Dr. Wayne Dyer Motivation: How to Eliminate ALL EXCUSES from Your LIFE!

There are many excuses that we have, many explanations that we have for our reasons for why we can't change, why something is difficult to overcome, why getting past addictions or getting past the way that we've looked for a lifetime or the way that we've thought or the way that we've been treated or the way we've treated others or living in poverty or not having enough or relationships that don't work, endless explanations that we use for ourselves. They're hardly— any of them will stand up to the very first question in the paradigm, which I'll talk about in a little while. They simply aren't true. You are literally running You're running your life on thoughts that if you really examine them and put them to a very simple test, you would discover that they don't hold up to the test of veracity, the test of truth. They simply aren't something that you can guarantee, and yet you run your life on the basis of these. So how did you get them? Wayne Dyer was an icon in self-development and spiritual growth. He wrote over 40 books, including an astonishing 21 New York Times bestsellers. His childhood was spent in orphanages and foster homes. but he'd go on to inspire millions and become known as the father of motivation. In this exclusive radio show provided by our partners at Hay House, Wayne Dyer explains how to eliminate all excuses, take control of your life, and achieve your biggest dreams. And if you want even more great Hay House content, check out their YouTube channel. We've linked it up down in the description below. I put out on my website and ask for everybody who tunes into my website to send me the excuses that you use most commonly in your life as I sat down to write this book. This is the third chapter in Excuses Be Gone. And I got 5,500 replies. And my friend and I started just taking them apart and just putting them into different, this is the same as this, this is the same as this. And sure enough, there were 18 categories. And so there are 18 excuse categories. On the PBS special, you see them as thought bubbles that'll come up when it plays on June 1st. I'll just give them to you real quickly. And I want you to understand now, these are all viruses. These are all things that were placed into your mind that you have come to believe that have infiltrated and spread throughout your culture. They're cultural ways of thinking that do not hold up to any of the components of the Excuses Be Gone paradigm. That if you begin to practice it, you can change it, whatever it is. I'd like you to think, particularly those of you who are closet addicts in here and closet eaters as well, I'd like you to just sit right now and just visualize that tomorrow you can be free of it. Tomorrow, easily, easily. And everything that you need and everyone that you need and whatever money you need, all of it will begin to show up for you. You can make that shift tomorrow. You're free of it. That's how powerful this is. I've seen it work. It will be difficult. Excuse. It will be risky. It will take a long time. There will be family drama if I do this, so I don't do it. I don't deserve it. It's not my nature. I can't afford it. You should never, ever, ever say the words, I can't afford it, and use money as a reason why you can't attract into your life what you want. Of course there is money out there for you. You just haven't connected to it. You've got to have within you an understanding that that is simply an explanation that keeps you from doing what it is that you want to do. You can afford to go to college. You can afford to travel. You can afford to get anything that you want in your life to make your life work at the level that you want to. You can afford it. The money is out there. The capacity for making it, attracting it into your life is within you. But if you believe that what I'm saying is not true, you're right. And that's a meme. That's a mind virus. You've already accepted and you haven't challenged whether or not the thought that you are thinking that you can't afford it is true or not. How many in this room have ever had the experience of believing that you couldn't afford to do something and you went home and suddenly an unexpected bonus had showed up in some way in your life? A tax refund, somebody sent you money, whatever, you found it, whatever. How many people have had that experience at one time or another in your life? Look around. Everybody's had that experience. It's a universal experience. And yet you convince yourself that it can't happen for you. Why would you continue with that thought? Getting ahead of myself. All right. No one will help me. There's 7 billion people on the planet. They all want to help you. Almost all of them are looking to help somebody. And you're convinced that there's nobody out there that will help you with what it is that you want to do or what your dream is. I'm not strong enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm too old or too young. The rules won't let me. It's just too big. I don't have the energy. My family history won't let me. I'm too busy. I'm scared. It's a shift that has only come upon me Even since I finished Excuses Be Gone, but I managed to get a big hunk of it in because I added it because it came later after it had been submitted and I said, "I gotta put this in here." But it's even much more detailed for me now. The greatest gift that you have been given is your imagination. In your imagination, in your thoughts, You have the ability to be able to create anything you want for yourself in your life. Anything, in your thoughts. Would you agree with that? That you can think and create an image of what it is that you would like to be able to create. So the first, I'm reading somebody called, named Neville. How many have ever heard of Neville? A few, maybe 25, 30 people out of 2,500. Neville was like an itinerant preacher. He died in 1972. He used to lecture out here on the West Coast in Los Angeles. It was Neville Goddard, but he just went by the name Neville. And he's written several books. You can find him on the internet. He wrote something called The Power of Awareness, which is, I don't have it. Hay House is gonna have it. He's passed away. His daughter Victoria has put out some of it, but it's available and we're gonna put it out there because it's one of those little books that I've read 5 times now. I'm not exaggerating. I've read it 5 times. I read it on the flight over here from Maui yesterday. It's not long, 120 pages or so, but you can read a paragraph 40 times and you can just be zowed by it, you can be wowed by it when you contemplate what it is that is being said here and whether it— and I keep thinking my experience in writing has always been to take what some people think of as complicated, like the Tao and quantum physics and things like that, and to just present it in a way that the cab drivers can understand it and that school teachers can understand it and that all of us all of us regular folks can get. And that's what I want to do with Neville. And I'm going to write a book about it, not this year, but next year. And I've already got the COVID for it, and I've already got it sitting on my table. Literally, I do. It's called Wishes Fulfilled. And it's, it's, um, I wrote a book years ago called Manifest Your Destiny. That's like elementary school compared to what this is. And I just want to give you just a little touch of it in the next few minutes. It starts like, I take 7 principles that you have to sort of get if you want to apply the excuses be gone paradigm. And these 7 principles, I'm not going to go through all of them. I'm just going to go through a couple of them. The first one is contemplation. And I've talked about contemplation before. Aristotle said that contemplation is the highest form of action, that it's action, that what you think about is what you become. And that, but it's even more than that. And I wrote out the specifics from Neville of it. I'm just going to go through a few of them here. I did this on the PBS show as well. Contemplation is the continuous use of your thought process. Like, what do you contemplate? What do you think about? How do you use your mind? Remember now, I started this by saying that the greatest gift that you've ever been given is the gift of your imagination. That you can create for yourself in your thoughts what it is that you would like to have for yourself. The problem with it is that most people don't get it. They think that I just think it and it's not really— that's not really reality. What I'm suggesting here is a shift in thinking about how you contemplate so that contemplation doesn't just become something that you think about, it becomes a way of being. That contemplation, that your thoughts are actually like things that begin the process of materialization. That what you contemplate in your mind, ultimately you can harden into material reality, into form. In fact, everything that has been hardened into material form began with someone's imagination, began with a thought. Okay? So that William Blake said that everything that you now see was once only imagined. Everything. This room, your cell phone, the clothes you're wearing, everything, including you, that you are imagined into reality by God, that you are a product of the imagination of the Tao of God. And so that sounds like a little far-out kind of thing, but it's It's more than that, and just stay with me for a moment. If you contemplate with thoughts that match originating spirit, you have the same power as originating spirit. If you could think like God thinks, you have the same power as God because you are God. You are a piece of God. You must be like what you came from. You must be. I illustrate that in the film in a real beautiful scene in there. We must be like what we come from. If you take out an ounce of blood from my veins and the cholesterol rating is 140, you can be certain for sure that all the rest of the blood going through my veins, the other 5 quarts or pints or whatever's in there, have 140 as well because what was taken out must be like what it came from. It's just a simple law of the universe, right? When contemplation is a vibrational match to originating spirit, a vibrational match to originating spirit, you gain the cooperation of divine mind, attracting and fulfilling your desires. As you begin to contemplate from a place of not thinking about the end but thinking from the end and never allowing yourself to deter yourself from that thought, you gain the access of Divine Mind. It's how it works. It's— I got the mic, folks, and you paid to hear me. This has always worked for me. It works for me. It's what I do. My children will tell you that. They will tell you how crazy I am, that I get a thought in my mind about what it is that I am going to do and I can't be detracted because I will not allow my attention to be taken away because I'm thinking, I believe that when I have those thoughts and they match originating spirit, that I will get the cooperation and it always happens. Always, always. Contemplation is therefore a kind of action in and of itself, which sets into motion all of the creative forces of the universe. Now here's what I want to tell you about excuses. When you rely on excuses, you allow your false self, that is the ego, which I spoke about at the beginning, to contemplate what you do not want or what you cannot get. That's what those 18 excuses are. They're all misalignments. They are contemplating what can't happen, how difficult it's going to be, how long it's going to take, how much money it's going to cost and you don't have it. As you contemplate in that way, you cannot create for yourself what you want. You create what you are contemplating. And then you stay down here and the universe offers you experiences that match up to what you are contemplating. When you contemplate up here in harmony with Divine Mind, the universe offers you experiences that match up here. The problem is that you're so easily taken away from your imagination, but I'm going to change that in the next 6 minutes. The presence of any of the excuses that I just outlined there for you in your life is evidence that you contemplate what you can't do or have. So you're really good at contemplating what you don't want, or what you can't have, or what's impossible. And everybody's doing it all the time and wondering why nothing shows up or the changes don't take place. To rid yourself of excuses, you must learn to practice contemplating what you intend to manifest and simultaneously detach from the outcome. So that's contemplation. Now the next— here's what Neville said, and this, this really got to me. He said, one in a million. Now there's 300 million people in America. That means 300 people know this. All the rest don't get it. It's what he said. Only— and he literally was speaking one in a million— that when you want to understand something mentally, you contemplate it. You cogitate on it. You think about it. You compare it. You analyze it. The first 4 letters of analyze. You're anal, right? You do all of this stuff. You contemplate, you contemplate, you contemplate. You think about it. When you want to understand something intellectually and mentally, you contemplate it. When you want to understand something spiritually, You must become it. You must become it. And that's where we're going now. And that's where I take you in the middle part of this book. Now, what you have to do— this is what Neville said and what I'm saying to you— is you take in your imagination what you would like to create for yourself. And you assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. You assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Memorize it. I have. I can say it. I say it 1,000 times a day to myself. Assume the feeling. Relationships, sickness, my work, my children, How I relate in my life, what I'm— assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. What is your wish? It's whatever you have in your imagination. How do you assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled? You must become it. And to understand something spiritually, you can't just contemplate it. You now must become it in your mind, in your imagination. You must become it. As you become it, now you have— here's the difficulty. Where do you place your attention on what it is that you are wishing for yourself in your imagination? There are two kinds of attention. The first is called objective attention. So you have a wish, you have a desire, you want to lose the weight, you want to overcome the addiction, you want to create, manifest abundance into your life. You want to get the job, whatever it is. You have the freedom to think it, to imagine it, right? You can think it. You're allowed to think it. Nobody can take that away from you. Now you assume the feeling of that wish fulfilled. What does that feel like inside of your body? What does it feel like? And ultimately, now you have to decide, where am I going to place my attention on what it is that I intend to manifest or what I want to create for myself? If you use subjective attention, what you do is you allow anything outside of yourself, like somebody says, "Oh, hey, you got a really bad speech impediment. You know, I can't even understand you," or somebody makes fun of you, or it doesn't work for you, and immediately you allow your attention to go off of what it is that you are using your imagination to create. And the minute that you do that, you've lost it. The other is called objective attention. And this is you never allow anyone or anything, no matter what comes your way, to take you away from your wish, your vision. It's yours. Nobody gets to say, "That's just a crock of shit." Nobody— they can say that all they want to, and you immediately go to the feeling. You've assumed the feeling of the wish fulfilled. You are not thinking about having that job or about being free of your addiction or about losing the weight, you've already lost it. It's in your mind. That's your imagination. This is how manifestation takes place. And so everybody that says anything to you, "Hey, chubby, how you doing today?" or "Yeah, you're still poor," or whatever it is, you instantly go to, "I feel great. I feel terrific. This is mine. You don't get any piece of it. You don't ever— you can't have it." It's mine. Okay? Now when you do that, what happens is you put into play what's called the subconscious mind. Now the subconscious mind, the mind that you use to drive back and forth to work every day, you don't think about where you put your foot and does it go on the gas pedal and am I going to, do I have to have it in drive, do I have to shift and should I turn and should I slow down and I better, I've got to, you don't do all of that, right? You can drive all the way across the country and never think about what the hell you're doing and never make a mistake and stop at every red light and go make your turns and all of that because you've turned it all over to this subconscious mind, this part of you that is just working on automatic pilot, right? Your subconscious mind, which is where all of your actions take place and all of your creation takes place, cannot make a distinction between what you are feeling in your body as a result of your imagination and living there, or what you are experiencing every day in the material world. It doesn't know the difference. So now here's the key. Now I'm getting excited. Now this is really good. The last 5 minutes of your day, before you go into your subconscious mind to marinate for the next 8 hours, what do you do? How do you use your imagination, your mind, your thoughts? What do you use it for? Most of you use it to review all of the things that you don't like about what's going on in your life and all of the things that are missing. And all of the reasons why it's not working again. And I heard that bald-headed bastard up there talking, and it may work for him because, you know, he's rich and famous, but this ain't working for me. I can guarantee you it's not going to happen. And on and on you can go with all of the reasons. He talked to me this way, and then she said that, and the money isn't coming in, and I can't pay the bills, and that bastard I'm married to, I mean, he doesn't ever listen to what I'm— And on and on it goes. You can fill a swimming pool. Remember Jackson Browne? I could fill a swimming pool with my tears thinking about the way that you think at night. So now the last 5 minutes you've just reviewed everything that's wrong, everything that's missing, everything that's not going to happen, everything that I'm depressed about, all of the reasons why the world is going to hell, about this, I'm probably going to get that swine flu. I've been thinking about pigs a lot. And the economy is going into the toilet, and that's— I'm going to probably lose my job, and I'm not going to have this, and my kids, you know, they need braces and I can't afford them, and my kids don't even like me anyway. And as I— and on and on and on you go. You're using your mind now. You're just about to go off into your subconscious mind, and you've got 8 hours, 8 hours, 8 hours, 1/3 of your day to marinate on all the things that are wrong. What I want you to do tonight is I want you to take the last 5 minutes when you're in bed alone or with someone else. What doesn't matter, it's the last 5 minutes when it's over. Okay? And what I want you to do in those 5 minutes is I want you to go back to assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled. In your imagination, because now your subconscious mind is going to do something for you. It's going to harden or start the process of hardening a thought into form. It starts there. That's how you get form out of thought, through this subconscious mind. Which can't distinguish whether you're just thinking it and then feeling it. Change your concept of yourself by creating an idea in your mind that you can identify with it until you become it. So a radical change of your concept of yourself and get a picture in your mind of what you want to attract that is so strong that you become it. You become it in your mind. Okay? You know a thing— I said this earlier— you know a thing mentally by thinking about it. You know a thing spiritually by becoming it. You are now it, and you are operating from that perspective. You have achieved what it is that you want to achieve in your life. The third is you assume the feeling of that wish fulfilled. You feel what that feels like in your body. Your imagination, number 4, is able to do all that you ask in proportion to the degree of your subjective attention. That's complicated. But it's basically what I've just explained. Your imagination, your mind, your thoughts, where materialization begins and ends, is able to do all that you ask in proportion to the degree of your subjective attention. How much are you willing to hang on to it, not because it's something that you want so bad, but it's because it's something that you already are. You're already it. Okay? And so all of your attention, that you place on your wish being fulfilled is subjective. It's yours. Nothing outside of you, nothing that comes along in the circumstances of your life can change that. You have to discipline yourself to get to that place. You access divine cooperation by staying in the state of what you have imagined with your subjective attention. This is how you harden an imaginative wish into a material reality by staying in that state. It ultimately has to become your reality. You will act upon it because your subconscious mind will start offering you up experiences to match up to that. And the— when I started writing the book, and I do that, that's why when I start to write a book, I already have the COVID of the book and the jacket and the title sitting in front of me, and I look at it every single day. It's already done. All I have to do is be the conduit to let it happen. I do the same thing when I give a talk like this. You think I take this for granted? You think I believe that I can get up here and talk for 3 hours without notes and, and make it interesting and compelling and, and give you something new? And, and so you think I take that for granted? I bust my ass doing this. It may— I— people tell me it looks— you make it look so easy. There's nothing easy about it. I have already imagined all of this. I've already lived with this, and my kids all know, don't bug me an hour and a half or 2 hours before I speak. Don't call me. Don't knock on my door. Don't ask me any questions. Don't ask me what you're wearing. Don't ask me anything. I am already completing this talk. And now I can come out here and I can allow Divine Mind to work through me because my subconscious mind has given me all of the experiences that I need. That's how it works. 6. Picturing the future without assuming the feeling is simply called futile daydreaming. Let me say it again. Picturing the future without assuming the feeling of the wish fulfilled is just idle or futile daydreaming. That's all that is. You have to assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. You have to say that 1,000 times a day until you really get it. Use, I said this already, use the last 5 minutes to awake, to awaken in your awakened state, to assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled. It can't hurt. It's your imagination. Why not review what it is that you want and what you already are instead of what you can't have and what's not working? Because that's what you've been doing for your lifetime. That's why you use all of these excuses. Because they become, they become your, you become a prisoner to them. They become true for you when in fact if you put them to the test, there's nothing true about them at all. The only reason that you keep using them is you keep contemplating what you don't want and what you can't have. And great spiritual masters and those who are great achievers, they don't put their attention, I learned that from my teacher Abraham Maslow back in the 1960s when I was working on my doctoral studies. He said self-actualizing people never put their attention on what's wrong or on what's missing. He said if you want to be a great therapist, don't talk to people about their problems. Give them 5 minutes and then spend the rest of the time on solutions, on what you're going to do about it and what's possible for you and what you can make happen, and get them to leave your office knowing within that they're already what they want to be. Your imagination is this incredible gift from which all things originate, to which all things return. That's you and God at work. And finally, experience in your imagination what you would experience in reality as if it had already achieved, if you'd already achieved it. Not as an onlooker, thinking of the end, but as a participant thinking from the end. Make it pleasurable. Okay. So, the substance that I'm speaking about here is consciousness. It's called consciousness. It is your imagination which forms consciousness, this substance, into concepts which are then manifested as conditions and circumstances and physical objects. So it's your imagination which takes consciousness and turns it into concepts, which when they're manifested, they come out as conditions or circumstances and physical object. This imagination made— thus imagination made your world. This supreme truth is with but few exceptions, man is not conscious of it. Most of us simply are not conscious of the fact that within us we have the ability to take consciousness, move it in our imagination into circumstances, move it into conceptualizations, and then move it into form through our imagination. That you have the ability to do that. You can become a manifester. If you think from the end. Now, the paradigm, which is the real essence of Excuses Be Gone. It's 7 questions that you look at and you look at in a hard way. I'm just going to go through a few of them. First question: every excuse that you use, it's going to be difficult, it's going to take a long time, I can't afford it, we'll use those. First question to ask yourself about that excuse as you begin the process of fulfilling your wishes is, is it true? Is that thought true? I want to do this, but it's going to take a long time. I want to do this, but it's going to be difficult. I want to do this, but I can't afford it. Those are just 3 of them. The second part of this question is, can you be 100% certain that the excuse that you are using for not making your life work the way you want it to is true? Can you be 100% certain that it is true that it's going to be difficult, that it's going to take a long time, that you can't afford it? Can you be 100% certain that it's not going to be difficult? You can never be 100% certain of anything, can you? So you can't be 100% certain that what you would like to do or accomplish or create for yourself is going to be difficult. And you can't be 100% certain that it is going to be difficult. But one of those thoughts will lead you to overcoming the resistance and creating what you want. And the other one is a guarantee that you'll never get it. Why would you opt for the thought that says it's going to be difficult and you can't be certain that it's true, rather than it's going to be easy, which you can't be certain, 100% certain that it's true, but at least if you believe that it's going to be easy, you'll start going down that path. And do you see how we do this with virtually every thought that we have? You get a headache, you get sick, things don't work out for you the way that you would like to, And immediately you go to the excuse, "I'm too old. I'm too scared. I'm too busy. I can't make this happen." And if you stop that and say, "What's the reverse of that thought? I'm not scared. I can do this. It's going to be easy. I can afford it." What's— if you say to yourself that you can't afford to do something, and I hear it from people every day, you can't afford to do something, why would you— and you can't be 100% certain that you can't afford it because the money could show up. There's a real likelihood that it could show up. Is it more likely that the money will show up if you think the thought that you can't afford it, or if you think the thought that you can afford it? Because if you think the thought that you can afford it and you assume the feeling of that wish fulfilled and you go through and marinate in that for 8 hours every night, you're going to now begin to align yourself in a different way. And the universe is going to start providing you with, and you're going to start acting and thinking like God thinks. And before you know it, the money's going to show up. The second question in the paradigm is, where did these thoughts come from? These are all memes. What are memes? Viruses. Not the kind of viruses that are in your computer or in your body, mind viruses. Do they have any substance? No, they're ideas. They've been placed in your mind. What's their purpose? Duplicate, infiltrate, spread. You have been a, a virus carrier for it. Where did they come from? The answer to that question is very simple. They came from you. Every single one of them came from you. But we carry these things around. What you do is you take total responsibility for every single one of them. You say, Yes, I was 3 years old. And when patients would come to me and say, "I was only 3 years old. You know, I didn't really choose it." I said, "Did you know any other 3-year-olds who listened to the same shit and didn't buy it? Who heard their parents saying the same thing to them? Who heard their teachers saying that?" "Yeah." "Well, who's responsible for you thinking those things?" "Well, it's my mother." Mothers take a big rap on this. Big rap on this. I say, "So your mother is responsible for the way that you are in your life? Yes. I say, okay, get out of here. I want you to get up. I want you to go home. I want you to go get your mother. I want you to bring her back here. Why? I said, because I'm going to treat her and you're going to get better. And you can see the absurdity of it, can't you? So if you're not willing to take responsibility, total responsibility for everything that you are instead of placing it on anyone or anything or any set of circumstances outside of your life. You signed up for all of that. If you're the middle child, you signed up for it. How do you know? Because you are. You know, if your parents got divorced, that was necessary. You had to go through that. You needed that experience in this lifetime. If you were abandoned, if you lived in an orphanage, if you were sick, if you broke your leg, If you're blind, whatever it means. As my friend Ram Dass says, everything that you experience in your life is nothing more than your curriculum to God. It's just your curriculum to God. This is the one that you signed up for. So accept it. Accept it all. And I talk quite a bit about that in there. The third of these questions is, what are the payoffs? And basically, the payoffs, every behavior, every excuse that you use has a payoff. Usually it's the avoidance of your dharma. It's usually to avoid the callings of your soul. It's usually to allow other people to be responsible and to run away from it. I go through them all, but the fourth one, and this is one I want to close with, ask yourself this question: What would my life look like if I couldn't use the excuse that I've been using to explain why my life isn't working the way I want it to work in this dimension? What would my life look like if I couldn't use this excuse? If you simply couldn't say, "It's going to be difficult. I can't afford it." What if you just couldn't think that? And as you begin to look at changing those ways of being, you begin to see that you don't have to hang on to them at all. If you couldn't think them, tell yourself you can't. It's no longer possible for me to think that I can't accomplish what I want. I have an imagination. I can assume the feeling of that wish fulfilled. I can place objective attention always on that wish being fulfilled. To watch another amazing Wayne Dyer video, check it out right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. If you can learn how to live fully and completely and totally in the present moment and just be there in this moment realizing that the now is all you ever get and that the future thing that you're all worried about is nothing more than just a now, and everything that's ever happened to you in the past