Live Stream with Jack Canfield on Thrive Time with Eric Edmeades

Welcome back to another edition of thrivetime. I'm Erik Edmeads. I'm your host. And as always, I'm incredibly excited. But today I'm even more excited. I'm bringing you a guest that has really been an incredible inspiration in my life. An incredibly good friend, a fantastic mentor. We're going to be talking about really making sure that you can get yourself unstuck, that you can have the best possible year ahead and how to use this time during lockdown to make that happen. I'll be right with you. All right, so welcome back. Our guest today is a person who I would. You know, there's so many. There's the official biography and all that kind of stuff. But what I want to say to you is that one of the greatest compliments I ever heard when I first started getting into speaking was what somebody said to me, that they felt like I was very much the same person on stage or on camera as I was in real life. And I don't know that there's that many people that are really like that, but our guest today is definitely one of those people. He's been an incredible mentor to me, an incredibly good friend, but part of that is because he's just generally a fantastic guy. He has also sold just about as many books as God, as far as I can tell, and he's just. I'm just super excited to have him here. I'm almost speechless. Jack, welcome, welcome, welcome to the show. So, so happy to have you here.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Eric.

So, Jack, I. God, there's so many. You know, you and I have had some fascinating conversations over the years, some of which I wish we had tape recorded and shared with the public. Others, not so much. So. But you know, what I really kind of wanted to dig into today is you started this year with this whole. Your kind of theme for the year was get unstuck. You know, it was kind of the start of the year, and then you started with that theme in January, and then by March, we were all stuck. And so, you know what I'd love to hear from you is what are you doing during this time? And look, I really get. You and I are both in incredibly fortunate situations in our lives. It's making this process probably much easier for us than it is for many people. That said, in understanding that and appreciating it, what are you doing during this time to make sure that you are not stuck and that you're helping other people to get unstuck?

Well, it's interesting because I started the month of March, coming back from a month in India. I'd gone over to Mumbai to an ayurvedic clinic where my wife Inga and I were working on just longevity. Changed my diet to a plant based diet over that course of the month. We did a lot of detoxing, lost a lot of weight, learned a lot of things from a master who his master lived to be 114 years old and his master before that 124. And one of the things he said that was really interesting was that success is knowing what you want, knowing how to get it, and enjoying it once you have it. And I think you and I have, you know, are successful based on that definition. And so I came back from India, you know, ready to go, excited. We have all these seminars lined up and speeches lined up and everything got canceled. So here, all of a sudden, you know, we've got all these people that could have asked for their money back. Fortunately, they didn't. We've been able to put things into the future. God only knows if that's actually going to happen. But I delivered a couple of talks by Zoom calls to a whole church where the whole church tuned in by zoom and was able to complete that contract. But mainly what I've been doing are several things. One is, you know, working on my health. As you know, I teach something called the hour of power, which is 20 minutes in the morning of reading, 20 minutes of meditation, and 20 minutes of very high intensity exercise, whether it's aerobics or high intensity interval training or something like that. And what's happening is my wife Inga right now is in a Pilates class online in our gym at home. So, as you said, we're fortunate. I have a home gym. I have three acres of land around my house. I've got a barn with my daughter living in the apartment above it. We have a house guest who has been living with us for the last couple of months, sheltered at home with us, who also helps cook, goes out and buys food. So I'm not. I've not been out of my house for almost six weeks, which is kind of strange. But what I've been doing, I think I told you before we came on air, I've done 40 podcasts in the last about three weeks. I had a book come out at the end on March 31 called the success Principles Workbook. So I've been doing a lot of promotion for that. We can talk about that if you like. And also just helping people like you say get unstuck get out of the fear that they have in their lives. There's so much fear and so much anxiety right now. And so I've been talking a lot about that, but also using this time that we have right now as a way to take ourselves forward. You know, we have this extra time at home. We can be studying, we can be learning, we can be working on our health. Like all the wildfit things that you teach a lot of people, you know, they don't do them fully, but now they can. People are not commuting back and forth to work. So there's a lot of time for all the health exercises you could be doing, the books you've said you're going to read, the website you were going to develop, the podcast you were going to listen to and go back to the TED talks you wanted to listen to and so forth. So for me it's been that working literally from about 7 in the morning with my daily disciplines and then from around 9 o' clock until 6 or 7 with calls and then a little bit of studying. And the other thing I'll just share before we get into more of a dialogue is that I recently, as part of this get healthy thing, discovered essential oils and have gotten involved with the company that's doing that. And just like we're now diffusing all these essential oils into our space and rubbing things on our feet to go to sleep at night. My wife had restless leg syndrome. That's gone now. So just it's a whole new learning curve for me about something I wasn't even aware of before Tino, one of.

Our very first thrive time episodes. And I'm trying to think who the guest was right now, but was an essential oil specialist. And it was one of the early calls. And I actually am a big fan myself. I've got diffusers in the bedroom and in the living room and I have oils that I like to do at night, like lavender and stuff that makes the. I haven't tried feet. I'm going to go with the feet next. I'll try that. But yeah, this is a good time for that stuff. It's definitely de stressing.

Well, let's talk about thieves for a moment, which is really interesting because where that came from, it's a combination of cloves and other kinds of herbs. And it found out during the original plague, which was like, I think in the 1500s, there were certain people that never got sick. And so the king said, go find out who these are. And they were thieves that were sneaking into people's houses because they were sick and stealing their stuff. But they themselves never got the plague. And they found out that they were all from the east, where they had all these spices that they would eat in their food, and those spices actually had antiviral qualities that were keeping them healthy. So it's fascinating. It's really fascinating.

I'll need to check more into that. That's maybe not so much a theme for today, but I'm all over that I just even shared. I hate to repeat it because I just said it on a episode this morning, but I'm. I am a big believer that COVID 19 is a wimp ass. You know, it's a virus that's dangerous in a population that's weak. That's.

I agree with that.

Yeah. And I agree it's not a popular thing to say sometimes, but, you know, it is what it is. So. Jack, I have so many different lines of or avenues to go down here, but one of them is this. That just about. I don't know, the majority of people out there at some point in time in their life have said the words, I would fill in the blank if I had more time. And often that fill in the blank is write a book. And I know that I've got a lot of my clients and fans have written to me and go, you know, now I want to write. And I'm kind of writing, and I don't really know what to do. And I joke about you selling as almost as many books as God, and it's not really even a joke. I mean, how many Chicken soup books ultimately were sold roughly?

Right now? About some approaching 600 million. So half a billion books.

Geez, that's. That's a whole lot. That's a whole lot of books. I'm gonna have to talk to my book launch manager and have a discussion.

So it took a while to do that.

I know, but you know, and I know that, you know, you. You have always. You've always taught really solid, practical stuff. It's one of the things I've always liked about you, long before we ever met, that, you know, there are some people, you can go see them speak on stage, and you can feel jazzed up and you can feel good, but you kind of don't know what to do. And I think you and I are similar in the sense of we want people to have a sense of what to do. Do you have a what to do? You know, we've got somebody sitting at home. They, they, they. They're no Longer commuting, maybe their job's in jeopardy, their business is in jeopardy, are gone. And this is the time. Maybe they could invest some time in writing a book. Do you have a, do you have a kind of formula or, you know, kind of advice for how somebody might get that going?

Well, first of all, yeah, I do. I actually teach a course on it where there's 37 different things you need to do. I call it to write and market a best selling book. Because if you want to write a book, you want people to read it. Too many people, they birth a book, but it's a stillborn in the sense that they don't go out and they don't market it. It's like when you put your baby on the, in a basket, you know, on the steps at a hospital and you abandon it. So it's not just writing it, it's about marketing it as well. But the first thing you have to do is have something worth saying. A lot of people have something to say, but they think someone else has already said it. But like you have an audience called the Wildfit community and the mindvalley community and so forth, where people know you and so they follow you. And so if you write a book, even if it's a lot of what other people have said, they're going to read it because it comes from you. And so I always tell people, you probably know more than you think you do and you have something worth saying. And so basically, first of all, decide what your message is. And then once you have that message, there's a number of things you can do. What I like to do is I like to write what I call vomit copy, which is just get words on paper first. Sit down. I say, okay, I'm going to write about asking for what you want. So I wrote a book called the Aladdin how to ask for and get what you want in life. And so it's a book on asking, overcoming fear of rejection. How do you ask? Who do you ask? When do you ask? Can you ask repeatedly, et cetera. And so basically I write down everything I know on a piece of paper. It's called mind mapping. You put a circle in the middle and you say this is the topic. And then what you do is you have lines going off of all the different themes you know, and you know who to ask, when to ask, how to ask, asking stories. I've had what you do with rejection and so forth. Now as soon as I get everything I know, kind of a bullet point, then I go back And I structure it into an outline in the book. And then I go in. And now I have a skeleton. Now I can begin to put meat on the bones, as it were. Or if you're vegetarian, put. I don't know, whatever. I can't think of the right metaphor, whatever it is. Anyway, the point being, you now want to just start writing. And the key was, when you're writing, do not edit while you write. Do your editing later. When I did Chicken Soup for the Soul, I made a commitment to write two stories a week for one year. That's why the book has 101 stories in it. It's about a year's worth of writing. And I would write one Monday through Wednesday. Then I would put it aside. I'd write another one and work on it Thursday through Saturday. Then I wouldn't touch those for a week. The next week I'd start two more. But I'd come back on the weekend and edit the two I wrote the week before that. Because if you try to edit as you go, it tends to slow you down. You get into critical thinking and so forth. Now, that's just one way to do it. Another way to do it is you've given a lot of speeches, Eric. So you have a lot of material that's been recorded. You have someone just transcribe that. So, for example, there are. There are services like Rev R E V, which you can send transcriptions to, and they send it right back really quickly. There's something called otter, which actually will transcribe as you write. Most of us in our Macs and things like that, we have things that we'll type as we speak. So we can do it that way. You can have someone interview you. And basically, like, a lot of times we don't know what we know. And so if you have someone interview and ask you a lot of clarifying questions, you can get words on paper that way as well. Once you have that, then you can start to go back and edit. You and I both know a woman named Lynn Twist. Lynn Twist is the head of the Pachamama alliance, which is protecting the rainforest and bringing the indigenous wisdom of the rainforest to the Northern hemisphere. And really, really powerful woman. And she has some of the best stories I've ever heard. And I said, lynn, you have to write a book. You've got amazing stories. She. She said, jack, I'm not a writer and I don't have time. And I said, well, I have an idea. Come to my house for two days. I'll invite 10 or 12 of my friends to sit in my living room. You sit on a bar stool up front. We'll record it on video. We'll record it on audio, so maybe even have a video product out of this. But at the very least, every day we'll record all your stories. Then we'll send off what we've recorded to rev rev within 24 hours, sends back a transcription. And so she recorded for two days, just told stories off the cuff. And two days later after that, we had about 400 pages of manuscript that would easily be edited to a book. So there's a lot of ways to get that original content. And then what you want to do is have. This is a really critical part. One of the principles I teach is the power of feedback. And most people don't ask for feedback because they're afraid of what they're going to hear. My wife's been working on a memoir called Stepping out of the Shadows. And she grew up with her mother, was kind of an Emmy award winning actress. Her first husband was the best skier on Mammoth Mountain. Her next husband was this incredible artist. And then she marries me, this great, well known author. And so she's always in the shadow of these people. And so just a couple weeks ago, she had to send the first draft of her memoir off to an editor and get feedback. It took her about a month to work up the courage to do it. And she got some hard feedback about things she needs to change and all that. But it's going to totally change the book and make it better. With Chicken Soup for the Soul, every story in every book had been read by at least 40 people. So we had a formula where we would always get 120 to 140 great stories after the first book. And then we would have 40 people. Republicans, Democrats, independents, liberals, conservatives, old people, young people, middle aged, millennials. We'd have people that live in the heartland, people that live on the coast, people that people of different ethnic backgrounds, et cetera. And they would read every story. And we put the name of the story here and we put the people across the top and then we would have all of those scores on the story, a score of 1 to 10. 10 being. It gave me goosebumps. I loved it. It made me laugh. And one being. Are you kidding me? And anything that scored less than a nine after we put them all into an Excel spreadsheet, never got published. Some of my stories that I wrote that I really loved never got published. Why? Because I might have liked it. But if the public didn't like it because we're trying to make sure that they get entertained and uplifted and inspired. It's not going to work. So even with the Success Principles book, which is I went and interviewed 75 of the most successful people on the planet and said, are these the principles you use? These are the ones I use. Which ones did you use? Maybe I don't know about. And with that one I wrote there are 64 principles. And so there are 64 chapters. And in the workbook down there's 17. We took the best 17. But the point being I had about 30 people read every chapter and give me feedback. Every page scoring at 1 to 10. This is redundant. This is boring. I don't get the point. You said this before. What are you saying here? Everybody knows this already, whatever it was. So that book went through six iterations before it came out and it's now sold about a million and a half copies in 47 languages around the world, which it never would have done if I had just written them myself. With most books, as you know, Eric, are read by you when you wrote it, your wife, because you wanted someone to look at it. You're a literary agent and a person that's called a, you know, an agent or an editor at the publisher. So four people's opinions is going to decide whether it is the best selling book. That's crazy. You never would do that.

Wow, that's. You know, it's funny because I've had so many book conversations with you before and I feel like you just can't condensed a ton of wisdom into a very, very concise message. Let's, let's do this. I really like the distinction about not editing as you write. That was a big breakthrough for me. I, I was struggling with that because, you know, I would just, I would find myself writing the same chapter like six times, you know, and you know, it's just like find a different way of saying it or whatever. And so I like your. I think you. Did you. What did you call it?

Vomit copy.

The vomit copy. I think Tucker. Tucker Max calls it that as well. The vomit draft. He says, you know, it's like it's not a nice image to begin with, but when you really. I think it's important that it's not a nice image so that you don't have a lot of judgment about it. And that really freed me and sped up my progress a lot.

Can I say what.

Yeah, go ahead.

Can I say one more thing that I didn't say? I think it's Critical. One of my friends was a best selling author, Bryce Courtney, in Australia. And he taught me this term called bum glue. You gotta glue your bum to the chair and write. And so you have to write either on a specific time every day. So it becomes like a habit. Like John Maxwell, who you know, is this great leadership guru. He writes for an hour a day, seven days a week, every, every, every day. So he's put out tons of books at the airport you can find a whole spinning rack of just John Maxwell books. Or you have to say, I'm going to write for two weeks. I'm going to go off somewhere in a cabin, you know, or you're alone now, you know where you are and just write all day long. But you have to set aside time. You know, Ernest Hemingway wrote every morning from 8 until about 12:30. And then he would go off and do everything that made Ernest Hemingway cool. He'd go to the bar and he'd drink and he'd go to bullfights and he'd do his adventures and so forth. But it was every day he would write from 8:30 to 12:30. And you know, like you, I like to edit. Editing's fun. Finding a way to. I remember I did this chapter in the Success Principles where I was talking about the guy that wrote Sleepless in Seattle and. And how his first manuscript was rejected, but he basically was looking for a theme that the universal theme is boy meets girl. There's all these problems and then eventually they get together. In the end he said, how could I do a twist on that theme? And so basically, if you remember Sleepless in Seattle, they don't meet until the last scene in the movie, which is totally different. And so he came up with that. And my next chapter was about a guy who was willing to go the extra mile, but he lived in Seattle and he was staying up late at night working on things. So I said, while Such and Such was writing Sleepless in Seattle, George was actually Sleepless in Seattle, which was really, really fun to be able to word craft that. So editing is great and it's fun and it's an art form. But don't do it while you're writing your first draft.

You know, it really kicked in for me when I began to recognize that it's actually a mode. It's a mode. And what's really crazy is I am quite dyslexic when I'm in creative mode. And then I can actually in a sense turn the dyslexia off when I'm in editing. Mode. But you know what else gets turned off? Creativity. So for me it's very different modes. If I'm in editing mode, then I can't turn the words as quickly. There's an idea constipation in a sense. If I let go of the editing and I just write, then I can put 5,000 words out in a day. And it's incredible. If I try and edit, it's 500 words that day. It's a completely different thing. So I think that's a really valuable thing.

You can write a book called the Success Principles for Dyslexics.

There you go. Is there already a chicken soup for dyslexics? And actually, based on your comment earlier, I need to know, was there ever a chicken soup for the soul? For the vegetarian soul?

You know, when I was in India, people go, we do not eat the chickens. Really? And so I said, well, what chicken soup was like, you know, it's. What do you call it? It's the elixir that gets rid of viruses. And we actually know that chicken soup has antiviral properties in it. They've done research on that, which is why grandmothers were giving people chicken soup forever. But in India they have something called kitchari, which is basically mung bean soup with a bunch of vegetables in it. So it's very similar. So I said, we don't do the chicory for the soul. That's super fun.

So yeah, you know what's really crazy is I have food being delivered here and not going out and stuff like that. And they brought me a chicken pre cooked chicken and it was a little dry. So you know what I did? I made chicken soup and I was talking to a friend of mine about it last night. I said, you know what, I'm going to make myself a chicken soup and I'm going to have it during my interview with you. But I didn't do that.

There you go. Well, you're getting ready.

So let's talk a little bit about goals. Like, do you, how do you feel about, you know, how many words a day should somebody be shooting for, you know, how many days in a row? Like do you do what has worked for you in that area? Are you more better blitz it out in two weeks or I can like, because you kind of gave both formulas. Which works better for you?

I think for me, when I decide to write a book, which I'm actually doing now, writing a book called Unstuck with Dan Least Janelle who, you know, and basically I will set aside a Couple hours a day to work on that. I'm a night person. My wife's a wife, a morning person. She's a. What they call a dove. I'm an owl. I'm a, you know, a late night guy. So basically the phones have stopped, my staff is gone. I'm not doing podcasts. I can just get into it and I will write when I. When I finished, I got way behind. When I was writing the success principles and had a deadline coming up, I would start writing around seven at night after having dinner with my wife. And usually I try to go to bed by midnight, but there were many times when I'd be typing away and I'd start to hear birds singing and I'd see the dawn starting to lighten up. And I'd been writing for 12 hours, you know, in that groove. So for me, it's. It's a combination of just consistency and blitzing. And so once I'm in the mood, like, I think a lot of people wait to be in the mood, and sometimes the mood never happens. And so basically, by starting to write, even if you're writing bad stuff, eventually it starts to tap in. It's kind of like, you know, when you used to prime a pump, you'd put water down the pipe, and so you got to prime the pump just by writing anything, you know, Then all of a sudden that creativity comes in. I've learned too, you know, this group called the Heartmath that teaches this thing called the Quick coherence breathing process. If I do that first and get into that space, then the creativity happens. I know Rhonda Byrne, when she wrote the Secret, she would meditate, and then she would go into a gratitude exercise and appreciation. And when she was in that gratitude space, she said, I wouldn't start writing until I had a tear coming down my face. And as soon as I had a tear coming down my face, I knew it was time to write. So if I get stuck or I have writer's block, I'll stop and I'll go into doing some deep breathing and some meditation, and then I'll ask the question, you know, what's wanting to come through? What am I needing to say? How am I stuck? How can I get unstuck? So for me, it's a matter of just creating blocks of time. Whether, like, Ernest Hemingway was 8 to 12. I know a guy that wrote Catch 22. He actually went to work every day 8 to 5, like a job. And then there are other people that write at night. There's another Woman I know that has written 11 novels, and she writes. She puts her kids to bed and she writes all night like I was talking about. She'll wake up. You know, they wake up around seven. She gets them ready for school, they go to school, and she goes to sleep, takes a big, long nap until three when they come home. Then she's a mother to them until they go to bed, and then she writes all night because no one's disturbing her. So you have to find your time. There are other people that will just go off for, you know, a week somewhere and just pump out that book that they've been thinking about for a long time. So it doesn't matter. What I say to people normally is, don't worry about the time or worry about. I mean, don't worry about how many pages you produce. How much time do you sit in front of the computer and actually. And actually type or dictate or whatever you're going to do. If you write five pages a day, if you write for a couple hours a day, you're going to get at least five pages or 250 words, whatever it is, 250 words a page. But if you write five pages a day, at the end of a year, 365 days, you've written over 1500 pages. You've probably written three books, you know.

So, you know, I really like that.

It's.

It's also. It kind of fits into the, like, let the words come out as. As vomit, draft and get them out. And one of the things that I've done when I've really needed to be disciplined is I just say, I have to write something. I don't care what it is. I got to write it. I don't care if I throw it away. I just got to write it. And I like, you know, he's saying about priming the pump. The metaphor I often use for is almost like siphoning, you know, and for people who I often. I know we have a lot of viewers from around the world, so siphon's not a super, super common. Siphoning is the way you used to get gas out of your father's car. You know, it's like the tube is in the car.

And.

But, you know, the thing is, is that that first mouthful is awful. And sometimes that's how the writing is. That's it is for me. And, you know, one of the things I got from Tucker Max was he, you know, he really taught me to reduce the. The number of words I expected from myself in a given Day, you know, I, because I can write 5,000 words a day, I would beat myself up If I wrote two. And he says, no, just commit to 250 words a day. Just commit to 250 words a day. And you know what's crazy? You almost never only write 250 words because those, those first 250 words are the yucky sip from the siphoning. And once you've got past that, you may as well keep going. That was really valuable to me.

So, yeah, it's, it's just a matter of getting started. Just getting started. Yeah.

All right, let's move on from book writing. I think there are a lot of people with questions about that. But you know what I'm, I mean, what I'm curious about is, you know, you're one of the, I don't know how to put it, one of the pillars, one of the fathers of one of the original sort of inspirational, motivational, making people, empowering people to live better lives kind of people, you know. And so here we are. For as many years as you have spent on the planet, nothing like this has ever happened. That I really believe that what we're facing right now, the last time something was this impactful to the entire planet was World War II. I mean, it's not, this is not something we've all faced before. Talk to me a little bit about your ideas for managing state of mind, because it strikes me that right now if we allow ourselves to get into fear and, you know, and vigilance, then we're going to become much more pessimistic and negative and we really need to, you know, we really need to stay on track. So what are some of your hacks for, you know, getting the focus right, getting the state of mind in the right place?

Well, the first thing is to realize that fear is self created, that we create a fear by imagining something in the future that hasn't happened yet. You've seen the acronym fear Fantasized experiences appearing real. Future experiences appearing real. Then I like fear, Forget everything and run. You know, it's like a lot of different acronyms, but the idea being that I am scaring myself by imagining something that hasn't happened yet. So we all have the ability to imagine the future. If there was a snake right now in your office, Eric, and it was like slithering toward you and you were afraid right now as a snake slithering toward you, nothing bad is happening. It's only if you imagine it biting you, which hasn't happened yet, that fear occurs. And so what happens is a lot of people are having thoughts that create fear. Almost all emotions are preceded by a thought. You know, we have a stimulus, an event. We then have a response to that event, and that produces an outcome. And basically, and I teach this formula, it's really. I think, let's talk about that for a minute, because it really precedes everything we're going to talk about. There's an event. You then have a response to that event, and then you get an outcome called your experience. So an event could be that your boss gives you a $2,000 bonus. Your response is, you go to Las Vegas or New Jersey, you spend it all. The outcome is, a year later, you don't have any increased net worth. Whereas someone else, they get that $2,000 bonus, they invested in something, and a year later, their net worth is more. So same event, different response, different outcome. Now there's only three responses you can have to any event. The things you think about it, your thoughts, the images you create in your mind about it, the stories you tell and the pictures you create. And then finally, your behavior, what you say and what you do. And so what's happening is we have this event called the coronavirus epidemic pandemic. And we have these shelter at home demands that our governors are giving us. We're not allowed to travel around, and we can't gather in large groups, and, you know, some of our businesses are shut down and so on and so forth. So now, in order to feel bad, in order to have fear, in order to have anxiety, we have to take that event and imagine something that hasn't happened yet. Like, I'm going to lose my house and I'm not going to recover. My stock portfolio is going to be worth nothing. You know, I'm going to get sick and die. My parents are going to get sick and die. I'm not going to be able to see my children for five months. I have a friend over in India, flew over to India to see his parents, and as soon as he got there, they locked down all flights in and out of India. And so he's going to be stuck there for a month or two. That's an event. But how he experiences that event is up to him. If he's there every day going, this sucks. I should be at home. This should have never happened. Then he's going to feel bad. If instead he says, what I always say, no matter what happens is, what's the opportunity that this is? Then you can start having a different experience. Napoleon Hill said, every adversity Every heartache, every struggle has a seed of an equal or greater benefit in it. And so a lot of people now have pivoted their businesses. For example, you and I have done like 30 or 40 podcasts. I'm now creating an online program I've been threatening to create for three years. Never got around to it. It's actually going to be better than most of the live programs we do because it's going to be 12 months with an hour and a half of instruction every month. An hour and a half of an expert call, someone like you, talking about Wildfit, et cetera, during the month on fitness and health. And we're going to have an hour and a half of Q and A, we're going to have some Mastermind group upgrades, etc. Now, we've been talking about doing that for a long time. Let's say we sign up a couple thousand people because they don't have to travel to a workshop, which we normally do. They don't have to pay the hotel bill. They don't have to worry about getting coronavirus because everyone's glommed together in the room. It's cheaper, all of that kind of stuff. I imagine we'll make several million dollars out of that that we wouldn't have made if it wasn't the coronavirus happening. Another friend of mine has a gym, and people were going to come to his fitness center and work out on the bicycles and the treadmills and the ellipticals and so forth. And now it's like the GY closed because they're not allowed to be open. But what did he do? He meditated, which I recommend everyone do. And then you asked the question, how can I use this experience to my advantage? And after a day of that, he had the idea, sanitize all the equipment, call up everyone as a gym member and say, would you like me to rent you the equipment? I'll deliver it to your home, I'll set it up, I'll teach you how to use it by video, if you don't already know. And he actually had to buy more equipment because more people wanted to rent it than he had equipment. He's making more money now than when he had his gym open. And he's teaching classes by Zoom Call individually and also in group. And everyone's. Nobody's like, even the people that are not coming to their gym love him so much because they see he's trying to help. Nobody has canceled their gym memberships. So again, it's a matter of thinking thoughts that leave you feeling better. You know, most of your listeners have probably heard of Abraham. Esther Hicks, channeling this being called Abraham. And Abraham always talks about think a better feeling thought. What does that mean? Think a thought that makes you feel better. If you're thinking, all the men have been taken and there's no good men left in my time, I'm going to die a spinster. That's a terrible thought. It's going to make you feel bad if instead you think the thought, I know the perfect man is on his way into my life right now. I'm just preparing for him. He's going to show up any day. It's a different thought. Same reality, different thought. You're going to feel better. And so fear is created. And as you know, and you've probably talked about this with people on your show, that as soon as you go into fear, you depress your immune system. Because what happens is fear used to be tigers and lions in the jungle, and you would basically get an adrenaline rush which would make all the energy go to your arms or legs. So you could run away or you could fight the thing. Fight or flight. Now it's an unseen predator called the coronavirus. We can't see it, we can't feel it. I mean, we can't fight it or run away from it. But what we do is all our energy is now out here in this cortisol rush, and we can't. And the immune system depresses. And I didn't realize this, that when you go into fight or flight, the immune system basically shuts down. Because if you can't run away from that tiger, it's irrelevant whether you have the flu or not. You didn't make it. You got eaten. So basically, it's taking all of your energy and putting it into survival over here. When you're in a state of rest and positive thinking and positive expectations and focusing on the good and being relaxed through meditation and through other kind of things. You can do tai chi, qigong, et cetera, yoga. Then what happens is your prefrontal cortex gets stimulated instead of your amygdala, which is where the fear lives. And then you're now in rational thought. So you can think rationally about what I need to do. You can study things. What are the herbs and what are the vitamins you can take that actually basically fight off the coronavirus? And you can have creative thoughts so you can have creative solutions to your business.

Okay, good. This is really good stuff, actually. We've got a. We're going to Have a couple of live questions and I think we've got a question that's sort of related to this. Melissa, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly but welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Please say hello to Jack.

Hello.

Hi.

Hi. Do you hear me?

I see you and I hear you.

Ah, good. So just wanted to like I'm coming from Serbia, it's a small country from Europe and back in 90s we had your show Million Dollar Forum on state television. So I don't know who if many people watched it, but it made a huge impact on me in my life and Both you and Mr. Lee Pulas, if I pronounced it correctly and I mean it was a long time ago and what I wanted to say, say it's like from times I was practicing the positive thinking and trying to have my goals and then there were times of the like, I don't know how to say like going low and I could not get up and thinking again and then there are some periods like that and then I switch on positive again. But I wanted to ask you like because you're teaching the positive thinking, is it for you all the time like that, do you have some tricks to go positive when you go low or. I mean we are all humans and I think that we all have good times and bad times and okay, this is especially occasion at the moment. Me personally, I don't feel fear of this coronavirus firstly because I work all the time and I also felt like that this is the time to grow. Personally I watch a lot of podcasts and I think good for my soul, for the business. I think it's going fine. Okay. I'm not sure what future will come and bring but I'm feeling that it's going to be okay. But I wanted to ask you for your personal like tips, tricks, how do you manage to keep up the positive?

Well, part of it is you have to surround yourself with positive meaning. Like most of my friends are positive people. And so you know, Jim Rohn famously said you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So you want to try to find other people in your life that are positive. I watch positive videos, I watch TED talks, TEDx talks, YouTube videos of all the famous speakers out there, Tony Robbins and Brian Tracy and Eric Ed Meads and people like that. So that I'm surrounded, I'm creating an environment, an intellectual context. I can listen to CDs and download PD, you know, MP3s, I listen to positive music, I Have playlists with songs that have positive lyrics for waking up in the morning for more mellow positive, more energetic positive. When I'm running on my treadmill or on my elliptical, I'm listening to positive lyrics rather than watching negative news. And also reading, you can read for 20 minutes a day, read something uplifting so that even though you might be getting into a space of thinking negative thoughts, you have the ability to surround yourself. So the key is what I would call daily disciplines. If you are what I said earlier, if you meditate for 20 minutes a day, if you do affirmations and repeat your affirmations for a few minutes a day, if you have a gratitude practice and you focus on what you're grateful for, you know, even in the midst of being locked down, you know, I mean, here you're alive, you have food, you said, you have a job, you know, you have probably friends you can talk to. If not, if you, if you're sequestered like we are, there's FaceTime, there's Zoom calls or Skype calls, there's WhatsApp, where you can communicate with people. So I think it's critical that you build in time every day, whether it's even 10 minutes in the morning, whatever, where you surround yourself in positivity. You know, for years monks in their monasteries would read something spiritual, you know, whether it was a quote from the Bible or the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita or some other spiritual text to keep their mind focused on the positive. So you've got a lot of resources around you that you need to utilize in a disciplined way so that every morning at 7:00 or 6:30, I'll share an interesting statistic too that I just found out. And you probably don't know this, Melissa, and maybe you don't know either, Eric, is that I wrote the foreword for two books this year. One was called the Billionaire Secret, where my friend Raphael Baziag, he interviewed 21 billionaires looking for what was the common secrets they had. And then a friend of mine, Andres Piro, wrote a book called Homeless to Billionaire. He was homeless when he was 19 in Thailand and now he's a multi billionaire real estate developer at 35. So in 15 years he went from homeless to billionaire. And one thing I found that was common to all these billionaires was they all get up before 5:30 in the morning from whether they're 30 years old or 81 years old. They all meditated. I was kind of shocked to find out. I didn't expect that they all read most of them for an hour a day and they all exercised. You know, even this 81 year old guy was exercising for 30 minutes a day. And if they had a 5:30, you know, private jet, they had to get on their jet and go somewhere. They would get up at 3:30 and exercise for half an hour to an hour before they would go to the airport and get on their jet. It was like a non negotiable behavior. Just like drinking your Alka Geyser is. If you're part of the Wildfit community that should be a non negotiable thing you do. And so you want to have some non negotiable disciplines that keep you thinking in a positive way, surround yourself with positive thoughts.

We've also got Harry here. Thank you very much Melissa. We've got Harry here coming in and he's got a question about, largely about like how do you direct your focus on what actions to take? Harry, jump on and say hi to Jack. Oh Harry, we don't have you for some reason. Sound.

Can you hear me now?

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah. Okay. Hi. It's been very interesting to listen to it but for me regarding to being unstuck and because my work hasn't changed regarding the current situation, I'm just working from home and sometimes it feels that like some people get the luxury of more time and then how to focus on like the important stuff and less on the urgent stuff. Because at the moment I feel that I'm doing all the urgent stuff in the work and all that stuff but I don't get to take the time to do the focus stuff and how to be more focused on important stuff for yourself. Well, as you know, you know, I think was Stephen Covey said most of us tend to work on the urgent not so important instead of the not urgent but more important. So again it's a matter of scheduling, like schedule some time every day, whether it's an hour or two hours, whatever to really focus. Like right now I'm doing a lot of podcasts, I'm responding to my staff. We've started working with this network marketing company. There's a big upward kind of, you know, get the plane off the Runway type of thing we're doing with that. And so there's a lot of things I'm doing but basically I'm still scheduling an hour and a half a day to write. And so the idea is you've got to make your schedule and schedule the things in that are going to get you where you Want to go. If you don't do that, you'll constantly be responding to the non essential or the urgent. And you'll feel like you're getting a lot done, but it won't get you where you want to go. Usually. This book I'm writing with that topic of getting unstuck, what we're finding is most people, what they have that's keeping them stuck is a limiting belief. And most of us have beliefs that are unconscious. We don't even know we have them, and so they're sticking us. I'll give you one example. One of the guys I'm working with in this essential oil company, he's a doctor, a psychologist. And we're finding that when we go back to a memory that was negative and we actually inhale certain essential oils at the same time. When you inhale this oil, it goes past the olfactory nerve. The olfactory sense is the oldest sense we have in our body. And so we go back, we go past the olfactory nerve, goes past the amygdala, which is where fear lives, into the hippocampus, where these memories are stored. And then you have this negative emotion from the hippocampus associated with the negative, with the memory. When we inhale a positive smell, an aroma, what happens is that's pleasant, the pleasant feeling happening at the same time as a negative feeling. What it does is it dissolves the negative feeling. The brain will always choose in favor of something more pleasant if it's given the two things at the same time. So anyway, we're doing a lot of work with that. And so even without the aromatherapy, you still have things that have happened. I'll give you two examples. So with this guy, what was happening for him was he was writing his book and he could never get it finished. He would write and then he'd get close to getting it finished. Then he'd create some drama in his life or he'd get distracted by something else, et cetera. And when he finally did the aromatherapy, what he discovered was that when he was in high school, he was a quarter miler. Today would be 400 meters. And one day the coach said, I want you to run the mile today because our miler is not here. And for three quarters of that mile, he was doing very well in the last quarter because he hadn't trained for the mile, his legs gave out. I used to run track. I know what that feels like. All of a sudden you just can't move your legs. They're like dishrags. And no matter how hard you try, you just can't keep going. And so he felt like he'd failed, he couldn't finish. And he decided at that time with a strong emotional component, because whenever you have an experience with a strong emotion, you remember it. Everyone remembers where they were on 9, 11. Everyone remembers where they were when they started realizing they're gonna be locked down. Everyone remembers the day you watched your dog get hit by a car. Let's say, because it was so much emotion, it actually creates more proteins in the brain when you have that, that locks that emotion in. It thickens the neurons that allow that memory to be there. And so here he is now in his 40s, trying to finish his book, and he doesn't know why he can't. But when he discovered this limiting belief and went back and healed that and replaced it with a positive belief that I can finish anything I start, you know, he was able to finish his book in the next couple of weeks. Another example was a woman that we've worked with who is an Olympic level athlete who was doing really, really well in her practice times, but then when she would get in the competition, she wouldn't do as well as her best practice times, which is normally not the case in competition. You usually get pushed faster. And so when we did this process with her of going back to the source of limiting belief, what happens is that she got in touch when she was 10 years old. She was bringing home medals and trophies and ribbons, and her mother would always hide them, whereas her friends would always be displayed on their bookcases and on their bulletin boards. And she said to her mom, mom, how come you never display my medals and my trophies? And she said, every time you bring one home, it makes your brother feel bad, her younger brother. And so I don't want your brother to feel bad. So she decided at a young age, when I win, it makes people I love and care about feel bad. And so she doesn't want to make people she loves and feels bad, you know, cares about, feel bad, but she's subconscious. She doesn't even know it. So some kind of belief work. And, you know, I can't do that exercise online. It takes too long. But if you go to jackcampfield.com and just get on my mailing list, about every three months, I go online, and for about a thousand people, I take people through this process for free. And basically, we did that in January. I did three of them. Three, you know, three weeks apart. And we had about 4,000 people limiting beliefs that were sticking them just from that, you know, one hour call.

That's really good stuff. Jack, thanks so much. And Harry, thanks so much for the great question. Limiting beliefs is always a fascinating conversation to have. And I think that when we're under pressure, like we are at the moment, that's when they really start to surface. You know, it's like.

Right. They get triggered.

Yeah, very much. How about this? We've had, you know, we had our very good and mutual friend John Gray on the show talking about relationships. We've had Bruce Music and Amber Trueblood. Because, you know, one of the things I spotted early on in China with what was going on was the divorce rate suddenly started going up in China. And.