LOA Today - Your Daily Dose Of Happy

“What do you do when nothing’s changing, even though you say you want your life to be different?”
That’s the unspoken question at the heart of this powerful conversation between Walt and Joel, where they explore what Joel calls the Law of Action - the missing piece so many people leave out of the Law of Attraction.
From the start, Joel makes his stance crystal clear: “I have never been successful using the law of attraction and not taking action. I’ve never been the guy who sat on the couch, and a guy with a million-dollar check showed up.”
For Joel, action isn’t optional. It’s the ignition key. Even the wrong action is better than no action, because movement allows life (or the universe, or God, depending on your belief system) to redirect you, like a GPS that only works once the car is moving.
Walt presses the point with a real-world example: a young woman recovering from a devastating car accident and depression. He highlights her choices:
She didn’t just stay where she was.
She changed therapists four or five times.
She kept taking action, even when it was hard.
To Walt, the lesson is obvious: “It was the action she took, the repeated action, the adjusting action that made all the difference in the world in terms of her healing.” Joel agrees. Action isn’t just physical; it’s also mental action - choosing to try again, to shift, to refine.
Joel weaves in ideas from Atomic Habits: when the staircase of change looks like 1,000 impossible steps, you don’t climb them all - you just take the next one. “Break it down to the next step, always be moving forward. Doesn’t mean there’s always forward progress, but it’s still action.”
He shares how he launched a complex intensive outpatient program in a matter of days by starting messy - inviting beta patients for free, accepting a “train wreck” day one, and then engineering improvements from the chaos.
Walt connects this to software development - ship, break, fix, repeat. Joel links it to Elon Musk’s rockets blowing up on purpose so engineers can learn exactly where the system fails. Failure, in this worldview, isn’t condemnation. It’s data.
A powerful theme emerges when Joel opens up about living with ADHD. His mind wakes up at full speed every day: “Imagine having a brain, where you wake up, and everything happens all at once in your brain.”
For him, structure is not a prison; it’s freedom. Routines, workouts, meditation, and a tightly organized schedule keep his powerful brain from turning on itself. When he tried a “free” unstructured day, even napping was impossible. The takeaway?
The “right” system is deeply personal. Walt found calm through mirror work, not structure. Joel found sanity through structure, not slowing down. Both discovered the same principle:
You must find the processes that work for your nervous system.
Then take action within those processes every day.
Walt and Joel both return, again and again, to vibration and hope. You don’t have to be high-vibe all the time. On your worst days, the win might simply be:
Getting out of bed.
Eating something.
Saying, “I have hope that there could be hope.”
As Joel puts it, even moving from “no hope” to “I have hope that there is hope” is progress.
The real question they leave you with is this: What is one tiny, imperfect action you can take today that starts your own GPS and lets life finally begin to redirect you?
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/law-of-action
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Sometimes life whispers. Sometimes it nudges. And sometimes, as Walt put it, it brings out the “two by four method.”
That’s exactly what happened to Carolyn, whose life changed in a split second during a devastating car accident in her senior year of college - a moment that nearly ended her life and ultimately transformed it.
“I was a senior in college. I was in a life‑threatening car accident, and I grabbed my seat belt seconds before the accident,” Carolyn shared. “I was lucky to be alive. It was a huge turning point for me, because I had struggled so many years with depression and anxiety, it finally was that little shift I needed to wake up and focus on what was important in life.”
Walt asked the question that so many people secretly wonder after a crisis: “People go through these ‘crash and burn’ moments and they come out the other side and then they say, ‘I never want to have to go through it again, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.’ Was it the best thing that ever happened to you?”
Carolyn didn’t dodge the weight of that question: “That’s such a loaded question, but honestly, in a way, yes. It just forced me to tackle my mental health issues and confront all the demons I’d been trying to ignore.”
From that moment forward, she stopped just existing and started living. Writing became her lifeline. What many people do privately in a journal, Carolyn did through a book - “Unbreakable” turning raw pain into words that could help others.
“Writing was the thing that poured out of me,” she explained. “It was the most healing thing for me. I got to write things down and just let them go.”
Gratitude and mindfulness also reshaped her inner world. After the accident, Carolyn began practicing gratitude almost daily, not as a trendy habit, but as a survival skill: “Looking at life with gratitude was something that I didn’t really do until after that accident, now I try to practice that almost daily and just really find little things to be grateful for.”
Simple practices - like her therapist’s “deep three” breathing tool - became powerful anchors: “You take three deep breaths, it regulates your nervous system. If you’re in a manic state or you’re about to panic, it helps reset. I’ve practiced it over and over, and it really helps calm me down.”
The conversation also explored the courage it takes to get help. Carolyn was honest about her years of depression, anxiety, self‑harm, and the struggle to find the right therapist. She even admitted to once going to therapy and pretending everything was fine: “Don’t go to the therapist and lie to them either, because that is only going to hurt you in the end.”
Her journey also includes living with a nonverbal learning disability and learning to see it not as a flaw, but as part of her superpower - the part that can write a song in 10 minutes and craft a book that reaches people exactly when they need it most.
One review captured the impact perfectly: a reader said the book “didn’t resonate” at first - until they went through their own trauma, came back to it, and found it helped them through an incredibly hard time.
That’s the ripple effect of being, as Carolyn titled her book, Unbreakable: “Even if you think some pieces are shattered or broken, they’re really not, because you can always pick up the pieces, and that’s what makes you unbreakable.”
Key Takeaway: You may not control the crash, but you can choose what you build from the wreckage. Therapy, gratitude, mindful breathing, honest connection, and sharing your story can turn a breaking point into a doorway to purpose.
LOA Today Episode Page: https://www.loatoday.net/carolyn-sophia-skowron
Carolyn Sophia Skowron's Website: https://www.carolynsophia.com/
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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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