LOA Today - Your Daily Dose Of Happy

What if the quality of your life is not random, not unfair, and not “just the way it is” but a precise reflection of the standards you quietly live by every single day?
In this powerful conversation, Walt and Joel unpack how much our lives are shaped not by what we say we want, but by what we’re actually willing to accept, repeat, and tolerate - in love, in work, in health, and in how we treat ourselves.
Walt asks a question most of us live but never say out loud: “Which organ is the standard coming from? Is it coming from my heart, or is it coming from my brain?”
He shares that when he finally decided, “I can always trust my heart” and let his heart make the final decision. Using his brain only as a tool, not the boss - life got “a whole lot easier.” Choices became kinder, calmer, and more aligned with joy.
Joel explains why this shift is so hard. The brain is constantly scanning for danger using old failures as evidence: “The brain is scanning the horizon for problems, using historical events, where the heart is simply saying, ‘Okay, well, let’s give that a shot, see what happens.’”
So when your brain and heart disagree, your standards decide who wins.
One of the most uncomfortable takeaways from this conversation is that people often defend beliefs and patterns that are quietly destroying them.
Walt admits he used to cling to things that hurt him: “I didn’t feel good about myself. If we don’t have ourselves to hang on to, we have to find something else, ‘I’m going to be right about this thing, even if I’m wrong.’”
Joel sees this every day in his coaching work: people whose lives don’t match what they say they want, because their actions match their wounds, not their standards. He puts it simply: “You’re living a life that you’re willing to accept.”
So how do you change standards that live deep in your nervous system? Not with a single insight but with repetition.
Joel talks about his decades-long routines: writing five things every morning, walking, and going to the gym every day, even through COVID. When he woke up from an anxious dream with his heart racing, he didn’t analyze it to death. He went straight to his routine, and his system regulated itself.
Walt ties this to neuroplasticity and standards: “Those neural pathways are going to pay off when I have a day like the one where I need to just wake up from the bad dream and get past it quickly.”
The message: your routines are not just habits; they are physical proof of your standards.
If someone watched your life for a week - your choices, your reactions, your routines, and then answered this question: “What are this person’s real standards?”
Would you like their answer?
Because whether you’re following your heart or your fears, your life already reflects it.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/your-life-reflects-your-standards
Follow the LOA Today podcast:  https://www.loatoday.net/follow
#loatoday
#lawofattraction
#manifesting
#vibration
#podcast
#deliberatecreators
#Q&A
#waltthiessen
#joelelston
#LawOfAttraction #PersonalStandards #SelfWorth #FollowYourHeart #MindsetShift #EmotionalHealing #SelfLove #Neuroplasticity #DailyHabits #EnergyWork #ConsciousLiving #Alignment #FlowState #SpiritualGrowth #InnerWork

What if the worst thing that ever happened to you became the doorway to the life you actually want?
That’s the emotional heartbeat of this powerful conversation between Walt, Anne-Marie, and guest Dwight, who shared how a full-blown health crisis and career burnout forced him to reclaim his life, purpose, and freedom.
For years, Dwight was the classic high-performing IT consultant: a global internet security specialist, running a computer consulting firm, a retail store, and a service division. He wore exhaustion like a badge of honor. “I used to go days on end without sleep, it’d be nothing for us to be up three days,” Dwight recalled.
Then his body pulled the emergency brake.
At a casual birthday gathering, a friend accused him of “winking” too much. Confused, Dwight went to the bathroom and realized the right side of his face was paralyzed. It was a severe facial-nerve event tied directly to stress and exhaustion. “I went into the bathroom, and the right side of my face was paralyzed. In three months, I couldn’t work”.
Doctors and a long-time friend delivered a brutal truth: if he didn’t change, he might not be around much longer. That friend also challenged him: “You make a good six-figure income, but you’re broke all the time. You need to do something different”.
That painful wake-up call led Dwight out of IT and into financial education and coaching - but done his way: relationship-first, heart-first, and purpose-driven.
Walt connected deeply with that arc. He shared his own crash in 2008 - business destroyed, years of debt, and profound burnout as an IT guy who was good at the work but never really loved it. That burnout eventually pushed him to create his podcast and, later, discover a genuine passion for AI: “For the first time in my life, I actually like IT. AI is like, " Oh my God, this is so much fun” .
Both men asked the same pivotal question in different words:
Do I really want to keep living this way?
If not, what am I willing to do about it?
Dwight framed it simply: " Are you 'the willing”? “Are you willing to embrace the uncomfortable? If you’re not willing, then be honest with yourself and be honest with me. I’m going to go help somebody, that’s the willing”.
A major takeaway was the shift from brain-only living to heart-centered living. Walt described the turning point: “My heart never misleads me. My brain is really, really good at misleading me. My heart never gets it wrong”.
Dwight reinforced that with a simple physical practice, hands over heart - as a reminder that the heart is the true compass: “This is more of a north on a compass than this is. This fools itself. This reacts in real time”.
Anne-Marie pulled it all together with one core theme: be kind to yourself, build awareness, and refuse to have a bad day by always finding the silver lining - even if it’s as simple as, “I opened my eyes today.”
So ask yourself:
Where am I still on the hamster wheel?
Am I willing to be “the willing”?
Am I listening to my brain’s fear or my heart’s quiet truth?
Because as this conversation proved, burnout and crisis aren’t the end of the story. They can be the beginning of finally living life on purpose, not by accident.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/dwight-heck
Dwight Heck's Website: http://www.giveaheck.com/
Follow the LOA Today podcast:  https://www.loatoday.net/follow
#manifesting
#vibration
#podcast
#Q&A
#waltthiessen
#annemarieyoung
#YourDailyDoseOfHappy
#BurnoutRecovery #LiveOnPurpose #HeartCenteredLiving #MentalHealth #SelfAwareness #PersonalGrowth #LifeAfterBurnout #EmotionalIntelligence #ChooseYourFocus #LOAToday #ReclaimYourLife #InnerWork #MindsetShift

When Walt sat down with life coach and LOA teacher Joel for an episode of Your Daily Dose of Happy, a simple phrase from one of Joel’s TikToks became the doorway to a powerful, uncomfortable truth: “Excuses are expensive.”
At first glance, it sounds like a clever slogan. But as Walt admitted, the moment he read it, he realized how true it was - we pay a real price for excuses, while getting nothing of value in return.
Joel explained that for him, excuses are usually a procrastination tool and often a symptom of something deeper: a victim mindset. He doesn’t want excuses from people who work with him. As he put it, he’s fine with someone saying, “I got 4 of the 5 things done; I’ll do the last one tomorrow.” What he doesn’t want is the story:  “My dog did this, this happened, and that’s why I couldn’t do it.”
Walt pushed the idea further, asking why people cling so hard to excuses. His take: we’re often pre‑emptively defending ourselves from anticipated blame. We’re bracing for the blame game, so we start playing it first. Joel agreed, connecting this to the broader culture of blame, where responsibility is dodged instead of owned.
One of the most powerful moments came when Joel described appearing before a judge back in 1995 for crimes related to his gambling addiction. The public defender told him, “Everybody pleads not guilty.” Joel refused. When the judge asked for his plea, he simply said, “I’m guilty, Your Honor.”
Joel didn’t use his addiction as a shield: “That’s not an excuse. I knew exactly what I was doing. I stole the money, and I’m ready to pay the price.”
Instead of five years in prison, the judge gave him 30 days and probation, openly admiring his courage. That moment became a cornerstone of Joel’s philosophy: radical responsibility moves life forward; excuses freeze it.
Walt contrasted excuses vs. explanations. Both are rooted in real events, but they’re used differently. An excuse carries emotional charge and self‑protection. An explanation simply states what happened without trying to dodge responsibility. As Walt noted, when Joel described his gambling at sentencing, he was offering context, not justification - fact without victimhood.
The conversation then turned to relationships and the destructive need to “be right.” Walt shared how he realized that, when he insisted on being right with someone he loved, what he was really doing was trying to prove they were wrong and unconsciously choosing “being right” over the relationship itself.
Joel now regularly asks people, “Is being right worth more than the person you care about?”
A recurring theme throughout the conversation: energy. Excuses, blame, and the quest to be right are emotionally expensive. They drain energy that could be invested in healing, action, connection, and joy. As Joel put it, the faster he simply accepts what is and asks, “What’s my next step?” the easier life becomes.
In the end, Walt and Joel brought it back to happiness and responsibility: when you drop the excuses, you don’t just lose your defenses - you gain your power back.
Key Takeaway Questions to Ask Yourself:
Where am I making excuses instead of taking action?
Am I offering an excuse, or a simple explanation without blame?
Is being right more important to me than this person I care about?
What is my next actionable step, right now?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/excuses-are-expensive
Follow the LOA Today podcast:  https://www.loatoday.net/follow
#loatoday
#lawofattraction
#manifesting
#vibration
#podcast
#deliberatecreators
#Q&A
#waltthiessen
#joelelston
#ExcusesAreExpensive #RadicalResponsibility #LawOfAttraction #PersonalGrowth #EmotionalMaturity #VictimMindset #NoMoreBlame #SelfAwareness #MindsetShift #DailyDoseOfHappy

What if the part of you that hurts the most is also the part of you that knows the way home?
In this powerful conversation on LOA Today, Christine shares how growing up with a brilliant physician father and an alcoholic mother launched a lifelong quest to answer one haunting inner question: “I need a doctor. I need somebody to help me. I need some help. I need somebody to fix me.”
As a child, she had access to medical excellence, but not to the emotional safety she desperately needed. The family looked solid on the outside -success, status, financial comfort but, as Christine put it, “We had an interesting shell of a life, there was a lot missing on the inside.”
There were no emotional conversations, only trauma, distance, and a deep, unspoken loneliness. That gap pushed her into a lifelong search: How do we heal?
Christine devoured psychology books as a teen, explored countless modalities - psychology, plant medicine, reflexology, bodywork and eventually earned a master’s in Counseling Psychology. But the real turning point came when she faced the grief she had buried for decades: “It took me into my 40s before I could really acknowledge it and feel the grief and feel the child that was extremely afraid and felt abandoned.”
During her graduate program, in the “strange safety net” of learning to help others, she finally turned toward her own wounded inner child. This is where the conversation dives into one of the deepest themes of the episode: the wounded healer.
Christine realized that if she tried to heal others instead of healing herself, she would always be unconsciously using clients to fix her own pain. So she made a new commitment:
Heal herself while helping others.
Clear her own patterns so she could be “a clear channel” for her clients.
Stop “secretly, subversively, unconsciously” trying to heal herself through them.
Host Walt connected this to his own experiences as a Reiki practitioner and former partner of a psychotherapist. He echoed a vital truth his ex-wife learned from a supervisor: “It’s not your job to heal them. It’s your job to provide the information. It’s their job to heal themselves.”
Christine’s work as a clinical hypnotherapist rests on that same foundation of empowerment. She dismantles the myth that hypnosis is about losing control: Hypnotherapy, she explains, is actually about giving people more control over their minds, not less.
She collaborates with clients to craft language that fits their truth and their goals, then delivers those suggestions to the subconscious in a relaxed, focused state. It’s not magic. It’s a partnership.
Throughout the episode, Walt keeps returning to one core insight: “You can always trust your heart, but the last thing we’re willing to trust is our own heart.”
Christine admits she didn’t even know how to feel her heart for a long time. Her parents never mirrored her, never reflected back, “Oh my gosh, I just love you so much.” So she had to learn later in life how to recognize and interpret those heart signals.
The big takeaway?
Healing isn’t something a guru, doctor, or therapist does to you.
Healing is what happens when you reclaim your heart, your story, and your sovereignty.
Helpers - whether they’re hypnotherapists, Reiki practitioners, or friends don’t fix you. They help you clear the blockages so your own “spark of the divine” can do what it’s always wanted to do: heal.
You can’t think your way to that kind of healing. But you can feel your way there. One brave step, one released pattern, one kinder thought toward yourself at a time.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/christine-brodmerkel
Christine Brodmerkel's Website: https://christinebrodmerkelhypnotherapy.com/
Follow the LOA Today podcast:  https://www.loatoday.net/follow
#lawofattraction
#manifesting
#vibration
#podcast
#Q&A
#waltthiessen
#annemarieyoung
#HealingJourney #WoundedHealer #InnerChildHealing #TraumaRecovery #EmotionalHealing #Hypnotherapy #Reiki #SelfCompassion #TrustYourHeart

“What do you do when nothing’s changing, even though you say you want your life to be different?”
That’s the unspoken question at the heart of this powerful conversation between Walt and Joel, where they explore what Joel calls the Law of Action - the missing piece so many people leave out of the Law of Attraction.
From the start, Joel makes his stance crystal clear: “I have never been successful using the law of attraction and not taking action. I’ve never been the guy who sat on the couch, and a guy with a million-dollar check showed up.”
For Joel, action isn’t optional. It’s the ignition key. Even the wrong action is better than no action, because movement allows life (or the universe, or God, depending on your belief system) to redirect you, like a GPS that only works once the car is moving.
Walt presses the point with a real-world example: a young woman recovering from a devastating car accident and depression. He highlights her choices:
She didn’t just stay where she was.
She changed therapists four or five times.
She kept taking action, even when it was hard.
To Walt, the lesson is obvious: “It was the action she took, the repeated action, the adjusting action that made all the difference in the world in terms of her healing.” Joel agrees. Action isn’t just physical; it’s also mental action - choosing to try again, to shift, to refine.
Joel weaves in ideas from Atomic Habits: when the staircase of change looks like 1,000 impossible steps, you don’t climb them all - you just take the next one. “Break it down to the next step, always be moving forward. Doesn’t mean there’s always forward progress, but it’s still action.”
He shares how he launched a complex intensive outpatient program in a matter of days by starting messy - inviting beta patients for free, accepting a “train wreck” day one, and then engineering improvements from the chaos.
Walt connects this to software development - ship, break, fix, repeat. Joel links it to Elon Musk’s rockets blowing up on purpose so engineers can learn exactly where the system fails. Failure, in this worldview, isn’t condemnation. It’s data.
A powerful theme emerges when Joel opens up about living with ADHD. His mind wakes up at full speed every day: “Imagine having a brain, where you wake up, and everything happens all at once in your brain.”
For him, structure is not a prison; it’s freedom. Routines, workouts, meditation, and a tightly organized schedule keep his powerful brain from turning on itself. When he tried a “free” unstructured day, even napping was impossible. The takeaway?
The “right” system is deeply personal. Walt found calm through mirror work, not structure. Joel found sanity through structure, not slowing down. Both discovered the same principle:
You must find the processes that work for your nervous system.
Then take action within those processes every day.
Walt and Joel both return, again and again, to vibration and hope. You don’t have to be high-vibe all the time. On your worst days, the win might simply be:
Getting out of bed.
Eating something.
Saying, “I have hope that there could be hope.”
As Joel puts it, even moving from “no hope” to “I have hope that there is hope” is progress.
The real question they leave you with is this: What is one tiny, imperfect action you can take today that starts your own GPS and lets life finally begin to redirect you?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/law-of-action
Follow the LOA Today podcast:  https://www.loatoday.net/follow
#loatoday
#lawofattraction
#manifesting
#vibration
#podcast
#deliberatecreators
#Q&A
#waltthiessen
#joelelston
#LawOfAction #LawOfAttraction #MindsetMatters #TakeAction #ADHD #StructureAndFreedom #PersonalGrowth #SelfDevelopment #EmotionalHealing #RecoveryJourney #AtomicHabits #HopeAndHealing #HighVibration #Resilience #WaltThiessen #JoelElston