Neil Dudley: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another quick episode of Straight from the Horse’s Mouth. And I want to dive right into it. This episode is all about release the frustration. I have a conversation with Dad to share with you in a minute. We’ll link a bunch of stuff in the show notes for you to go check out. But I had a devotional that a guy named Gary Bear had shared with me, and I just want to read it real quick. And then we’ll dive into the conversation I had with Dad. And I hope you all hear something that you can use it in your life or tell somebody else to go listen to it; it might help them.
When we feel frustrated, most of us have experienced frustration when it comes to personal issues. But what do we do when we feel thwarted, and the roadblock comes from God himself? Sometimes God uses frustration to get our attention. It can help us think about things we wouldn’t otherwise consider and perhaps redirect our path towards something new or different. So, when you’re harried by feelings of anxiety or restlessness, don’t rush to bury or escape them. Instead, consider them internal signs as if your conscious is saying it’s time to turn inward, listen and process your feelings. Rest assured, if these stirrings are from God, they will not go away. And when they recur, we need to give him our undivided attention. We will begin to see that he loves us enough to send something very specific, to set us on a new path with him. It’s an honor to have our sovereign creator invest in our personal life, so invested in fact that he may frustrate us in order to show us a better way. At the end of the day, it’s all because of his great love and his commitment to conform us to the image of his son.
So, in the spirit of releasing frustration, I thought that devotion really tied it all together. I hope you enjoy the next little excerpt here from me and Dad talking about a conversation we had. Thanks for listening.
Okay, we’re going to jump right into it. This is From the Horse’s Mouth, and it’s an illustration of the reality of my life and why I think the Cowboy Perspective has been imparted in me by Dad. And I’m just going to tell this story and that’s what this kind of short form conversation is for, and we started calling it From the Horse’s Mouth. Let’s do this. So, the other day, I’m listening to Dropping Bombs with Brad Lea. He’s a- if you’re listening to the podcast very often, you know I mention his podcast a lot. I have a lot of fun listening to it. I think his guests are awesome. Well, his guest that day was a guy named Jesse Itzler, and Jesse was talking about how it’s important for us all to think about and realize what our relationship with money and time is. So, this is on my brain while I’m pulling up to the feed store, and I had to get some cubes or something I needed to take probably to Hamilton for Cody because it just happens to be in this crazy time, right after the big winter storm, everybody’s running low on feed. Well, I look and Dad’s over in the tractor. He’s got the fuse panel box open and he’s looking, and after just hearing this podcast with Jesse and Brad Lea, I’m thinking I’m going over there and just for no other- Oh, the other thing they had talked about is building your network, contacting three to five people a day for no reason other than being a part of their life. And I’m real lucky; I live real close to Mom and Dad, and I don’t take the opportunity to tell them I love them and appreciate them as much as I wish I would. When I start getting realistic or understanding my relationship with time, it became more important to me to go over there and say I love you on that day. So, he’s in the tractor, and I walk up and I’m like, “Hey Dad, I just, man, I don’t say it enough. I want to say I love you and hope you have a good day.” And he kind of laughed and, “Yeah, good. Yeah, I love you too. Yeah, what’s up?” You know, “Nothing. I’m not, no reason.” Well, and then, here’s kind of the story that ensued after that, which I think is even- it is just kind of a valuable insight into how Dad teaches me about things and he has always done it that way. So, we end up talking a little bit, and then I’m like, “Well, why do you got the fuse box off?” Now, Dad, you can tell them why you had the fuse box off and what you were thinking at five o’clock in the morning when you woke up.
Harry Dudley: Okay. Yeah, our conversation that morning, it’s one of those that just evolves, which we do quite often when we get together, just some conversation about what’s going on in our life, and it’ll evolve into a story. And the story of that morning was I was frustrated. About five o’clock in the morning, I woke up, and I’d been wanting to get my tractor fixed because the warning flashers weren’t working, the lights weren’t working, and I needed that tractor to where I could get out on the highway and transfer some hay bales around. And so, I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to get into the tractor dealership and get my lights fixed. And at five in the morning, I’m thinking I’ve got all these things on my list, or at least in my mental list, that I want to get done today. And this is one of those things that I need to get this fixed so I can do some of that stuff. And so, I was frustrated. I was upset that I wasn’t getting an appointment, or I thought I had an appointment, but I just wasn’t ever able to get my tractor into the dealership. And so, at five in the morning, I’m sitting there in the bed or laying in the bed and getting mad. I’m getting mad at the dealership. I’m getting mad at the service department. I’m mad that I haven’t taken care of this already. I should’ve had it fixed by now and I haven’t. And so, I’m just getting mad. And I stopped for a second and realized this is doing me no good. It’s not going to get the tractor fixed any quicker. All it’s doing is ruining my day at the first of the day. I’m starting the day upset. And that’s not making- that’s not going to help anything at this point.
Neil Dudley: Yeah. And the value in that story for me is I’m appreciative and impressed and want to emulate that ability I see in Dad. See, like a lot of times I’ll start spiraling and getting mad, and I don’t have the wherewithal to take that step back. You just- take the step, find a way, train yourself. I don’t know how you built that skill, but maybe you were just born with it day one. But how do you kind of unplug from that frustration, anger, pressure, all those things that are on you in life, especially in this time. This was another piece of that conversation we had was everybody is highly, just really on edge with COVID, the economy, pressures of all things in life happening right now. So, everybody’s got a little bit of that angst just constantly on them. I think for my audience, anybody, just in case you don’t listen to Dropping Bombs with Brad Lea or follow Jesse Itzler, here’s a chance to hear some of what they think plus Dad and how valuable it was to me on that day. It improved my life. It improved my perspective. It made me understand how valuable it is to just say, look, there’s no reason to stay mad, angry, anything. That’s not helping. It’s not doing any good. It’s not going to make anything that you need done or want done go faster. It’s just causing you to have an unhappy life. So that was so valuable what Dad had told me, and I wanted to share it with you guys on this kind of new part of the Cowboy Perspective we’re doing that’s kind of a shorter form. We’re not going to talk about a whole bunch of things. Just sitting here now, I’m like, oh, I want to explore that idea, that idea. But for this purpose, all we want to do is say think about that. If you’re feeling mad, angry, stressed, or want to go ring somebody’s neck, can you take a deep breath and say, none of those feelings are helping me accomplish what I really want to do? So, I bumped into Dad, he’s in the tractor- Oh, by the way, did you ever get it fixed? What was it? Have you figured it out?
Harry Dudley: It was the light switch on the steering column.
Neil Dudley: There you go. So, he just kind of went in with a whole different attitude and probably got it fixed. How long did it take you to get it fixed?
Harry Dudley: Well, I ended up taking it to the dealership because I wanted to get a service done on the tractor anyway. But in the meantime, I was not getting into the dealership to get the service done, and I needed those lights fixed. So, I just said, well, I’ll fix that myself. I’ll do a little troubleshooting and find out the problem. Well, and as you told me, you said, check every fuse, and maybe you’ll find it. Well, it wasn’t in the fuses that were indicated on the fuse box. So, I went to thinking, okay, it’s not a fuse. If it’s not a fuse, where can it be? Well, it’s got to be in that switch because the switch is, just common sense is telling me-
Neil Dudley: That’s the next point of failure.
Harry Dudley: Yeah, because I can put on the directional lights, and they work. That’s on the opposite side of the steering column. So, it’s not that. It’s got to be over here in this switch. And so, once I got over my mad, now I’m able to think clearer. I’m able to realize, hey, there’s probably, there might be a solution to this I can solve. Rather than being mad at other people and at businesses, this might be something I can solve if I just calm down a little bit and start using my own mind to solve this problem. And of course-
Neil Dudley: And you weren’t mad that you had to anymore. You just released all that and just said, okay, I know I can fix this. Let me just do it. Right?
Harry Dudley: Well, there’s daily examples of that. We just had one, we just completed one a minute ago, where we get on the internet trying to purchase a product, and we’re in a hurry, we’re not taking it methodically like, which I need to do in order to do it correct.
Neil Dudley: And I’m real fast. Like I just sit down and hit buy. I mean, that’s how, that’s the difference.
Harry Dudley: And then we spend an hour backing out of it.
Neil Dudley: That’s right. Totally. I spend a lot of, when I do things like that, backing out of it, which is one reason I’m pretty good at it. I pretty much could figure it out. Oh, the other thing we talked about is always check the ground wire. For all you cowboys, farmers, anybody out there that works with equipment or electrical components, we had a – what do you call it? A siren on our feed truck. And it would just off and on work, and we’re like, man, that’s got to be a bad connection somewhere. Maybe it’s a fuse. Well, no, the fuse didn’t burn out. Turns out, one day that just kind of stopped everything. You can find yourself always in a hurry because there’s just always, there’s this long list of things you need to get done. Generally, I have the most success if I can just release all that and say look, I’m just going to figure this out. If it takes all day, that’s cool. Whatever. Everything else is going to be there for me tomorrow. It’s not the end of the world. It’s like your relationship with time has to change. You have to realize this life is, if it’s over in the next five minutes, was this all that big a deal, right? So, it helps you prioritize, which is the whole reason I walked over to that tractor that morning and said I love you. And then I got a lesson out of it. But the other lesson was check the ground wire. We’ve been worrying about this siren for a while, trying to figure out why it wouldn’t work. I’m like, Dad, how’d you get that fixed? Oh, the ground wire was loose. I knew that. I always should think check the ground wire first, but I spent an hour checking every other connection before I decided to do that.
Harry Dudley: Very typical. And you have to go through life and experience a lot of things to realize that our mind seems to gravitate to the complicated side of it. We try to think, oh, this is going to be very difficult. It’s going to be complicated. It’s going to be a hard issue. And if we just slow down, if we let our mind slow down a little bit and just think through it and say I’ve done this a hundred times, and out of that hundred times I’ve found that the ground wire was loose. So why don’t I go check the ground wire first? No, I want to go to the battery, I want to look under the hood, and I want to do all the other things, because I’m just so sure it’s going to be a hard fix. And the reality was it wasn’t a hard fix. It was just I didn’t stop, slow down, relax, and let my mind think about what might be the problem. So, I would say it’s all a matter, for me anyway, to tamp down my anxiety, tamp down my anger, and slow my mind to the point that I think more clearly. As you say, it’s taken me years to do it, but I have kind of developed the ability to when I see I’m getting way over-revved on something that’s probably not that important, I try to set a break and back it up and say, now, wait a minute, I have been down this road before and it’s not going to get fixed any quicker with me throwing a fit or- I told somebody that one day on a problem I had. I said, “Is throwing a fit going to get this fixed any quicker?” And the guy said, “No.” And I said “Okay then, there’s no need to be throwing a fit.”
Neil Dudley: Yeah, but you want to so bad – this is not going the way I want it! I want it now! And it just, it won’t help. I don’t know exactly what all of that is for, but if you’re listening and it helps you in any way, that’s why we’re doing it. I think it’s just a thing to think about. Dad is so valuable to me that way. He’s my number one mentor in that way that he knows how to get things across to me in a way that I kind of, at least at this point in my life, I really am able to put it into my thoughts and it makes so much sense to me. So, I just wanted to share, that’s how he taught me something that day. Maybe it’ll teach you something. And if you figure out, oh, I think I agree with Neil and Jesse and Brad Lea that yeah, my relationship with time is important, it might mean that you go say I love you to somebody that you don’t have the next day, and you had no plans for that. Like one of the things they said, and Jesse said it like this, who all thinks they’re going to die? I do. I’m pretty sure I’m going to. Have you got your cemetery plot picked out or have you made all the plans? No. Well, that’s right because you don’t, nobody thinks it’s going to happen today. But the reality is God has that plan, and it is what it is. So, I’m really excited to have a little bit of a different relationship with time now. So yeah, I’m still working with urgency in my business, in all things that I do, and parenting. I guarantee, I bet dad would be honest here. He probably watches me and thinks, wow, Neil, why don’t you slow down a little bit and just enjoy this beautiful life you have. And I think I need to. I don’t know if I’m capable of that yet or have not came to the point where I’m like, yes, I know how to do that and I’m going to. But in that hurried pace that I live, I’m going to definitely think more often about, at the end of the day, this all goes away. And have I told the people I care about – kind of goes to that cup of love theory a little bit. If you didn’t listen to that episode that Dad I did together, you should go check it out. And here I go rambling. We’ll make this thing another hour-long conversation. Anyways, hope you learned something. And thanks so much for listening to From the Horse’s Mouth, brought to you by the Cowboy Perspective.
Now, for your listening pleasure, a little Traversing the Trail from Mr. Byron Hill.
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