we want them to be in. Is this hitting home? Man, this stuff is beautiful. And so your mind is an instrument. It needs to be tuned every time you pick it up. And so like, and I'm being serious here, tuning your instrument, your mind throughout the day is critical, especially first thing in the morning, because you'll wake up out of tune, so to speak. I do too. When I get up early, I'm like, oh, I just want to go back to sleep.

Rachel Denning (04:24.846)
Or sometimes you just wake up feeling groggy or or if you ever woke up just right out of the gates, you feel discouraged. You ever felt that? So we need the tuning. Wake up just like you're picking up an instrument before you play anything, before you make some music, right? Before you make your music that day, get that thing in tune. And I would say we need to tune our bodies. We need to tune our minds. We need to tune our emotions, which will go with the mind. And we need to tune our spirits.

And I would, we can even carry this over. We need to tune up our relationships every day, the important close ones, do a little tuning every day. How are we doing? Tweak this, tweak that, express some love, express some gratitude, ask for forgiveness, communicate more effectively. Right? This tuning can have such an unbelievable power in our lives, but we have to be able to reset, right? And interestingly and powerfully, please jot this down.

It is when you and I do not feel like it that we must do it.

That's worth repeating. It is when we don't feel like it that we must do it. In fact, I would invite you to have that be your barometer, have that be your indicator. When you feel like crap, when you don't feel motivated, when you don't feel positive, when you don't feel optimistic, when you are just kind of grumpy or or dishonor or discourage or feel like you got a foggy brain or you just have a dark cloud over you, when you feel like being grumpy and unpleasant, that's when we...

must, we absolutely must. That's our indicator that it's no longer, yeah, I should do that or I could do that. It's a must. It's when you don't feel like it that you must. That's your indication. They're like, Hey, well, things are off because that's not your best self. That's not who you are at your absolute very best. You just gotten out of tune. And so we have to reset that mindset and the heart set.

Rachel Denning (06:30.478)
at a minimum every morning so that you're not reacting to everything from a low state.

that sink in. If we're not tuning up, then we do. We end up reacting to everything from a low state.

And what happens when you do things from a low state? What happens when you engage in work? What happens when you are trying to study? What happens when you are working on a project? When you engage with other people? This is a big one. What happens when you engage with your spouse or your friends or your kids in a low state? Well, we all know what happens. It does not go near as well as it could, right? Because we're out of tune.

So a morning tuning could be kind of like performing a life examination, a life review, and a life evaluation every single morning. We just tap in with ourselves and say, okay, where am I at? How am I doing? Let's go. And we tune up. And even if we wake up, I'm like, I feel great. We tune up. And sometimes when I pick up my violin, I go over it and guess what? It's in tune. It's amazing. It's like, oh man, it stayed in tune.

Sometimes I pick it up and it's off and sometimes a string has come loose and that baby's way off. And perhaps it's the same in true life. Some mornings wake up. I feel great. This is awesome. I still tune. I still check in. I still do things that keep me in tune. We do this valuation and my friends like jot this down, write it in your hearts and in your minds. It is really hard to get off course in life.

Rachel Denning (08:18.222)
if you examine your course every morning. It is really hard to get out of tune if you tune up every time you pick up the instrument. And that may be the case with every time you're going to interact with somebody. Right? If you're going into a meeting or you've gone off to work and you're coming home to reengage with your spouse. Before you do that, just pause for a minute and say, let's get in tune here so I can go in.

Like for me, I'm going to say, I want to be the best husband and the best father I can be. I'm going to tune up. And when I remember to do that, I engage with more energy, more positivity, more optimism, more patience, more love, and the kids feel it. But when I'm distracted, I'm kind of in my own mind. I'm thinking about something. There's like something's off and I'm trying to deal with this problem. I'm trying to solve something or something didn't work out and I'm in my head and that that's in my heart. And I just go in kind of.

and engage with other people almost unconsciously or maybe the way to say it is not deliberately. So it's not malicious. There's no intent to be off. But I go in without being deliberate and intentional, right? Without tuning up first. It's not near as impactful, influential, loving, wonderful as it could be. We miss out on a lot of happiness because we're so out of tune. Now,

Does that sound difficult or even tedious? Well, try letting your life get off course and see how that goes. Oh, man, right? Ouch, I've been there. I've done that. Let your life get out to and see how that goes. And then we'll come back and talk about tedious and difficult. Do you think that's a high price to pay or, oh, it seems a little monotonous. I tune it every time.

And again, that's why I think this metaphor fits so perfectly because every time I picked up my violin to practice, I'm like, seriously, I have to tune this thing again. And it's a nice violin we bought in these back little alleyways in Prague in the Czech Republic. We were going to this amazing restaurant for my wife's birthday and I walked past this little violin shop and it was, it was unbelievable. This guy, we just, he was the master and he was in there just restoring these old gorgeous violins.

Rachel Denning (10:42.734)
And so we bought a handmade violin from the 1800s. It was built in Germany and he had restored it. It was, it's unbelievable. It's beautiful. It has so much meaning, but yes, we have to tune it every time. And yes, you need to tune yourself every day and I need to tune myself every day multiple times. So let's.

Let's stop with the ideals for the outside world. A lot of us go, well, we want to create this idea for the world. Let's start creating an ideal for ourselves. And that starts with getting tuned.

And maybe, honestly, maybe you retune yourself every hour. It's interesting, there's a lot of research coming out saying that the brain and the body need a break every 45 to 60 minutes. And that can be as simple as just, if you're sitting down working on stuff, you just stop and you stand up and you move your arms, you swing your arms around, lift your legs, do march in place a little bit. You can do some exercises, some yoga, some stretching, go get a healthy snack, go get a glass of water.

You could just stop and just kind of relax and, and just, you could lay down on your back and do something. But the, the body and the brain need to be kind of reset every 45 to 60 minutes. And that's going to reset the emotions and the thoughts and those things. So what if we did that? What if we did a quick two minute tuning? We could do this and man, it would make you so well, instead of me saying that, let me ask, wouldn't it help you be more efficient and more effective?

If every hour you stopped for a two minute tuning, wouldn't you and I be more engaging, more positive, more effective, more influential? Yes, yes, and yes. Right. And we might say, well, no, I don't need tuning. And then bam, it explodes, right? It all comes out on some poor, innocent person that happened to walk past.

Rachel Denning (12:44.174)
Right at that moment when all your frustration and all your bitterness, all your anger, all your upset, all your irritation is just blah. You ever done that before? Right? We don't tune up, we don't check it, we don't check with ourselves. We haven't done the examination for a while and we're like, I'm good, I'm good, I'm good. And all of a sudden, kabam. And so we need to break those negative patterns.

and replace them with positive patterns of tuning up often, very often. Move your body, listen to an audio book, read from a great book, listen to a song that you love, do some dancing, do some stretching, do some fun exercise, just bounce in place. Have some mantras or incantations or declarations you say to yourself. Go look at your vision board. Have some pictures on your...

on your phone or on your computer in your journal. I've got in my journal. I got my gold journal. I have some pictures that fire you up and get you excited. Just look at, it's so eat and get a healthy snack. I mean, all these things is so easy to tune up. We really could do this, but we have to make it a pattern. We have to make it a habit. We have to break that old hat pattern and habit of, of being the old you that's off tune all the time and just kind of settled into it and got used to that nasty sound we make when we're out of tune and we tune back up.

We stay tuned up. Oh, life is so much better. We are so much better. So let's tune up a lot, at a minimum, every morning, every time we pick up that instrument. Let's tune it up. Love you guys. Reach upward.