Believing in Yourself and Achieve the Life You Want with Janet Langmeier

To live a fulfilling life requires bravery and a willingness to make choices and embrace the changes that may come with them, such as starting a new job, changing careers, moving to a new location, or making relationships. How can we have the confidence to make these decisions and believe that they are achievable? In this episode, we are joined by Janet Langmeier, the founder of Phoenix Soaring International. Janet shares her incredible story and the philosophy she lives by that everyone is worthy of the life they desire. With over four decades of experience, Janet has helped countless people overcome their limitations and achieve remarkable success. Join us as we learn from her wisdom and discover how we too can believe in ourselves and create the life we truly deserve. --- Listen to the podcast here: Believing in Yourself and Achieve the Life You Want with Janet Langmeier Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less, and one of the key themes of pretty much every episode of this podcast and how it all comes together, it’s all about the mindset. In order to achieve the life that you truly want, what you really desire, a truly joyous life, to quote my guest today, you need to believe it’s possible. You need to think it’s possible, you need to have the right self-talk, and you need to think about the right things. My guest today, Janet Langmeier, is the founder of Phoenix Soaring Intl and a facilitator of the Mastery Mindset Coaching Services. --- Welcome, Janet, to the program. Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here. Oh, yeah, thank you for coming on my podcast and for the workshop in which we met at a few weeks ago at the Mind Body and Spirit Expo. So, Janet, let’s start a little bit about your story because you’re all about what your self-talk is, what you’re thinking about, and what you really believe is possible and making it possible through your thoughts. Is there a background you come from that led you to investigate all these things and want to facilitate it for others? That’s a loaded question, Stephen. I know, I know. I was like --- Of course, the answer is yes but it’s not that simple. Oh, yeah, of course. If it was just yes, this wouldn’t be a podcast. Well, studying what we what might have been in my day considered esoteric things. I’ve always been interested in what drives us, what’s going on inside. The inside of life has always been very, very interesting to me from the time I was very young. And so reading things that a lot of other people didn’t read back when I was a kid opened my mind to think differently, I guess. I did a lot of the normal eight-to-five and what other people expect for a long period of my life, for enough decades that got that down, got that down really, really --- So you know what that’s about, fully know what the eight-to-five is about. Yeah, and I had a lot of success but I worked really hard and I made some choices that were not easy because I was raising children at the same time and I was working and I look at the younger people today and the choices that they make and I just applaud how so often they know how to make choices that support their life as opposed to I felt like I had to do that, I had to do this, there was no other choice for me. And yet that didn’t align with the things I studied and the things I believed in. And, one day, you know, we all have our one day, right? Yep. Well, the one day that I really, really knew that something had to change, I was driving to a job that I was very good at and I liked and everything, I was on the Boulder turnpike, as a matter of fact, and I had my daughter in my ear, I was listening to her talking to me, and I get to the exit to go to my job and I started having a panic attack. Oh my. And my daughter could hear it and she’s like, “Mom, pull off the road, pull off the road,” and I’m like, “I’m a block from the office, I’m gonna park,” and, I mean, I just the whole full blown --- Yeah. --- and I just couldn’t believe what was going on. And a friend of mine texted me and I said to my daughter my friend is texting me, she goes, “Mom, hang up for me, she’s a doctor. Call her back right now.” So I did and she could hear my voice so she goes, “What’s going on?” and I told her and she goes, “Janet, turn the car around.” And I’m like I’m single, I have to pay my own bills, I have to take care of myself, if I don’t go into my job, for my car, nobody’s going to take care of me, turning the car around is not an option so I argued for my limitations. I was doing a really good job of arguing for my limitations because most of us have been taught to argue for our limitation and she just said, “Just take a deep breath and turn the car around,” and I heard her and I picked up the phone and said, “You know, I’m gonna hang up from you because I’m going to text my boss and tell her I can’t come in.” So I texted and said, “I’m here but I can’t work. I need to go home,” and I turned the car around and it was the most empowering decision I ever made in my life. Every mile closer to home, I was feeling better, I was getting stronger. So I made an arrangement to work from home the next day. This was before work from home was a work from home thing. So this was before the pandemic or before… Oh, this was quite a long time before the pandemic and so I’m sitting in my kitchen the next morning, all I have to do is walk down six stairs from the kitchen to the office and 10 minutes to the time to go online and go to work. I started having another panic attack. And I went this is tied to what’s going on. I’m not happy. I’m doing a job that I’m good at. I’m respected, I’m making money but I’m not happy and I knew it. I knew that it wasn’t filling me. In fact, I was working all the time. And so the short version of the story is I never went back. So, what was the prelude? You have that one day and you said that you were in this type of job for a number of years, you were doing what was necessary, and this one day, you had the panic attack and then, all of a sudden, you couldn’t go back, but what about the year or two before that? Did you have signs in your head that you knew that you were unhappy, that something felt wrong? What did that feel like? Absolutely. That had been going on for a number of years. I had been in a job similar to the one I was doing for a different company and I just was like at the end of my road, I’ve been doing that for a number of years and it was just grueling. And so this other company offered me a lot more money to do the same thing. Yeah. And so I wasn’t all that happy but you got to make a living, I said yes to the additional money. And here’s the thing. It didn’t matter. I had so little life because I was working so much more.Share on X I was actually spending more money even though I was making more money. And I had less health. I managed to keep singing during that time, that was the only outlet that I found for myself, but other than that, I was literally getting up, going to work, coming home, going to sleep, getting up, going --- well, that wears you out and that had been going on for a good five, six years before the panic attack day. Panic attack day was my body’s saying no more. Yeah, that was when --- Because the body will eventually tell you, if you don’t listen to the little signs that come up --- Yeah. --- there were plenty of little signs that I ignored. Because what did I say? Even on the day that I’m having the attack, fear messages. Yeah. I can’t go back. I have to do this on my own. I don’t have any other choices. I was feeding myself all the things that were keeping me blocked from making a decision. Now, I’ve studied this stuff for years. I know what I’m talking about, but this was an opportunity to say how much do you believe in it? Do you know about it or do you know it? So you’re talking about the difference between I’ve read something and I intellectually know this to be a fact versus I’m actually going to live by it. Right. Absolutely true. And the truth of it is is that turning the car around that day was the beginning of that, but the very next day, it was like I can’t ignore this message. I know the truth. I know the truth. So that means trusting it. That means taking action on it. And, fortunately, my friend who is a physician wrote me a prescription that said you need time off, take a week. So she wrote me a prescription for a week off and I called my brother and I flew back to Wisconsin and spent a week with my siblings. My mother was still alive at that time, my father was gone. I went to his grave, had a conversation with him. Talked to my brothers and sisters, just had fun, but a really significant thing happened that trip back home. My sister who’s next to me, I’m the oldest of eight, we were going to meet at the park with one of our other sisters at this park by the river and so we were there waiting for her to come and she didn’t know my story because she didn’t know what had happened, I hadn’t told anybody, I just said I’m coming back, so I’m sitting at the park waiting, she comes in and she just runs up to us. She gives us a big hug. She jumps up on top of the picnic table and she starts spinning around going, “I’m free. I’m free. I’m free. I’m free,” and I said, “What happened?” she said, “I quit my job---” Oh, wow. So I jumped on the table next to her and I danced with her and I said, “I’m free, I’m free, I’m free, I’m free ’cuz I’m never going back,” and I didn’t know it until that moment. And we just looked and our other sister looked at us like you’ve both lost your mind and we had, we lost the mind that kept us trapped....