Why Affirmations Don't Work -- And What Does (NOAH ST. JOHN)

So welcome to Ally and you, the Business Success and Lifestyle Show. My name is Allison Maslin. My friends call me Allie. And I'm a business growth mentor. And, and we help businesses scale their company and reach their dreams. And today you're going to get some actionable tips and steps that are going to help you get there. You're going to be able to apply right away. And so I'm super excited to introduce my guest, Noah St. John, who is absolutely going to blow you away. How are you doing, Noah?

I'm great, Allie. Great. Great to be here.

I'm so excited you're here. And listen to this cool fact about Noah. He is the only author in history. He's published 14 books. 14. I've got my second one coming out and that was like pulling my hair out to make that happen. I don't even know how you do it, but by so many different publishers. Hay House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Mindvalley, on and on and on.

And.

You have helped clients add more than a half a billion dollars in revenue. So we're going to talk about that, and we're going to talk about how your mindset gets in the way of making money. So if you want to make more money in your business right away, stay and listen to the full interview that I have here. Before I jump right into it, I wanted you guys to know, many of you that follow me, know that I'm a cheese addict and, you know, had a hard time giving up sugar. But that's all stopped because JJ Virgin, and these are some of her shakes. And Noah, you know JJ, we've known.

Each other for 10 years. She's awesome.

Yeah. So I am doing, I am all in with the JJ products and JJ Virgin products and quitting sugar, quitting dairy and gluten. But these taste so freaking good. I'm doing her seven day challenge. I haven't felt this good in a long time. I wanted to jump into summer feeling. Great. And so if you guys want to do this with me, just go to jjvirgin.com Alison all right, so anyway, so let's talk when you and I met. And I was trying to think, Noah, who introduced us and I can't remember.

Well, we met at a Debbie Allen event where we were both speaking.

Oh, we did. But we talked on the phone before that. And you actually shared with me this process that you came up with called Affirmation. So I want to get into your story and all of that, but let's start off with that because it's so powerful and something that you created. But it's not like typical affirmations.

No, not at all. So just so for the folks listening, if you haven't heard of me before, we're saying a new word. It's a word that I invented called afformations. This is my hay house book. You mentioned hay house. So it's afformations, not affirmations. So just to give you a little background, just a real quick background, because I think the context is important for folks to understand where this all connects, came from and what it means. So I grew up poor in a rich neighborhood. I know that's a total cliche, but I grew up in this little town. It's totally true. I grew up this little town called Kennebunkport, Maine, which just happens to be one of the wealthiest communities in New England. But my family was dirt poor, and I mean that literally. We lived at the bottom of a dirt road in a drafty, unfinished house that my parents ended up losing to foreclosure. So from a very young age, I was painfully exposed to the dichotomy, the gap, the chasm between the haves and the have nots. The haves was everyone else in the community. The have nots was my family. And so as a kid, it was really confusing because my parents worked really, really hard. And, you know, you hear growing up, well, if you work hard, you'll be successful. I'm like, well, they're working hard and they're not successful. What's the problem here? So it didn't make any sense. Meanwhile, across the street was people. They didn't seem to be working so hard, and they had lots of money and, you know, things and food and stuff, you know. And I was like, wow, this didn't make any sense. So, you know, I'm a nerd, right? I'm probably the nerdiest nerd in this industry. What I mean by that is I like to take things apart and see what's missing and fill in the gaps, you know, that other people seem to leave behind sometimes. And so what I did was I just had to know. It just bugs me to not know the answer to something. So I just went to the library. I didn't know any other, you know, I didn't have anyone to talk to. Certainly I couldn't go to my family, they couldn't help me. So I just went to the library. I started reading books on, you know, personal, personal growth, spiritual growth, self help, all the classics, Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, you know, just trying to figure out how to succeed. The problem was I was working really hard too. I ended up working really hard and I wasn't successful. So at the age of 25, I decided to commit suicide. I was at a point in my life where I said, I just don't want to be here anymore. I've been working hard and I'm not seeing any results. And it was very depressing. So I decided to take my own life. Now, at the very last moment, my life was spared. I share that full story in the Book of Afformations. But bottom line is I was spared at the very last moment. And I decided to devote the rest of my life to serving God and serving humanity as best I could while I was still here on the earth. The problem was I still didn't know why I was here on the earth. And so I'm like, well, great, now what do I do? I still don't know why I'm here. So it wasn't until five years later that I had this epiphany that really changed my life. And what I always like to say to people is, have you ever noticed you get your best ideas in the shower? Right? How many times have we had that? I'm sure I say that all the time. I mean, we all have those aha moments in the shower. Well, in my book I call it the shower that changed everything. Because on this particular morning I was thinking about the fact that I've been reading all these books for all these years, doing everything they said, and I was still very frustrated, still didn't have anything that I wanted. I wasn't successful, I didn't have the life I wanted to. And yet I was following what they said. I was writing down. Now if you've ever read a self help book, you know what an affirmation is, right? Of course. An affirmation is a statement of something you want to be true. So a classic affirmation is I am rich. And you say, I am rich. And your brain says, yeah, right, right. So we say the positive statement, but we just don't believe it. And so what did the traditional teachers say? Well, if you don't believe your statement, just repeat it a thousand million billion kajillion times and you'll believe it someday, right? We've heard this a million times, right? So now for some people that worked just fine, but for millions of us, people like me, it didn't work at all. And we ended up more frustrated than before. And so I said, so I was in the shower thinking about all this. I'M going, why have I been doing everything they said and I'm not getting any results? I go, there's got to be something missing. There's got to be something they're not telling us, but what is it? And I started thinking about what is. What are we talking about? We're talking about beliefs, right? Because if you want to change your life, you got to change your beliefs. I knew that had to be right, but I said, well, what's a belief? Well, a belief is a thought, okay? So what is thought? And the more that I thought about it, I realized that human thought is the process of asking and searching for answers to questions. Not statements, but questions. For example, if I say to you, why is the sky blue? Why is the sky blue? Now, what immediately happens in your brain? You start to search for the answer, right?

Figure it out, right?

So just like a Google search, right? Or a computer. Your brain's like a computer, so, you know, like computer searching its files. And you go, well, the sky's blue because I don't know, but it's searching, right? And in fact, you can't not do it. It happens without your own volition. And I said, now wait a second. If the human mind is automatically searching for answers to questions, why are we going around making statements we don't believe? Because the problem isn't the statement. The problem is we don't believe the statement. So I said, well, okay, if that's true, well, then how could we change this? I said, well, let's see. You get the statement or affirmation. One of the things I like to do at my live events, right? I have everybody stand up. I said, okay, we're doing the classic affirmation, Ready? So everybody go, say, I am rich. And they go, I am rich. And you know what happens next? Everybody starts laughing. I go, what are you laughing at? They go, well, I'm not rich. I go, but you just said you were. And they say, yeah, but I don't believe it. See, that's the problem. It's what I call the yeah, right response. Your brain goes, yeah, right. So I said, well, if that's the statement, then what would the question be? And I said, why am I so rich? Why am I so rich? Now, when you ask that question, what immediately starts to happen in your brain? You start to search for the answer, right? So I said, what we're talking about is the law of sowing and reaping. As you sow, so shall you reap. Of course, this is nothing new. It's been Taught for centuries. But what are we sowing? We're sowing seeds of thought. But what are most people doing? Sowing lousy thought seeds. Why am I so stupid? Why am I so fat? Why can't I lose weight? Why can't I grow my business? Why can't I get the right clients? Why is there more month left at the end of the money right now? When you ask lousy questions, what do you get?

Lousy answers.

Lousy answers, right, and that creates a lousy life and you feel off. What if instead of asking lousy questions that lead to lousy answers and create a lousy life, what if we just flip the whole thing around, start asking empowering questions that lead to phenomenal answers and create a wonderful life? And as I was standing there in the shower, April 1997, I said, Holy cow, I think I just invented something. And so I had to give it a name. And the name that I gave it was afformations, not affirmations. A F F O R M a T I O N S. And you can Google that. You can Google afformations and my name, Noah St. John. And you'll see that they're just unbelievable. Incredible, but all true success stories of people who've used my afformations method to like, double or triple their income to lose hundreds of pounds after they've tried every diet and exercise program.

So give me some more examples with that.

Yeah, well, I'll give you why am I so rich? Right?

So basically by doing that, the experience is then you can really see yourself in your mind feeling rich. Why am I so energetic? Why am I so happy?

So think about what most people are unconsciously doing. They're unconsciously asking disempowering questions. So the classic one is, why am I so stupid? That's just a very common one. Why am I so dumb? Why can't I do anything right? Well, when you ask that question, what are you going to get the answer right? Well, I'm stupid because I did that wrong and I screwed that up and I made that mistake. It's like, great. This is fun, right? This leads to the whole thing that I call your head trash, my latest book. But your head trash is that voice in your head that says, I can't do it because. And then you just fill in the blank. Well, I can't do it because I'm not smart enough. I can't do it because I don't have the money. I can't do it because I don't have the time. I can't do it because I don't have the connections or whatever it is. And then it becomes true. See? So all of these things work together. And with my afformations method now, for the first time in human history, we can take conscious control of the questions we're asking and change the questions and thereby change your life.

Yeah, yeah. And so the experience that you find when people start asking these kinds of questions, how does it impact them on a daily basis? So if they say, you know, why am I so successful? Then what is the next thing from there? Like, what's the next step? Is it just, oh, I'm thinking I'm successful?

Well, let me give you an example of many, many that we have. You know, I, I like to brag about my clients and my students.

I do, I want to.

Because the story, it's more relatable. Exactly. So I'll share a story of Susan. Susan came to us from California. She actually heard me on a show similar to this. It was a radio program and it was just so captivated by my story and the fact that, oh my gosh, we have this new technology now, a new technology of the mind called Afformations. You've never heard of it, of course. And so she, you know, decided to join my program and get our online, you know, join my online programs and things like that and get coaching for me. Now just the backstory Susan is she came to me, when she came to me, she was $60,000 in credit card debt. Now she didn't get into that much debt buying, you know, shoes and bags and clothes and stuff like that. She did that by buying self help programs. Right. So she had invested over $60,000 in programs that were supposed to help her. Right. So the problem is they weren't helping her, number one. Number two, she was about to lose everything. She was about to lose her home, she was about to lose her marriage. Her husband said, I can't take it anymore. You're buying all these programs supposed to be going up, we're going down, this is not working. And so she was literally almost at the end of her rope. So anyway, she heard me, she joined my program, she got coaching for me, long story short, using my afformations method and my, you know, I other have another program called the Power Habit system, which is the power habits of unconsciously successful people. So she, I taught her how to do these things to get her foot off the brake, to get rid of that head trash that I was just talking about. Long story short, in less than a year, she went from $60,000 in debt to a six figure income. She landed her dream job, she's now a television producer. She's been nominated for an Emmy twice and in fact she's just published her first book which she asked me to write the foreword for because of how I changed her life. So I mean, going from $60,000 in debt and remember that was from self help programs that were supposed to have helped her to being totally stuck to a six figure income in less than a year. And a big, big part of that was using my affirmations and power habits methods. So.

But how can you give me an example of what you had her do?

Yeah, absolutely. So talking about the afformation. So basically there's four steps to afformations, which you know, I teach you that in the book. But basically I can. It's, it's, it's pretty straightforward. It's very simple. The first step is to ask yourself what you want. What is it that you want to manifest? What's your pot of gold? Right? So where do you want to go? And so that's the first step. It's got. And you know, a lot of people come to me and they don't really know what they want. They're not clear on that. So that's a big step. It might seem like, oh well, no kidding, but actually it's a little deeper than you might think. So that's the first step. Then the second step is to inform that what you want is already true. So an example like you just mentioned or like what Susan did is she said, well, why did I finally land my dream job? Why am I now manifesting the life that I really want? Okay, now your brain's gonna go, huh? What? That doesn't make any sense at first, right? You're like, what? But see, that's the third step. That's what leads to the third step, which is to give yourself to the question. Alright, so what we teach our students and our clients is to do four things. Reading, writing, speaking and listening. Those are the four modes of human communication. Reading, writing, speaking, listening. So you know, like in my book of affirmations, I give you over 400 affirmations in the 10 major areas of life. So you can read them. You of course can write your own affirmations. I have people who carry around journals and write their own affirmations and that's an awesome thing to do. The third thing is to say them out loud. Like I have a lot of married people or partners, you know, they say it to each other and that's awesome. Or you say it to your kids. Kids love affirmations. We've got kids getting better grades and self confidence and just self esteem. It's awesome. And so that's the third step. Oh, and then the fourth mode is to listen to them. So we have things called ioform audios where you can listen to them over and over. You know, even while you sleep, while you're busy, you know, you're on the treadmill or doing emails or whatever, you can actually be reprogramming your subconscious thought patterns while you're not even paying attention. That's called I of form audios. And so that's where how you give yourself. So you really are restructuring your brain. Okay, and then the fourth step, which is the most important by far, and that is to act based on your new assumptions. See, we all have assumptions about life. Most of our assumptions I have observed in the 20 plus years that I've been doing this. Most of our assumptions are negative or what I call disempowering. Like I was saying earlier, why am I so stupid? Why can't I do anything right? Well, if that's what you're reforming, then you're going to make yourself right. That's your headshot. So the point is that what I want your audience to know, Allison, is that everybody, every one of you, in fact every human walking the earth right now, is already using afformations. Everybody's already doing this. The problem is they don't know they're doing it, number one. Number two, most people are doing it in a disempowering way. Like why am I so dumb? Why am I so fat? Why can't I lose weight? I had one client who came to me and she was making about $5,000 a month in sales. She had spent tens of thousands of dollars on all these different self help programs. And she started, she, you know, I taught her the affirmations method and power habits. Long story short, in less than a year, her business went from making 5000amonth to $75,000 a month. That's a 1500% increase in less than a year. It sounds impossible. It sounds insane. Well, go watch the video where she talks about how she did it. You know, it's right on the river.

Yeah, well, it's, you know, it's just a testament to that. The only thing in between us and what we really want to achieve, Noah, is our thoughts, our head, our actions. And so, which is exciting because I think that people feel that. Well, that's attainable for her, for him, but not for me. And if we can really get rid of that head trash and shift the questions that you're asking to empowering instead of disempowering, we can change everything. So that's very cool. So thanks for sharing that. That's so exciting. And I'm going to start switching my questions around. So I love that. Now, your new book, which. Do you have that on you? Can you show me that?

I can show it to you. I just happen to have one right here.

Get rid of your head trash about money. So it kind of leads into where the affirmations kind of left off. So can you tell us about this book?

Yes, absolutely. So, as I mentioned, I've been doing this for 20 plus years. I started in 1997 after I had that epiphany in the shower that I just shared with you. I started my company in my college Dorm room with $800 and the book on how to do HTML. I had no idea what I was doing. I just said, wow, this is a pretty amazing discovery. I could really help a lot of people, you know, just have to get the word out. And so, you know, in all this time, you know, of course, we've had just so many amazing success stories from our clients and students. And lately what's happened is that people, you know, find me and they say, hey, Noah, you know what? I'm feeling stuck. I'm feeling overwhelmed. I hear you're the guy that helps people get unstuck. Can you help me get unstuck? Can you help me get out of this overwhelm? I just kept hearing this over and over and over again. And so I started thinking about it. I'm going, why am I hearing this so much? Why am I hearing all of this stuckness? And it's overwhelmed. And I'm going, well, so again, being a nerd, I'm the nerdiest nerd. I go, I got to unpack this, right? I got to find out what's going on here and then fix it. I just, I can't help it. I got to fix these things. So I started thinking about, well, and, you know, really talking to my clients and researching and saying, what is stuffness number one? Number two, what's causing it? And number three, how do we fix it? Right? So what I realized is that stuckness is really an overwhelm. They're really very much combined. Okay? And so one of the things that's causing this feeling of stuckness or overwhelm is this phenomenon that I call Your head trash, as I mentioned earlier, your head trash is that voice in your head that says, I can't do it, because, again, it's. And then it's. You fill in the blank, right? I can't do it because I'm too old. I can't do it because I don't have the money. I can't do it because I don't have the time. Whatever, right? But again, here's the thing to remember, is you always make yourself right. So if you believe that, well, I can't do it because I don't have the time. Oh, guess what? You find that you don't have the time. Meanwhile, I can show you that we all have the same amount of time. You, me, Bill Gates, Mark Cuban, Richard Branson. We all have the same 24 hours, right? They haven't figured out how to make the Earth rotate any slower. You know, they got the same 24 hours as all of us. So how come they're so successful and most people aren't? Again, it has to do with systems. It has to do with getting rid of this head trash and so forth. And not buying that. Not listening to that guy. So that's what's really nice, is that once you identify your head trash, that. That voice in your head and what it's saying to you, then you can start using afformations and power habits to actually get rid of that. Literally take out the trash and start to get the results you want.

Because it really is trash, you know, and it's recycled trash.

Think about this, Ellis.

You think those same things over and over again.

Exactly. Think about this, all right? And for everyone watching, just think about this. So imagine your house, right? Your home where you live. And imagine you say, you know what? I don't think I'm gonna take out the trash this week. You say, you know what? I don't feel like taking out the trash. And you let the trash go for about a week, and you say, and the next week comes, you go, you know what? I don't think I'll take the trash out this week and another week. And then you let a month go by and two months and months and six months and a year. How do you think your home is looking right now? Pretty gross, right? I mean, you couldn't live in it. It would be impossible. People who haven't taken out the trash in their head for 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

Yeah. That's quite a visual if you think about it that way. Not only is it so freaking heavy.

Yeah.

But it's Just, yeah, it's all that negative energy.

Yes. And as I was saying, you always make yourself right. So if you've been thinking that trash for 10, 20, 30, 40 years and you go, gee, I wonder why I'm getting the same results. Well, because you have it. You're holding on to those same beliefs. I'm not trying to put anybody down. I'm not trying to be critical. I'm trying to literally hold up a mirror and show you you don't have to keep thinking this stuff. Like going back to Susan, who had spent $60,000 on all these gurus and self help stuff. Well, the point is they never pointed this out to her, you know, so it's not, it wasn't her fault that she was, you know, spending all that time, money and effort. It was the fact that she just didn't have the proper framework to literally take out that trash.

Right. Yes. And I think too oftentimes you might be thinking, in your business this isn't working or this strategy isn't working, well, the strategy might be perfectly great. But if what's in between your ears is old thinking, old negativity, whatever from our upbringing, like what you said that you went through, then, you know, it doesn't matter what the strategy is, it's still going to hold you back.

Right.

You clear that out.

Exactly. So as you like you were just saying a moment ago, you know, people listening to this could be saying, oh, yeah, well, I'm sure it worked for her, but I bet won't work for me. Well, that's. There you go. You're going to make yourself right. Okay, I'm giving you the same system. Or you know, we have it available. It's right here. You know, we have all these systems, these strategies, these frameworks available. I've been teaching for 20 years. I've helped people make hundreds of millions of dollars. If you come to me and say, well, I bet it won't work for me, guess what? You're going to be right.

Yeah, exactly.

That has nothing to do with the teaching.

Okay?

So we're just inviting you to go, gee, how long do I want to keep thinking this? How long do I want to keep this trash in my home? Right, guys?

And it doesn't just affect business, it affects your relationships.

Absolutely.

Health, all areas of your life. Well, this is so fascinating, and you talk about in this book, and we may have talked about it already, but the three biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make when it comes to reaching their goals.

Yes, absolutely. Well, and by the way, that is the subtitle of the book, it's get rid of your head trash about money. And the subtitle is how to avoid the three big money mistakes even split smart people make. And I know everybody watching this program is very smart. So however, you may be making one or more of these mistakes without knowing it. So the first big mistake that I see people making is not getting rid of their head trash, right? Just not even realizing that it's there. So that's, you know, what we've been talking about. That's, I mean, right there, that's going to stop you and that's going to keep you stuck, right? That's what I was talking about earlier. So that is the first big mistake. The second big mistake that I see people making is not having a mentor, right? Not just trying to do everything by yourself, not having any support system. So at Success Clinic, what we teach is that a mentor is two things. Number one, someone who's where you want to be. Now, that's the easy part. You can't turn on Facebook without, you know, some hotshot saying, hey, look at my cool this and look at my that. Aren't I awesome? It's like, yeah, you're awesome, dude. Have you helped anybody else? Right? And that's the thing. It's like, well, no, it's all about them, right? So if it's all about them, then do they have a system or do they have a personality? Usually nine times out of 10, 99 out of 100, you know, it's basically personality driven, not systems driven. So the second part, which is far more important is have they helped anybody else? That's what, like I was saying, I'd rather brag about my clients than me. Because if it's just me, and yeah, you don't want to be following someone who's living in a van down by the river, right? You'd borrow Chris Farley's phrase. Remember that from Saturday Night Live? You know, probably not the best mentor. Right? So. So that's of course why that was funny, right? Just Google that if you haven't seen it. It is hilarious. Yeah, but my point is that, yeah, you don't. I get it. You don't want to be following that guy. But the point is, have they helped anyone else? That's why I'd rather brag about. If you go to. If you go to our website and just click on the results tab. I mean, it's just. Just dozens and dozens of stories. Real life, real people, ordinary people getting extraordinary results using my system. Because it's system based. And that's the second big mistake. And then the third big mistake I see people making. And even if you're not making these first two, this one can really hold you back, and that is gathering too much information without giving yourself permission to succeed. Literally, just keep gathering information and not giving yourself permission to succeed. Now, not accidentally, my first book happened to be titled Permission to Succeed, because that's What I discovered 20 years ago, was that we don't really need more how to's of success. What most of us need is to give ourselves permission to succeed. That's why I trademarked that phrase. I own that phrase. But my point is that there's so many people just. I mean, look, we're all overloaded with information, okay? And I get that. The point is that, you know, as you mentioned earlier, you know, I've written 14 books that have been published now in 17 different languages. I'm the only author in history published by Hay House, Harper Collins, mindvalley, Nightingale Conant, Simon Schuster, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher. No one else has ever done that before. Now, is that because I'm so smart and great? Well, I don't think so. I think it's because I have the ability to focus, right? I have the ability to just eliminate distractions and focus. Now, the point is that nowadays in today's overwhelmed, overworked society, that's like a superpower just to be able to eliminate distractions and focus. Because that's what so many people come to me and they just say, no, I'm overwhelmed and lack of focus. And I mean, I just hear this over and over. I go, well, that's a skill that you can develop. It's like a muscle. You know, it's going to take some work, but you can do it.

Yeah.

Wow.

Well, and we're going to be. You have a special gift that you're giving away, and we're going to have it on our library. So you're actually going to give away, tell everybody what your gift is?

Yeah, absolutely. So we're giving you a copy of this book, Get Rid of youf Head Trash About Money. All you need to do is I've paid for the book. We just ask you to cover the shipping. All right, so if you go to sendmeabooknoah.com very easy to remember. Send me a book. Noah.com and I will send you a book.

So actually, on our library, so if you go to allisonmaslan.com library, we'll have it there. And you can also get all of the gifts and downloads from all of our guests on Ally and you. But how generous for Noah to have this book for you all. And I'll have the URL below so that you can grab that. You want to do that right away and get rid of that head trash. Work on your affirmations. Change the questions that you're asking to make them empowering. And that's truly going to change your life.

Yes.

And help you reach all the goals that you desire.

So.

Well, this has been awesome, Noah. Thank you for coming on and sharing this wealth of knowledge. You've been doing this for a long, long time. You've helped a lot of people. And I just. I love your new book. I'm going to read it myself.

Great. Well, thanks. I mean, it's been a pleasure, Allison and I look forward to seeing everybody and, you know, great to be here.

Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. And you can check out more of Noah's work at his website, Noah St. John.com and for those of you that have those big dreams, know that they are so attainable, it's right there waiting for you. And we love sharing this knowledge with you. These tips, these steps, the support on Ally and you'd. And we have new shows every single week we've been running since 2011. And our mission is really to help you to break through to the next level in your business, because we know that business is the best way to. To change your life and change the world. So you can go to subscribetoally.com that will subscribe you to all our shows on itunes. We are on all of the platforms out there for podcasts. Thank you for joining us today. And Noah, we will be talking to you soon. Thanks for being with us. All right, bye, everybody.