LOA Today - Your Daily Dose Of Happy

What if the smallest moment - a single question, a single choice could begin to rewrite your entire life story?
In this powerful conversation on LOA Today, Walt, JodieLynn, and guest Doug explore addiction, forgiveness, recovery, and the quiet power of asking, “What if?”
Their stories remind us that transformation doesn’t always arrive as a lightning bolt. Sometimes, it begins with waking up in the center seat of an airplane, with no idea how you got there.
Doug describes his past with disarming honesty: drugs, alcohol, theft, and the collapse of his father’s business. He remembers the moment he realized how far he had fallen, flying back home after stealing the last of the money: “I had to fly back and face him. And it was at that point that I realized my life's probably not going in the way it should be going.”
But what happened next wasn’t punishment. It was a doorway. Doug’s father lost his business and much of his financial security, yet chose forgiveness over resentment. Doug recalls: “You know that man never resented me for it, he became probably one of my biggest fans.”
One of the most emotional threads in this conversation is the question: Who shows up when you’re in the hole? Walt shares the story of a man who falls into a hole, and the friend who jumps in with him: “Yeah, but I've been down here before, and I know the way out.”
Doug experienced his own version of that when he walked into a 12-step meeting and saw two fishermen, customers from his old store, standing on either side of him: “One of them looks at the other and then looks at me, goes, we've been waiting on you.”
The conversation repeatedly returns to one key idea: everything can happen for the better, even when it looks unbearable in the moment. Doug quotes his mentor, Fred: “Everything that's happened in my life happened for the best. I just didn't know it always at the time.”
JodieLynn echoes this from her own life, including surviving childhood trauma and financial collapse in her twenties: “I remember being shook when I saw that phrase and actually tested it against my life and the crappy things that happened, always something better.”
So where does “What if?” come in?
Doug’s book Start With What If grew out of a simple yet profound intervention early in his recovery. Overwhelmed by the damage he’d caused, someone gently reframed his world: “What if today, you just went a day without a drink or a drug?”
From there, Doug turned what if from a phrase of regret - “What if I hadn’t ruined everything?” into a tool of possibility: “What if I changed how I think about this moment?”
He teaches a simple three-step What If Rule: Pause. Question. Go.
Interrupt the autopilot, ask a better what if, then take one small action. JodieLynn beautifully ties the episode together by asking us to bring this down to the present moment: “What if we just focused on this moment today? What would change? How would our lives be better?”
The real magic of this conversation isn’t in a massive, dramatic change. It’s in the invitation to ask yourself, starting right now: What if today was enough to begin again?
What if one question could be the first step out of your own hole?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/doug-fleener
Doug Fleener's Website: https://www.dougfleener.com/
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What do you do when the pain feels like it will never end?
That quiet, hidden question was underneath everything in this heart-opening conversation about healing, grief, and the power of energy.
Walt began by sharing the rawness of losing his cat Joy just three and a half weeks earlier and then discovering that Joy’s sister, Harmony, is facing the same kidney condition.
The emotional whiplash of back‑to‑back losses brought him face-to-face with a powerful truth: “It’s rough. It’s really, really rough. It’s almost like life is piling it on top of you.”
From there, Walt and life coach and LOA teacher Joel opened up a deeply human exploration of what healing really is and what it isn’t.
Joel made an honest admission that many people are afraid to say out loud: “The loss of my son, TJ. I don’t think I’ve healed from that. I don’t think I will ever.”
Instead, Joel describes living in what he calls “remission from the grief,” where the grief is not gone, but it no longer dominates every moment. Healing, in this sense, is not erasing the pain, but learning to live around it, to integrate it, and to let it shape us without completely breaking us.
Walt reframed healing as the decrease in the intensity and frequency of breakdown moments over time. He recalled how, after putting Joy down, he collapsed into tears dozens of times a day, then watched those episodes slowly lessen. The pain didn’t vanish, but it became less constant, less overwhelming, more survivable.
The conversation turned from emotional healing to physical and energetic healing, especially around Harmony’s surprising improvement.
Harmony had stopped eating. The prognosis was that once she declined, improvement was unlikely. Yet after receiving Reiki, focused love, and attention, she began eating again, sometimes even without the appetite medication.
Walt asked a powerful question that many quietly wonder: “Isn’t this an example of how, through the power of our thoughts or the power of our emotion, our love, that we can actually help somebody else?”
Joel responded by sharing research and stories about energy healing and distant intention, where people improved even when they didn’t know anyone was praying for or focusing on them. He pointed out that while modern medicine has limits, the body’s capacity to heal, under the right emotional and energetic conditions, goes “way beyond the comprehension of modern medicine.”
Walt and Joel also questioned the rigid structures of modern medicine and institutional thinking. They discussed:
Doctors constrained by corporate employers
Medical standards that keep moving the goalposts
The pressure to follow party lines in medicine, religion, and addiction treatment
The courage (and risk) of quietly practicing a more expansive view of healing
The deeper takeaway: healing is personal, individual, and often far more possible than we’re told. It may involve medicine, but it must also involve mindset, environment, belief, support, and energy.
Joel’s closing thought captured the heart of the conversation: “We are far more capable of healing than anybody even realizes. I don’t think we scratch the surface of that part of healing.”
In the end, this wasn’t just a conversation about death, illness, and systems. It was about choosing to believe in our own capacity to heal, emotionally, physically, and spiritually - even when life gives us every reason to give up.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/healing
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What if the person you’ve trusted for years turns out to be a complete illusion?
That’s the emotional earthquake Justin describes in his conversation with Walt and Jodie Lynn - a collapse so profound it didn’t just end a relationship; it rewired his life’s purpose.
Justin shares how his partner of eight years suddenly “ruptured the marriage” in a way that, as he puts it, “was not consistent with the values that she had set throughout the relationship for eight years”. While he was reeling, she quietly transferred tens of thousands of dollars to herself and her mother. Looking back, he calls it a “horrific Gone Girl type experience, similar to being, you know, paralyzed on an operating table and the surgeon’s carving away at you, having fun”.
The obvious question Walt raises is: how does something like this happen to intelligent, caring people? And why don’t we see the red flags?
Justin admits, “Apparently I’m really bad at finding red flags, or I used to be”. That painful admission became the seed of his dating safety app, Cray. Instead of letting the trauma destroy him, he asked a different question: How can I make sure this doesn’t happen to someone else?
Drawing on his background in app development, he helped launch the first concussion app in 2011. Justin spent 18 months turning his landmines into guardrails for others. Every trick he encountered online - catfishing, blackmail attempts, and financial manipulation became another safety feature. As he puts it, “Over 18 months, as I stepped on these landmines, I built in safety protocols in the app to try and help people to avoid them too”.
A central theme of the conversation is love bombing - a tactic many people feel but don’t have language for. When Walt asks, “What exactly is love bombing?”, Justin explains it as the overwhelming, movie-level affection that feels like a dream but is engineered to hook you: “You feel like you have your best cheerleader sitting next to you while they’re strangling you to death, and you not knowing”.
Jodie Lynn adds her own lived experience of missing glaring warning signs - being told she wasn’t “allowed” to see her own brother, ignoring violent outbursts, shrinking from a confident woman into “a little mouse” who just did her work in the corner. Later, she realized, “I am the common denominator in all of this, and I need to take responsibility for the way that I’m living”. That decision led her to hire a relationship coach long before getting into her next relationship.
Both Justin and Jodie Lynn return to one crucial takeaway: healing starts with self-love and boundaries. Justin says, “If you love yourself, then boundaries are a natural, secondary consequence”. Walt reinforces that the way we talk to ourselves - through journaling, affirmations, and mirror work can be the turning point that stops the cycle of abusive partners and manipulative dynamics.
Justin’s app, Cray Dating Safety, is his way of standing guard beside people who are young, newly divorced, or healing from trauma - those least likely to recognize danger early. “If it could happen to me, I had to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else,” he says.
In a dating world full of masks, illusions, and expertly staged performances, this conversation leaves us with a hard but hopeful truth: the red flags are there.
The real work and the real freedom are learning to see them, trust ourselves, and walk away.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/justin-smith
Justin Smith's Website: http://cray.app/
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When Walt opened the show by sharing that his beloved cat Joy had just passed from kidney failure, “This is also my daily dose of happy. I really need it today,” the conversation instantly shifted from a typical Law of Attraction chat to a raw exploration of grief, love, and what it truly means to be “ready.”
Walt described the brutal week leading up to Joy’s passing: “I literally spent every day with him, I think I gave him about 30 hours of lap time over a three day period.”
He poured Reiki, time, and love into Joy, watching how the energy eased his suffering: “Every time that I did give him the attention, he calmed right down every single time.” Still, when it came to the ultimate decision to end Joy’s suffering, Walt was “absolutely locked up.”
The episode’s core theme came from a TikTok-inspired title: “Ready Is Not a Feeling.” Joel explained that waiting to feel ready is how we get stuck: “Ready is a decision. It’s not a feeling. If you keep waiting for the perceived perfect conditions, they never come.”
Joel shared stories of people waiting for the “right time” to have children, and then being surprised with triplets. He talked about job loss, sudden tragedy, and how life’s plot twists never arrive on our schedule. His point: you almost never feel ready, but you’re still called to act.
Walt pushed the idea further by asking whether “ready” even belongs in the equation at all: “Is it possible that ready actually doesn’t play a significant role in any role?”
Joel agreed it’s largely a story we tell ourselves. Life doesn’t wait for our readiness; it demands a response. That led Walt to reframe “responsible” as “able to respond,” not a burden handed down by society, but a sacred opportunity to choose our perspective and our next step.
Yet both acknowledged that in the deepest pain, like when Joel’s son TJ died or when Walt was watching Joy struggle to drink water, choice doesn’t feel available in the moment.
Joel admitted there was “no rational thought” in the early days of his loss; he survived by going to the gym over and over, just to make it to bedtime. Later, though, he chose what to do with that pain. He decided to work harder, study more, adopt another child, and live, in his words, for two people.
Walt mirrored this with his own experience, noticing how our minds can eventually reshape trauma. He described how he once feared emotions would last forever, only to discover that intense feelings often pass in minutes if we allow ourselves to feel them fully.
One of the most touching moments came when Walt revealed that, just before Joy was put to sleep, he whispered a secret password in Joy’s ear so that, when Walt eventually crosses over, Joy can greet him and confirm their eternal connection.
In the end, this conversation wasn’t just about grief. It was about agency in the face of what we cannot control. We may never be ready for loss, for endings, or for sudden change. But as Joel put it, “Your power exists in your response.” And as Walt discovered, sometimes the bravest decision is the one that ends a loved one’s suffering, even when every part of you wants to hold on.
You may never feel ready. You may never feel okay. But you are always, quietly, profoundly, able to respond.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/ready-is-not-a-feeling
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Insecurities are usually a part of ourselves that we want to hide. But in this powerful, vulnerable conversation, Joel and Walt turn that idea on its head and show how insecurity can become a doorway to growth, authenticity, and even freedom.
Early in the conversation, Walt asks a deceptively simple question: “How is it that we have a number of different institutions where there’s a crumbling effect going on, and one of the essential pieces is insecurity?”
That question launches a deep exploration of how insecurity shows up in childhood, in social groups, in religion, in politics, in money, in aging, and even in our most personal love relationships.
Joel shares how he used to be paralyzed by insecurity - missing opportunities because he was afraid of embarrassment or not feeling “worthy.” A turning point came when a mentor suggested a bold strategy: whenever someone asked for a volunteer, be the first one to raise your hand. Joel explains that he often “screwed it up,” but that was the point. By choosing to step forward, he refused to let insecurity make his decisions for him.
He gives a painful but illuminating childhood memory: as a boy, he loved to sing loudly in the church choir. Then one day, the choir director told him in front of everyone, “Joel, just move your lips.”
That single shaming moment created a lifelong story: “I can’t sing.” It’s a vivid example of how quickly a confident child can become an insecure adult.
Walt pushes on the definition of insecurity by bringing up his cat’s decline and his fear of losing him. He wonders aloud if that fear is insecurity or just love. Joel gently reframes it, saying it’s not insecurity but pre-grief - the natural pain of loving someone deeply and facing the reality of loss.
Another powerful thread is Joel’s distinction that insecurity is often comparison-based:
“I don’t have as much money as they do.”
“I’m not as attractive.”
“I’m not as smart.”
He describes working with wildly successful people - famous actors, NFL players, top nuclear scientists - who, despite their achievements, quietly confess things like: “I don’t think I’m as smart as everybody thinks I am.”
Walt then highlights the moment of choice we rarely recognize. He recalls his first public talk, standing at the podium, feeling like an imposter but also knowing he truly understood his subject. He realizes he could have chosen to crumble into insecurity or to lean into what he did know and speak anyway. He chose the latter, and it went well. Only in hindsight did he see that it had always been a choice.
Joel sums up the heart of the conversation with one word: perspective. Your perspective determines whether insecurity imprisons you or propels you forward. He notes that his own story can be told in two ways:
“I’m the biggest failure in the world,” or
“I have one of the greatest comeback stories of all time.”
The facts are the same. The perspective and, therefore the life experience is completely different.
In the end, Joel offers an invitation: embrace your insecurities as part of your story, not as a verdict on your worth. When you change the way you see them, you change what they mean and what you’re capable of next.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/insecurities
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