Episode 21 - When Life Pushes You Off Track, Double Back To Find Centre

Ever feel like life keeps throwing pebbles at your window, and you’re too busy to look up? We dig into why trying to run the universe leaves us stressed and isolated, and how a small but radical mindset shift—faith that we’re created with purpose—turns daily setbacks into guidance instead of grief.

We start with the high cost of control: the always-busy, never-present grind that treats every interruption as an enemy. From a missing button to a frightening diagnosis, tribulations arrive in all sizes. Rather than powering through, we explore how to read these moments as messages. A pilot’s navigation lesson brings it home: drift is normal, course checks are essential, and sometimes you double your correction to intercept the original path before returning to centre.

That same logic lives in Maimonides’ approach to character. If you’re off on stinginess, anger, or impatience, don’t aim for a tiny correction—swing to the opposite for a season. Give more than feels comfortable. Practise calm longer than feels natural. Wait attentively when you want to rush. Like a pendulum, exaggerated practice helps you settle into a healthy middle, far from both extremes. We share concrete steps, from defining opposite behaviours to using everyday irritations as training cues, so you can build balance with intention.

The takeaway is simple and strong: success is the centre. Faith anchors the frame, tribulations provide feedback, and disciplined overcorrection brings you back to who you’re meant to be. If this conversation moved you, hit follow, share it with someone who needs a reframe, and leave a quick review so others can find it. What trait are you swinging to rebalance this week?

Transcript

The Illusion Of Control And Its Cost

Reframing Tribulations As Loving Signals

Pilot’s Lesson On Course Correction

Maimonides And The Pendulum Method

Practical Traits To Rebalance

Finding The Middle And Closing

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hello and welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for joining us on today's episode of the Trust Factor Podcast. Glad you could be here. A little bit of housekeeping. You know that we're still giving away the books. We're still giving away Amuna by Rev. David Saperman. When we're done with that, which should be pretty soon, we've already given away six, if I'm not mistaken. So we've only got four more copies to give away. The last four winners were notified this week, and books have been shipped out. There are a few left, and then we're going to shift over to giving away copies of the Garden of Amuna, the book that we are reading from in season two. Yesterday we talked about the fact that somebody who walks around thinking that they own the world, thinking that they are the boss not only of themselves, but of creation, they have difficulties, they have tribulations. These are the people who are stressed out most of the time. These are people who it's oftentimes difficult to connect with on an emotional, on a real level. You barely get any of their time. They're not emotionally available because they're too preoccupied trying to conquer the world. So many people are like this. They've sold themselves on the concept that if they don't do it, it simply won't happen. If they don't conjure it up somehow, if they don't risk everything, including their morality in their pursuit of the things that they're trying to gain, then it will not happen. This concept of prayer, this concept of a creator is an alien idea for them. That's who we talked about yesterday. And he says that a person with a Muna, a person who has faith in his creator knows that he is a creation. As soon as somebody understands I've been created and that there's a purpose, this alone makes his life easier and more pleasant. He does his best to perform his mission on earth. He tries to understand what the creator wants from him. He doesn't need extreme tribulations to force him to seek his ways and his purpose in life. The creator's subtle messages are enough to arouse him. That's how it works, my friends. Every time you have a tribulation, every time you deal with anything that sets you back, and I mean absolutely anything, from something so insignificant as losing a button on your shirt in the morning when you're getting dressed that forces you to go look for a new shirt, to putting your hands in your pocket to pull out a quarter and you pull out a nickel, and you gotta go back into your pocket a second time, all the way to getting information from a doctor about, God forbid, a difficult health situation or difficult health scare. All of those are tribulations. Your car breaks down, you need to go to the mechanic. You have now an expense that you weren't planning on. Your child brings you bad news from school. There are a million different things that can happen. You have a blowout with your boss at work. It doesn't end, my friends. Those are all tribulations. Now we can look at them one of two ways. We can look at them like the first person who thinks he owns the world, who's going to look at the situation and get irate. He's going to be terribly upset about these situations because they are not part of his plan. He doesn't want these tribulations. He doesn't want to deal with these difficulties. He just wants to go out and create more and build more and bring more home. He doesn't want any problems. If problems come his way, he gets immediately upset about them and tries to do away with them in the shortest, quickest way possible so that he can get back to what he was doing. Or we can look at it a second way. And the second way is to look at it with love that it comes from your creator, that you were created, and that you have a purpose, and that one of his jobs is to constantly remind you of how you're doing, so that you don't get to where you're going after 120 years empty handed. And you get there and you now understand only when you get there that you were lacking, that you didn't do what you were supposed to do, and you weren't notified of it, you weren't made aware of your wrong decisions, so you weren't given an opportunity to course correct. Tribulations are an opportunity for you to do that, to course correct. Oftentimes we get off track. That's normal. It's perfectly normal in everything that you do, but you have to check in once in a while to see how you are doing. And if you're not checking in, it's because of one of two different things. Either you think you run the world, or you're not getting the messages that he's sending out a long time ago in a different lifetime. I got my pilot's license 25 years ago. When you're flying a plane, especially 25 years ago, it's by map. You have a map in your lap, paper, good old-fashioned paper that tells you where you're going that you're supposed to check in with. And what happens is we get into this situation where we get off course because of many different things. Drift, wind, you're just not paying attention. Many different things can take you off course. But every once in a while you're trained to look at the map and know where you're at and compare it to where you need to be. Am I still on track to reaching my destination? And if you're not, there are at least two ways, at least 25 years ago, there were two ways to course correct. There were formulations. And you did it while you were flying your plane. You didn't pull over because there's no way to stop. You took out your ruler, you took out your pencil, you took out your flight computer, and in a matter of seconds, you figure out where you are, where you need to be, and what you need to do to course correct. Interestingly enough, as I tell you about this, it comes into my mind that one of the methods, I don't remember the name associated with it, but you figure out the amount that you've drifted and the angle that you've drifted to. And in order to get back to where you were, you have to course correct by double. In other words, if you cur if you were off track by three degrees, you need to come back six degrees in order to pick up where you left off and then correct back to three degrees. Do you know where else you see that? You see that in Rambam, Maimonides, where he talks about different character traits. And he talks about how to be successful in your character trait, how to have the right approach to life. And he says that if you want to be a successful person, an Ishmatzlia, which literally means a successful individual, then you have to check in and do an accounting of where you are. And if you find that if you are off track, that if your one of your emotions or character traits is too far to the extreme, either left or right, how do you course correct? How do you correct that character trait? According to Rambam Maimonides, who lived over 800 years ago and who was a giant in Torah and Halacha and Jewish law? He says that a person who finds himself with a character trait that is flawed, let's say that individual is stingy, they're cheap, they find it very difficult to put their hands in their pocket and give away some of their hard-earned money. Very common, unfortunately, especially when times are difficult. How does that person build their ability to be more generous once they've identified that they're not giving enough? Well, what he says is that individual needs to course correct by going to the opposite extreme. It's not enough to go back the three degrees that you were off course to figure out where you should be. So let's say you're supposed to give away 10% every year, and this individual has done his math and realized that he's not even giving away 1%. It's not enough for him to go back to giving 10%. He needs to go to 20%, because that's the opposite extreme. He needs to go to giving away double for a period of time until his character naturally finds the right place, which is 10%. It's like a pendulum. When the pendulum is at the opposite end of the spectrum and you let it go, that ball swings to the other end. That's what you need to do. You need to swing to the other end of the extreme. What happens with that pendulum after an amount of time? It naturally finds balance. It naturally comes back to center. It's the same thing. So if you find yourself with any character trait that is flawed, meaning that it is extreme, anger, you fly off the handle way too quickly. Or, like we said, stinginess. It's difficult for you to give away money. Or patience, you don't have any patience to sit and listen to anything. One minute of audio in a podcast is way too much. When you're flipping through your screens, which hopefully you're stomping to do eventually, but as you're flipping through, you recognize that it takes milliseconds for you to move on to the next to lose interest. You have to work on yourself. And how do you do it? Well, the book just explained it over here. And Maimonides, the Rambum, also explains it very clearly. You need to force yourself to operate in the opposite extreme for a period of time in a place that is so uncomfortable for you, so unnatural for you. And as you stay there and as you force yourself to operate there, eventually you will find yourself coming back to a healthy balance. And that's what we should all be striving for. Because at the end of the day, Maimonides says that if you want to be an Ishmazriach, if you want to be a successful person, and I don't know anybody who doesn't want to be a successful person, he says you need to be right in the middle. And in fact, the words that he uses are you need to be as far away from the right and as far away from the left as humanly possible. Where does that put you, my friends? Smack center. Strive for that every day, and you too will be a successful person. Have an amazing day. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts, drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.