Sample Chapter from “Better: A Guidebook to a New and Improved You” by Jamie Turner

What follows is a sample from Jamie Turner’s newest book titled Better: A Guidebook to a New and Improved You.

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The doctors had given my wife, Dayna, between 24 and 48 hours to live.

As I sat at the foot of her hospital bed, I could hear the beeping of the heart monitor attached to her body. The smell of antiseptic permeated the room. And in the corner, there was a small window with frosted glass so that light could get in, but nobody could see out.

In a way, the frosted glass was a reminder that the last thing Dayna would see would be the inside of a hospital room. She wouldn’t see a blue sky, white clouds, or a golden sunset again.

We were having a long, emotional talk about our 23-year marriage together. Despite some difficult times, primarily in the first few years, our marriage was very good. We had both been faithful to each other. She had given birth to our child and acted as a stepmother to my two oldest children. And my career as an author, university lecturer, and professional speaker laid a solid financial foundation that helped us live well and travel regularly.

Our marriage had been amazing. Or so I thought. Then she laid the bombshell on me.

“I’m grateful that you worked hard and provided for our family,” she said. “But …”

The minute she said the word “but…” my heart sank. I knew that any time someone says something like “you worked hard and provided for our family” and follows it with the word “but…” then everything in the original statement is negated.

So, I took a deep breath, braced myself, and leaned in.

In a voice weakened from a 5-year battle with cancer, she said, “You were never present in our marriage. You did a lot of things that were good, like putting food on the table, helping raise our daughter, and connecting with my family. But ..”

There was that word again.

“You weren’t there. You were always climbing the next mountain … dreaming about what’s next … planning your next big venture.”

Dayna kept talking, but I didn’t hear her – I was having that out-of-body experience that happens when your world gets turned upside down.

For 23 years, I thought I had done an honorable job pushing through the tough times and being supportive, engaged, and present during what I thought were mostly good times.

And now, I find out – as my wife lay dying – that she felt I wasn’t fully there.

I felt my face get flush and my fingers go numb as I was trying to process what she was saying.

It’s as if 23 years were just flushed down the toilet. And there was nothing I could do about it because her physical body was going to be gone … forever … in a matter of hours.

Months later, as I sat crying during a counseling session with Ewell (the best counselor who ever lived, in my opinion), I told him how devastated I was by what she said. I directed Ewell’s attention to a yellow sticky I had on my office wall. “Look,” I told him. “For the past few years, I even had a yellow sticky on my wall that said, ‘Dayna wants my presence.’”

Ewell, who has a gift for cutting through bullshit, said, “A note to yourself about being present is not the same thing as actually being present. You need to understand the difference between an idea and acting on an idea.”

He was right. I had an intellectual understanding of the importance of being present, but I didn’t act upon that idea. And the result was that my late wife left the planet, saying something about our marriage that I should have seen coming but didn’t.

Reframing a Setback in Order to Move Forward

You might be asking why Dayna shared something so heartbreaking during our last moments together. I didn’t recall Dayna saying, “You weren’t present in our marriage,” until those final hours in the hospital bed. I was floored by what she told me.

(In her defense, while I don’t recall her ever saying that exact phrase, I’m sure she must have expressed the sentiment regularly during our marriage. But I was too busy or too ambitious or too distracted to fully hear what she was saying.)

In the months following Dayna’s passing, I kept asking myself why she would have said something so devastating as she was departing the planet. How could she shoot an arrow through my heart, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to fix what she was frustrated by?

I felt terrible. About myself. About my actions. And even about my lovely wife, who said those things when we were both at our most vulnerable.

I realized I had two choices – I could let my previous actions drag me down. Or I could use them to propel myself forward. In other words, I could wallow in what had happened previously, or I could learn from my mistakes and use it to build a better version of myself.

Then I realized something — in a way, Dayna hadn’t taken a parting shot at me.

Instead, she gave me a gift.

The gift was to effectively say, “This is how I felt during our marriage. You’re going to live a long time and have another opportunity at love. Don’t f*ck it up. Be present next time.”

It was the most difficult gift I ever received, but it’s one I’ll appreciate for the rest of my time on the planet.

How all of this Relates to You

The painful lesson I learned that day permeates the pages of this book. Essentially, it’s that we all have a choice on how we look at things. You can see the negative and let it hold you back. Or you can see the positive and let it propel you forward.

We all have things in our lives that are less than optimal. You might have grown up poor. You might have had trauma in your childhood. Or you might have a disability of some kind. And, while all those things are difficult and come with their own set of challenges, they can also be seen as gifts that can be used to help propel you forward.

As you move through the book, you’ll notice that it is divided into four sections: Mindset, Mentoring, Management, and Marketing. Each section will focus on key ideas:

Mindset: How to change the way you think about the world around you so that you improve the outcomes in your life
Mentoring: How to engage more effectively with people in your life
Management: How to manage your mental and physical well-being
Marketing: How to develop a personal brand that reflects your better self to the outside world

To keep track of where we’re going in our journey, you’ll occasionally see an image of a compass with the Four Ms inside of it. Think of the compass as a guide to tell you where you are and where you’re going. You can use it to keep track of the progress you’ll be making.

The compass will act as a reminder of where you are in the book.

In the first section, Mindset, we’ll discuss ways you can break free from the chains of limiting beliefs. We’ll talk about how changing your thoughts can help you change your actions, which can help you change the outcomes in your life. And we’ll discuss how to rewire the neural networks in your brain so that you can see challenging events in your life as gifts to help you as you move forward.

In the second section, Mentoring, we’ll talk about how you can approach relationships with a focus on growth and reciprocity. How to use science-based communication techniques to build stronger connections. And how to turn conflicts into opportunities for understanding.

In the third section, Management, we’ll discuss ways to prioritize your mental and physical health. I’ll share techniques with you that can help you reduce stress. And we’ll talk about techniques you can use to find calm in a busy world.

In the fourth section, Marketing, we’ll focus on how you project yourself to the world around you. We’ll visit the idea of who you are as an authentic human being. And we’ll talk about how to cultivate meaningful relationships.

Science vs. Hypotheses

There’s one other thing you’ll notice about the book. Almost everything discussed here is based on science. For example, we’ll talk about the fact that the human body generates electromagnetic fields. One of the ways these fields are created is through our thoughts.

Here’s how it works — our thoughts create emotions. Emotions produce neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin. And those neurotransmitters create electrical activity in our neurons, which produce electromagnetic fields in the brain, the eyes, and the heart.

Thoughts turn into emotions. Emotions produce neurotransmitters, which have an electromagnetic charge to them.

That’s the science. Where it gets a tiny bit speculative is when I suggest that humans can sense the electromagnetic fields of another person. We’re still doing research to prove that, but here’s why I believe it’ll ultimately prove to be true — we’ve all noticed that some people “light up” a room when they enter it. You’ve felt it, I’ve felt it, and most other people have felt it, too. Conversely, we’ve all noticed when the opposite happens and someone “darkens” a room when they enter it.

Much of this might happen from visual stimuli – a person who lights up a room enters with a smile and body language of joy and confidence. But there are some as-of-yet unconfirmed hypotheses that humans do, in fact, pick up on the electromagnetic fields that other people emit.

In fact, Caltech did a study that confirmed that humans subconsciously process geomagnetic stimuli. And here’s what they say about how wild animals sense electromagnetic fields:

“Many species, from bacteria to algae to animals, can sense this field and use geomagnetic stimuli to navigate and survive. Some birds migrate over thousands of miles using the field to keep track of where they are and where they are going. Other birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish home to specific locations through geomagnetic cues. A magnetic sense allows burrowing mole rats to navigate underground mazes in total darkness.”

(Source: https://maglab.caltech.edu/human-magnetic-reception-laboratory/)

So … research supports the idea that wild animals can sense the Earth’s electromagnetic field. That said, the earth’s electromagnetic field is much stronger than what emanates from a human being, so the idea that we can sense another person’s energy (in the form of electromagnetism) remains a hypothesis.

Back to my point — when I do write about speculative information, I’ll be sure to let you know so that you’re aware when we’re moving into the world of hypotheses.

Conclusion

Okay, we’ve covered a lot of ground here. We’ve talked about how to reframe a setback, which we’ll talk about again later. And we’ve discussed the four sections of the book: Mindset, Mentoring, Management, and Marketing. And finally, we discussed some of the science behind what we’ll be talking about as we move forward together.

Now that we’ve covered those topics, it’s time to move on to some of the other techniques you can use from the book. Ready to dive in? Great, let’s go.