Bob Olson from Afterlife TV has a new book that can help you discover what life is trying to teach you in your everyday experiences. Bob Olson believes that the Universe is trying to guide us and teach us life lessons through the experiences we have. This new Afterlife TV episode (Sept 2024) will guide you on how to identify these hidden messages from your guides and angels.
Bob Olson’s new book is “Insight From Hindsight: Stories that reveal what life is trying to teach you.” Available in paperback, Kindle and audiobook. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0965601978/?tag=altvcom-20
Bob Olson is a writer who aims to inspire readers to improve themselves, follow their passions, and make the world a better place to live. A former private eye, Bob used his investigation skills to explore the world with a new perspective, gleaming insight and wisdom about purpose, joy, and the afterlife.
If you’d like to watch this video, What Life Is Trying to Teach You! Are You Listening?, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=3869
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson's other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob's Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
JOIN BOB'S NEWSLETTER: Join Bob Olson's "Afterlife Academy" newsletter (free): AfterlifeAcademy.com -- Follow Bob as he investigates the afterlife.
Hey everybody, Bob Olson here with Afterlife TV. You can find us at afterlifetv.com. This is where we talk about life after death, answer the meaningful questions you have around that subject. Today we’re gonna be talking about something that has more to do with life.
I discovered many years ago that by looking at some of my experiences that happened to me, usually some of the more significant experiences, when I started telling my friends about stories that, of events that had occurred, I realized that there were messages hidden within my own experiences. And when I say messages, I mean, it’s as if life was trying to guide me in a certain way. It was giving me messages of guidance and growth.
And direction. And I really first noticed it because, this is back in the 1990s, I had written an article about something that happened. And I had submitted it to our local newspaper in the city.
And when I was writing the article, it was different than when I was telling the story to my friends. All of a sudden, as I was writing it out, this insight about the experience came forward for me. And it was a life lesson that I still haven’t forgotten to this day.
It was interesting because then the newspaper published it. And I got amazing feedback on the article. And a lot of people loved the insight that came from it.
The life lesson that was being taught in that story. And I kind of got hooked on it. But I, at first thought, well, I was just lucky.
Like this is never gonna happen again. And then the next time I wrote a story, the same thing happened. And then the next time, and then the next time.
Well, I’ve been writing stories for 30 years. And I have realized that by thinking about the experiences in our lives and looking back at them after they’ve occurred, it gives us this bird’s eye view of, with a new perspective on that experience so that we’re able to identify maybe the positive aspects of that experience that existed, even if it was a seemingly negative experience, even if it was something that was sort of painful to go through. We were able to look back and think, you know, that was tough, but I learned things from that.
And I’m sure you can think of examples in your own life where this has happened. Well, I kept writing these stories and eventually I started sharing them with my audience in different ways, you know, via email, sometimes here on Afterlife TV. At the end of an episode, I would read one of my stories.
You might remember that. And I shared them in other ways as well. Well, if you saw my video two videos ago, I think it was, that I talked about something that I was calling The Incredible Awakening.
It was when I had a TIA last December. A TIA is called a transient ischemic attack. And basically most doctors would describe it as a mild stroke.
I didn’t have a major stroke. So don’t get me wrong. I was back home 24, you know, whatever, 30 hours later.
But I had, you know, an emergency, you know, visit in an ambulance, going to the hospital. A lot of weird things were happening to my body that freaked me out a little bit. But if you remember, if you saw that video, and if not, I recommend, you know, watching it.
You, what you learn from that story is that while that was a seemingly negative event because it was, you know, disheartening that my body wasn’t working the way it normally does. I came away from that experience with a lot of positive life lessons, positive experiences from amazing people like the EMTs and a nurse that I had, and just people in general. I mean, certainly the friends and family members who had reached out to my wife, Melissa and I during that time.
But I also learned lessons about the fact that I don’t necessarily have as much time as I think I’m going to have. And this is true for all of us, right? I mean, I think the real takeaway from that experience was, okay, you’re 60 now, and you might think you have another 20 or 30 years to live, but you’re not sure if you do. You have an experience like that where all of a sudden your body’s not working.
My whole right side of my body basically stopped working. And it was difficult for me to think clearly. And when that happens, you’re in the, you know, I was in the ambulance thinking, is this it? You know, is my time up? And even if I don’t die in this experience, am I not going to be able to do the things that I am used to doing? Am I not going to be able to travel with my wife, Melissa, anymore? Am I not going to be able to play with my dogs? Am I not going to be able to write any more books or articles? Am I not going to be able to do any more YouTube videos? One of the things that I thought about was that I had been writing, oh, dozens of these stories that had amazing life lessons to them.
And it was in the ambulance that I actually thought, I want to put all those stories together into a book. And I’m here to announce, in one way, I’m here to announce my new book that just came out a few days ago, Insight from Hindsight. And the subtitle is, you know, stories that reveal what life is trying to teach you.
Basically, what’s the stories that you’ll read in here? There’s 23 of them. The stories that you’ll read in this book will serve as examples for you, so that once you’ve read a bunch of them, you’ll be able to look back at your own life and the experiences that you’ve had to be able to recognize how to extract the messages and guidance from those experiences. In the very end, I give you six simple steps for doing that.
And it’s not hard. And you don’t have to be a writer. You could do it in a journal.
You could do it verbally, just talking it out with your friends or your dog or cat, whoever will listen. It’s really about looking at your experiences in hindsight, so that you can gain the insight, right? And that’s why I called this book Insight from Hindsight, because that was what was happening. Now, for me, there’s two wonderful things about reading these stories.
And one is, if you enjoy a good story, there’s 23 of them here. Some are humorous, some are mysterious, some are captivating, some are heartwarming. Quite a few of them will make you feel better about the world and humanity.
But I think even more importantly than that, once you’ve read a bunch of these, you’ll recognize what I’m talking about when I say life is trying to teach us something through our personal experiences. I’ll give you another example. There’s a story in here where my wife Melissa and I were out walking our dog.
And in the course of walking our dog, we were taking a little extra time with her because we were about to go away on vacation and she wasn’t coming with us. So we were, you know, her name was Libby and we wanted a little extra Libby time. And so she wanted to go off the road and into this path and it was in a wildlife sanctuary and it was great.
So, you know, just go up that path. And I won’t tell the whole story, but the long story short of it is that Libby got caught in a trap. And the ordeal that took place from that point on, which was really about Melissa trying to keep Libby calm and me trying to get the trap open, which I had no experience with these traps that were made to trap animals.
I didn’t know how to open it. And all through the ordeal, which maybe was 20 minutes long, I was thinking about things like, oh, you know, this poor dog, the teeth are, you know, have got to be, you know, doing all kinds of damage to her paw. I’m gonna be carrying her up the stairs for the next few months.
You know, we’re not gonna be able to go for walks anymore. Oh, we’re certainly not gonna be able to go on this vacation that we were leaving to go on the very next day. And I was envisioning, you know, this ride to the emergency room, which this was a Friday evening.
So the vets were all closed. I had now, I had to bring her to the emergency vet, which was 45 minutes away. And I was experiencing in my mind what was happening during that whole rush to the emergency room and what it was gonna be like and how we were going to keep Libby calm and what the healing experience was gonna be like for her and us over the next few months.
At the end, what ended up happening was Libby ended up being fine. And it turned out that this trap didn’t even have teeth. It was just this, you know, horrible contraption that clamped onto her paw and wouldn’t let go, but it didn’t pierce the skin.
And Libby ultimately ended up being okay. In fact, we had called the police to see if they could figure out how to get the trap open and get her released from it. And when they finally arrived, I had already figured it out.
And Libby started flirting and playing around with the police officer. The lesson that I learned from this in thinking about it and then writing about it later was how ridiculous and unnecessary it was for me to go through all the suffering that I did in my mind even though it was only imaginary. And one of the things that we know and has been proven in multiple different ways scientifically is that the brain doesn’t know the difference between what’s really happening to us and what we’re imagining.
So, you know, my body experienced trauma that was completely unnecessary because none of it happened. We didn’t go to the emergency room. The teeth did not go through her paw.
I was not carrying her up the stairs for three months. We were still able to go on vacation the next day. And yet I had gone through this trauma that I can still feel in my body today when I think back to that experience.
And I end the story with talking about the importance of living in the present moment. And this is the life lesson that I learned from this simple 20-minute experience was that if I had just stayed in the present moment and said, okay, this is the situation. This is where she’s at.
I don’t know anything more. I don’t know what it’s gonna be like 10 minutes from now, half an hour from now, two weeks from now. I just have to figure this situation out now and not let my imagination run wild, then I would have suffered a lot less.
And I’m sure Melissa was doing the same thing as I was. And so we recognize that what so many people are talking about already, but we learned it through experience, which is staying in the present moment is extremely valuable and healthy. And I end by thinking it’s so simple that even a dog can do it because that’s exactly what happened with Libby as soon as she was out of the trap.
I mean, at first she was afraid to move her paw and we were afraid to let her, but once she started moving around, she realized she was fine. And then she starts playing around with the police officer. And we continued our walk.
She walked back. It was quite an experience. That’s one of the stories in this book.
There’s many of them and there’s many life lessons. And I think if all you did was read the stories and enjoyed them, if you love a good story, if all you did was read them and enjoyed those stories and then gained the life lesson at the end that I took from each one, you’d probably love the book. But if you then also are able to understand how we can extract the lessons and the messages that life is trying to teach us through our experiences, now you have gained a new tool for your own personal and spiritual growth and wellbeing.
And to me, that’s the real benefit of this book, Insight from Hindsight. So I just wanted to let you know about it, but I also wanted to give you an example of how this works. And I think just, I don’t tell the story as well as I wrote it.
And I shortened it up quite a bit because, you know, videos, people have a short attention span nowadays. But I wanted to give you an example of what one of those stories is like, how I took the lesson away from it and then how this works. So if you look back at any one of your experiences, and I got lots of different experiences in here, especially the significant ones where you can see this would have been a significant experience in my life and Melissa’s life.
Usually it’s gonna end up being the stories that you tell your friends. And maybe just in telling your friends about it, you’ll be able to see the positive from it. But the other benefit that happens is once you’ve read several of these stories and you get how it works, and once you’re able to do this for yourself, what ends up happening is that no longer do you need to do this in hindsight.
Now you can do it in real time. So as an experience is happening to you, and I’ll even say, I’ll go so far as to say, a lot of times when something bad is happening to me, I often will just ask myself, what’s the message in this for me? What can I gain from this experience that life is trying to teach me right now by this happening to me? And then I can take it a step further because whether I get the message right then or not, I have learned because it has happened to me so many times that there is a message, that there is a lesson. And when that happens, it brings us from victimhood to empowerment.
All of a sudden we feel empowered and we recognize that experiences are not happening to us. Things are not happening to us. They’re happening for us.
They’re happening for our benefit in one way or another, even if they’re bad experiences. We get to recognize when you’ve done it enough times, oh my God, there’s gotta be something powerful in this for me. And I will be better in the long run after it’s done.
I know that many of you have had hard experiences in your lifetime. In the late 80s and early 90s, I went through a long depression and it was horrible. I’ll tell you that story sometime, but it was very difficult.
It was a five year horrible experience of me being chronically depressed and suicidal. And I eventually, it ended in 1994. Interestingly, it was September 17th, 1994.
So I think it’s gonna be 30 years this year, maybe. I’m not sure. Yes, 30 years.
I celebrate that date every year. And one of the reasons I celebrate it is because if I had to do it over again, I would not take that experience away from me because I gained so much and grew so much because of the experience that I would not be who I am today if not having gone through that terrible chronic depression. And I know that you probably have experiences that are just like this.
Experiences that you might say were just painful and horrific and devastating. And yet, if you could do it over again, then you realize that it changed you in positive ways so much that you wouldn’t really take that experience out of the equation. You don’t wanna go back and do it again.
Trust me. I don’t wanna have to go through it again. But yet, there was a part of me, I’ll call it my soul, that higher wisdom aspect of me that is in the spiritual dimension that knew that that experience was going to change me in so many positive ways that I could one day, not during it, but later, look at it as a blessing in some ways, as a gift.
And I could be grateful for what I gained from it. Not from the pain, not from the suffering, not from what Melissa had to go through while I was experiencing it, but from the benefits that we gained from it and how it changed us not just immediately, but for the rest of our lives. And I know you have those too.
So I hope you’ll check out my new book, Insight from Hindsight. It’s on Amazon. It’s in paperback here.
It’s in Kindle. And it is in audio book, audible audio book. You can find that all on amazon.com. Just type in Insight from Hindsight or my name, Bob Olson, and you’ll be able to find the book for sure.
And if you’re into Kindles, you can download it instantly and start reading. Anyways, thanks for listening. I hope you gained something from this.
So interesting because I started to do videos and then this was right after. I told the story about my TIA a couple of videos ago. And I said, I’m gonna be doing videos again.
And then what had happened was because of the TIA, I decided I wanted to come out with this book. Well, it’s a lot of work coming out with a book and so something had to give. There was only so much time to do everything that I need to do.
So since I hadn’t really got started with Afterlife TV videos again, they went in the back burner. I’m still hoping to get back to them. Maybe I’ll get another one done next week and the week after and the week after.
We’ll see how well I do with that. For now, I hope you’ll check out the book. I appreciate you listening and I hope you’re doing well.
Thanks so much. Bye-bye now.
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson's other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob's Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
JOIN BOB'S NEWSLETTER: Join Bob Olson's "Afterlife Academy" newsletter (free): AfterlifeAcademy.com -- Follow Bob as he investigates the afterlife.
